Household characteristics and perception of users towards the environmental changes within community forests in the Dhaulagiri hills of Nepal

Abstract

This paper investigates how households’ characteristics, in light of community forestry intervention in the Western Hill of Nepal, influence the perception of environmental quality. Two types of data were used in this study, survey data on household’s characteristics and environmental perception from 212 households and individual level survey data. It was found, taking from the evidences from community forestry, that households’ characteristics are associated with perception of environment quality. Perception on environment quality is important from two angles that is firstly, it indicates objective environment quality degradation; secondly, it pave the way for designing the programme aiming to change the environmental behavior of forest users within community forestry. Key words: environment quality, perception, logistic regression, and variable Banko Janakari Vol.16(1) 2006 pp35-40