| Abstract | Armed conflicts pose a serious and potentially long term threat to institutions, societies and environments across the world. A decade long ar med conflict in various parts of Nepal led to disruptions in the agricultural cycle, creat ed leadership vacuums and generated additional environmental stresses. It has created e normous impacts not only on people’s lives, and communities but also in many areas of co mmunity-based natural resource management systems. In this context, this study ana lyzed the relationship between local community forest institutions, institutional embedd edness, livelihood and forest condition under conditions of active armed conflict. The study used interdisciplinary methods to collect data on social and biological dimensions. These included household surveys, semi- structured interviews, focus group discussions, participatory rural appraisal techniqu es, and forest mensuration. Seven community forest user-groups with similar forest go vernance structure were examined, located in similar bio-physical and ecological zone s, but experiencing different degrees of conflict. The data used for this study comes from a larger set of studies in Nepal, conducted using common research protocols developed by the International Forestry Resources and Institutions (IFRI) research program. The results show some positive changes as regards v egetation growth after several years of management and protection all across these seven co mmunity forests despite the decade long conflict. Notably, the livelihood of community forest-dependent people has been severely affected in high conflict sites, while peo ple from low conflict sites have greatly benefited from the community forest for livelihood. The existence of strong local institutions may have the capacity to buffer forest s from such conditions of increased harvest and depletion, however, results indicate th at after some years of active armed conflict, institutional arrangements have been weak ened in sites experiencing high conflict, whereas they have remained stable in area s of low conflict. While there are differences in the robustness of institutions in si tes of low and high conflict, there are variations as well in characteristics indicating in stitutional embeddedness, such as trust, reciprocity and moral values. This suggests that st udies focusing solely on institutional arrangements, especially under conditions of confli ct, are not capable of capturing certain critical aspects of institutions that govern forest resources. Strong moral values, trust, reciprocity, interdependence and level of awareness also play a critical role in determining the success of institutions and outcomes. In contr ast to the negative impact of conflict on institutional strength, the findings suggest that i nstitutional embeddedness has significantly increased in most of the sites experi encing high conflict, while embeddedness has remained stable in the sites with low levels of conflict. More importantly, the analysis revealed that those sites with an increase in embed dedness have shown an increase in forest vegetation density over time. This may be be cause of an increase in cooperation and interaction in the rural, natural dependent communi ties even in the face of a decline in community forestry contributing to the livelihood. These cooperation and interactions, in turn, produce public and interconnected reputations among community members, facilitating trust and shared understanding informa l mutual monitoring, sanctioning and social stewardship among ethnic groups for sustaina ble forest use and management. The findings of this research suggests that forest communities appear to become more cohesive during times of conflict, and motivated to increase characteristics of institutional embeddedness during challenging situations that med iates the impact of armed conflict on forest condition. Thus more attention should be giv en to embeddedness factors while crafting institutional arrangements or strengthenin g institutional arrangements for sustainable community-based forest management. |