Many government ministries, departments and agencies “put various barriers that make the whole local commercialisation a tangle of bureaucratic nightmares,” says Gilmour over the phone from Brisbane. Legally speaking, communities have no obligation to seek permission from the DFO for what has already been approved in their operational plans, but reality is often different. A 2012 paper co-authored by Khatri on barriers to earning income from community forests tallied 24 visits to the district office that members of one CFUG in the southern district of Kapilvastu had to make to harvest a season’s trees, including NPR 8000 in technical assistance fees.