Ramesh Sunam

Advancing Equity in Community Forestry: Recognition of the Poor Matters

SUMMARY The community forestry program in Nepal has been advancing as a successful means of improving the condition of forests. However, as in other areas around the world, Nepals community forestry initiative continues to face unresolved equity issues. This paper seeks to explore underlying causes of inequity using contemporary theories of justice. Examining two community forest user groups in the middle hill districts, the study finds that lack of recognition in interpersonal and public spheres exacerbated the powerlessness of marginalized people, reducing their participation in decision-making. The paper argues that, while distributional rules advanced by the program are crucial, the problem of recognition remains an unaddressed but necessary pre-condition for achieving equity. This suggests that policy and practice in community forestry needs to focus on broader political questions, including representation in decision making, making space for the voice of members to influence decisions, and transforming socio-economic and political institutions and cultural practices.

Community Forestry and the Threat of Recentralization in Nepal: Contesting the Bureaucratic Hegemony in Policy Process

Nepals community forestry program has been touted as a successful case in decentralized forest management. However, the government of Nepal has often constrained the autonomy of local communities as an apparent attempt to reverse decentralization. This article identifies the mechanisms through which decentralized reforms and growing deliberative culture of policy process are attenuated. To this end, we analyze an amendment proposal of the government to revise the Forest Act 1993—a widely recognized legislation for democratic decentralization—with the tacit aim of re-equipping the government forestry staff with substantial power. This article shows that the government often monopolizes the policy process and obstructs community forestry, while failing to address its own governance deficits. While acknowledging the importance of an antagonistic form of resistance, we emphasize the combination of alliance-led resistance and research-informed deliberation as an effective strategy to contest inappropriate policy decisions and promote a deliberative culture.

Reconsidering the links between poverty, international labour migration, and agrarian change: critical insights from Nepal

The role of international labour migration in processes leading to the (re)production of rural poverty in the rural South continues to shape critical academic and policy debate. While many studies have established that migration provides an important pathway to rural prosperity, they insufficiently analyse the profound effects that migration and remittances have on agrarian and rural livelihoods. This article uses the case of rural Nepal, where over half of the households are involved in foreign labour migration, as a ‘window’ to understand the processes shaping how migration effects poverty. The paper analyses how migration generates outcomes across the domains of rural peoples changing relationship to land and agriculture, their experience of migration, and rural labour markets to advance our arguments. First, it argues that migration leads to the commodification of land, generating changes in patterns of land uses and tenancy relations. With respect to rural peoples engagement with agriculture, migration generates both processes of ‘deactivation’ and ‘repeasantization’. Second, foreign migration offers an exit from poverty for some while also creating processes of deeper impoverishment for others. Third, migration leads to structural changes in rural labour markets, reducing the supply of agrarian labour. Consequently, in contrast to the simplifying ‘narrative’ accounts of a migration pathway out of poverty, this paper concludes that the effects triggered by migration are highly contradictory, providing an exit from poverty when linked to diversification strategies, while engendering rising inequality and rural differentiation.

Can Bureaucratic Control Improve Community Forestry Governance

The Ministry of Forest and Soil Conservation (MoFSC) of Nepal has recently passed a proposal and drafted an amendment bill to revise the Forest Act 1993. This Act provided the legal foundation for community forestry programme in Nepal during the past two decades. However, the MoFSC has justified its recent move for legal change by citing anecdotal cases of irregularities and illegal felling in some parts of Terai and Churia region. But the Federation of Community Forest Users, Nepal (FECOFUN) and other civil society organizations have strongly opposed this move. As a result, positions on the move have polarized, and sparked off resistance and opposition at local to national levels. In this context, this paper examines the proposal in terms of the process and contents, and assesses how it impacts the community forestry programme and whether the proposed change would bring about expected outcomes. Doing this we hope to enrich the deliberation on this issue.We suggest that, in terms of the process, MoFSC has undermined the multi-stakeholder and deliberative process, which was being progressively adopted over the past few years in forestry sector policy making. Some key assumptions behind this proposal have therefore become flawed. We also find that the proposed changes stipulated in the proposal are likely to aggravate the problems in community forest user groups — particularly corruption, illegal felling, and inequity — that MoFSC commits to resolve. We suggest that multi-stakeholder based and deliberative process can help identify the problems and remove flaws of this proposal. This process needs to be informed by a robust and independent study of the problems in order to be able to determine workable solutions.

Can Evidence and Voice Influence Policy? A Critical Assessment of Nepal's Forestry Sector Strategy, 2014

This article examines Nepals recently prepared Forestry Sector Strategy (FSS) (as of 2014) in terms of the use of scientific evidence and the quality of stakeholder participation. By reviewing the content and analyzing the context of its development during 2012–2014, we found that the transitional politics and overt influence of international development agencies dominated the process and content of the FSS. Although the FSS was developed through a significant stakeholder engagement, there was limited use of the available scientific evidence. The FSS was narrowly conceived as a deliverable of supporting aid programs, with limited demand for a politically meaningful policy processes. While civil society groups were consulted, they largely failed to present an independent voice due to their dependence on funding agencies. Our assessment calls for rethinking policy development in a way that facilitates assertive and independent participation by a range of actors and make better use of the available research.

Conservation Policy Making in Nepal: Problematising the Politics of Civic Resistance

Protected area governance has witnessed a shift from a strict-nature conservation model towards a seemingly more participatory approach in Nepal. Despite some progress, top-down and non-deliberative processes characterise policy making in protected area. However, many civil society actors have increasingly challenged the government to provide space for local people in decision making so that their rights to natural resources are considered. This article examines two key aspects of the politics of policy process: why conservation policy making is often less deliberative than it could be and why civil actors pick up some policy decisions (not others) for contestation. In doing so, we analyse a recent policy decision of the Nepal government on the protected area which encountered civic contestation. Drawing on the review of policy decisions and interviews with government authorities, civic leaders and protected area experts, this paper shows that the government and large conservation organisations continue to shape the policy process while undermining the legitimate voices of local and non-state actors in the conservation policy landscape. Civic resistance as a means of democratising policy processes looks promising, challenging unquestioned authorities of the government and conservation organisations. Nevertheless, the politics of resistance has enjoyed limited success due to the political interests of civic institutions and their leaders, at times overshadowing critical policy agenda such as the severity of rights constrained and issues of poverty and marginalisation. This article suggests that civic actors need to rethink over their politics of resistance in terms of pursuing agenda and strategies to ramp up policy deliberation.

How does Transnational Labour Migration Shape Food Security and Food Sovereignty? Evidence from Nepal

ABSTRACT Achieving food security has become a critical development issue. It is more so for Nepal, a country facing serious social and economic problems. In recent years, Nepal has seen rising temporary-work migration of people to foreign countries with implications for food security, even in distant rural places. In this article, we examine differential effects of transnational labour migration on food security and food sovereignty in migrant-sending rural areas. In so doing, we draw on the fresh insights gained from case studies carried out in villages representing two distinct geographical regions of Nepal – Tarai (Plains) and Hills. Findings show complex and contradictory effects of transnational labour migration. We argue that this form of migration has led to improved food security on a short-term basis through remittances and migration-induced rural employment. At the same time, it has also caused erosion in food sovereignty through generating adverse effects on local food production, and thus creating growing dependence on food imports and threatening poor peoples access to food. Rather than considering food security and food sovereignty as rival frameworks, this paper suggests that combining the two concepts offer rich and broader understandings of the impacts of migration on rural people’s access to food.

The Significance of Foreign Labour Migration and Land for Poverty Reduction in Nepal

Nepal has witnessed a decline in poverty in the last decade, although GDP growth is low and stagnant at around 4 %. What explains this decline is little researched. Descent poverty, or how some households tend to fall into poverty, is another important facet of poverty dynamics , which has also received little scholarly attention. This paper, therefore, examines pathways leading to poverty dynamics in rural Nepal. Employing the ‘Stages of Progress ’ methodology, this paper shows that nearly one-third of the total 386 households studied have escaped poverty, while 7 % have fallen into poverty over the last two decades. Foreign labour migration, small business and access to land define the movement of most households out of poverty, whereas loss of land, cultural burdens and health costs are the main factors associated with descent into poverty. This paper suggests two distinct sets of policies for promoting escape from poverty and for preventing descent into poverty. Such policies need to consider the situation of the poor who are unable to pursue labour migration, and the left behind household members, enabling their access to land and creating local employment.