Abstract
Forest land diversion is a governance challenge with significant consequences on rural communities, conservation outcomes, and national development. Despite legal provisions permitting diversion, the approval process is widely perceived as slow and unpredictable, generating persistent public and political criticism toward forest institutions. This paper asks: to what extent do delays in Nepal's forest land diversion process arise from rigid policy design, institutional capacity constraints, or their interaction? Drawing on systematic document analysis of the Forest Act 2019 and Forest Regulation 2022, complemented by practitioner informed interpretation, the study employs a qualitative policy diagnostic approach to disaggregate policy induced delay from institution induced sources of delay. The findings suggest that delays are primarily shaped by rigid procedural requirements including mandatory cabinet approval regardless of scale or impact, multi-tier sequential processing preventing parallel review, uniform and excessive documentation irrespective of project type and rigid post approval mechanism. These procedures are further intensified by institutional constraints including limited technical capacity, co-ordination challenges across governance levels and risk averse bureaucratic nature. Neither dimension alone explains the pattern of delay, rather they interact to produce delays whose severity exceeds what one of the factors would generate independently. These delays carry inequitable consequences: rural communities dependent on small scale infrastructure bear the same procedural burden as large commercial projects. Reform efforts therefore require simultaneous attention to policy redesign and institutional strengthening while preserving the conservation safeguards that have contributed to Nepal's forest governance outcomes.