A growing literature on collective action focuses on exploring the conditions that might help or hinder groups to work collectively. In this paper, we focus on community-based forest management in the inner Terai region of Nepal and explore the role of community and user attributes such as group size, social heterogeneities, forest user’ perception on forests, and affiliation to the user group, in the collective action of managing community forests. Household surveys were carried out with 180 households across twelve community forest users’ groups. We first measured ethnic diversity, income inequality, landholding inequality, and user perception towards the use and management of community forests to understand their effect on the participation of forest users in the management of community forests. Our results show that among the studied variables, group size (number of forest users affiliated to the community forests) and perception of the management of their community forests are strong predictors of forest user participation in community forest management. Income inequality and ethnic diversity were found to have no significant association. Land inequality, however, was found to decrease participation in the management and use of community forests. These community and user attributes play a crucial role in the success of collective action and may vary from community to community. Hence they need to be duly considered by the practitioners prior to any community-based project interventions for stimulating successful collective action.

This paper seeks to examine India’s role in the politics of a specific climate change mitigation policy called “Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+)”. It explores India’s strategic behaviour towards the development of REDD policy. The paper argues that India had pushed for the remodelling of the global REDD negotiations by expanding its scope to conservation activities, which entails more direct benefits for India. This is largely due to differences in India’s rates of forest cover and deforestation as compared to high forest - high deforestation countries such as Brazil and Indonesia. To substantiate its argument, the paper uses the main underpinnings of relative gains theory in international relations and applies them toward interpreting India’s behaviour in negotiating REDD+ at global level. Further, the paper analyses the Indian strategies used to remodel the REDD mechanism using insights from soft power theory and its more recent amendments. Thematic analysis of the REDD-relevant documents as well as exploratory expert interviews have been employed for showing India’s proactive role in the politics of REDD+. It is concluded that India indeed played a central role in critical past decisions, which lead to re-shaping REDD due to relative gains concerns and mainly by means of soft power strategies.