Focusing on people oriented forest policy initiatives, this paper intends to understand whether and to what extent these initiatives can address the social vulnerability of forest communities in Bangladesh. This paper found that despite the potential of community forest management, the community based policy initiatives in Bangladesh fail to address the dynamic relationships among the formal and informal institutions that largely shape the rights and access of forest communities to forest resources. These policies ignored the social construction process that generated inequality and marginalisation in gaining access to forest resources. This paper argues that various forms of institutional arrangements and their relationships are of central importance in determining which social actors gain access to and control over their local natural resources. This, in turn, contributes to the forest communities' limited ability to ensure their livelihoods, their basic needs and their capacity to cope with adverse events such as climate induced hazards.