The development of community forestry initiatives in Nepal necessitated a new role for Forest Guards. This paper gave a detailed account of the FINNIDA-funded collaborative process used to update the curriculum for forest guard training. A workshop of 14 forestry staff of all ranks worked through a framework of pragmatic questions, loosely based on Skilbeck's situational analysis model, to decide in turn the context, purpose, content, teaching methods, specific course objectives, means of implementing and means of evaluating Forest Guard training. The good sense of the resultant curriculum - focused on what Forest Guards actually did - meant that it was able to be adopted by trainers immediately.