To qualitatively explain the variation in ecosystem service
benefits across households and communities in terms of underlying
social processes, we used an abductive approach (Walters and
Vayda, 2009) based on eliminative inference. This implied systematic
testing of alternative explanations of ecosystem service distribution
which emerged from qualitative data from participant
observation, key informant interviews and focus group discussions,
and eliminating evidently false ones. In the following sections, we
first describe the distribution of bamboo, grazing and NTFP collection
between the different user groups, and then give a grounded
explanation of the social processes shaping this distribution.