The Bhutan Forest Note articulates opportunities for supporting Bhutan's sustainable development aspirations, including its constitutional commitment to maintain at least 60 percent of the country's land area under forest cover and to better respond or prepare for vulnerabilities such as climate change and natural disasters. The note presents a forward-looking business case for Bhutan to support an increase in forest utilization without jeopardizing the integrity of forest and non-forest ecosystems.

As global inequality is dropping, inequality within countries is rising. The problem of inequality is a cause for concern for nations as it undermines democracy and reduces welfare. Bhutan, a developing country in South Asia, also faces rising inequality. Based on the experience of the kidu system in Bhutan, this paper argues that the system is effective in reducing inequality of opportunity. The kidu functions as a welfare system in Bhutan, and is under the prerogative of the King of Bhutan. The traditional kidu system was reformed by the present monarch of Bhutan in 2006.

Property rights and management regimes for high-elevation rangelands in Bhutan have evolved over centuries in response to environmental, cultural, and political imperatives. The 2007 Land Act of Bhutan aims to redress historical inequities in property rights by redistributing grazing leases to local livestock owners in a process known as rangeland nationalization.

Shifting cultivation is a dominant form of farming in the eastern Himalayas, practised by a diverse group of indigenous people from the most marginalized social and economic groups. The survival of these indigenous people and the survival of their forests are inextricably linked. However, policy makers and natural resource managers perceive shifting cultivation to be wasteful, destructive to forests, and unsustainable.

International aid communities have recognized women’s participation in development and the improvement of women’s status in the developing countries as a key issue since the 1960s, and the concept of “Women in Development (WID)” has been emphasised as a development agenda in the 1970s. In the 1980s, with the newly proposed concept of “Gender and Development (GAD)”, an effort for “gender mainstreaming” has been regarded as an effective mean for firmly practicing the GAD approach in the international community.