Community Development Research Paper

Natural resources are the most important means of production, incomes, employment creation, export revenues and fiscal resources within a territory. Ina country with limited industrial progress, indigent peoples livelihoods will remain heavily reliant on natural resources. Soil, water, forests, and fisheries underpin commercial and subsistence activities often provide a safety net for the poor in times of crisis. Poor people are often the section of the population most affected by environmental deprivation. The intensity and brutality of the country 's development (mostly in developing countries such as Nepal is severely threatening the existing natural fragilities.

This empirical research works on collocating the role of local dimensions

Local development discourse of rural Nepal cannot be isolated from natural resource management (NRM) for sustaining the livelihood of rural people. This study attempts to explore the impacts of local development and local territorial system (SLoT, Dematteis and Governa, 2005) that influenced by governance and decentralization policies on natural resources and livelihoods of rural people

Local development takes place in space, territory, and scale. Local assets for local development can be considered as a territorial capital, a localized set of public goods, such as conditions/resources of natural environment including location, historical/cultural heritage, both material (monuments, landscapes) and immaterial (languages, traditional knowledge and customs etc), fixed capital (infrastructures & their externalities),

"relational assets" within the human capital (cognitive capital, social capital, cultural variety, institutional capacity, etc.) (EC and OCDE, 2001).

NRM started in Nepal as a small-scale village level forest resources management practice where decisions and actions are made with the participation of community people and their