•Linking research and policy remains a challenge.•We tested Policy Lab methodology to improve the link.•Policy Lab was part of a five-year action research project in Nepal.•The method helped to ...catalyse dialogues between researchers and policy actors.•Replicability of the methods requires attention to underlying political economy.
Whether and how science can improve public policy is a highly contested topic in both the scholarly domains and the world of policy and practice. The research community often finds itself frustrated over the continued neglect of research evidence by policy makers. At the same time, policy makers see researchers as addressing their own questions of curiosity, and not those of concern to policy makers. In the context of this ongoing research-policy divide, this paper presents experimental work on the research-policy linkage conducted in Nepal's forest sector. The insights presented here emerged from applying what is increasingly known as the “Policy Lab” methodology. We designed and operationalised this method to facilitate policy uptake of research on forestry and food security within the context of community forestry governance in the country. The method comprised facilitating the two-way interaction between the research team and policy actors. Underpinning this method were six Policy Lab events organized during 2014–2019 as part of an action research project aiming to enhance livelihoods and food security of local communities in the Nepalese hills. We found that Policy Lab methodology, if organized using the suggested principles, can help improve the much-needed link between research and policy. The study has also exposed new issues of concern that merit attention at the science-policy interface.
This article examines Nepal's 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.
Forest sector of Nepal is far from harnessing its economic potential, but witnesses a continuation of deforestation and forest degradation. This is largely because of the limited policy focus on the ...management of the most important forest product – the timber. Taking timber at the central stage in the debate on forest management, this paper examines the existing stakeholder relations, policy deliberations, programs and everyday practices in Nepal. This paper draws on the country’s policy, legal and regulatory documents, policy deliberations on forest governance, media analysis and everyday practices of forest management. These policies and practices are analysed in relation to environmental discourse, social practices and hegemony in forest sector governance. This paper shows that, while timber occupies a central stage in the government’s decisions, in most of forest-related contestations, and in everyday management decisions, timber management has received only secondary importance in the national forest policy and discourses. The analysis shows that since forest policy discourses have departed from timber, local communities and the government have lost significant incomes from the forest. The marginalization of timber in the policy discourse also encouraged deforestation and forest degradation especially through illegal logging and forest encroachment. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jfl.v10i1.8601 Journal of Forestry and Livelihood Vol.10(1) 2012 58-73
Based on the review of relevant literature, this paper investigates how forest authority is produced or reproduced in the course of forest policy change, by drawing on the past four decades of ...participatory forest policy reform in Nepal. We analyze various waves of deliberative politics that emerged in different contexts related to the Himalayan crisis, the flow of international aid for conservation and development projects, civil conflict and democratic transition, and most recently the policy responses to climate change. The analysis shows how such deliberative politics contributed to the change or continuity of conventional authorities around forest policy and practice. It shows that despite notable participatory policy reform, the conventional authority has become further re-entrenched. Based on this analysis, we argue that efforts to understand forest policy change can be more meaningful if attention is paid to whether and how deliberative politics emerge to challenge the hegemonic claims to power and knowledge about resource governance practices. Such approach to policy analysis can open new possibilities for understanding democratic policy reform by explicating the nuances of deliberation and policy politics occurring at multiple scales.
Based on the review of relevant literature, this paper investigates how forest authority is produced or reproduced in the course of forest policy change, by drawing on the past four decades of ...participatory forest policy reform in Nepal. We analyze various waves of deliberative politics that emerged in different contexts related to the Himalayan crisis, the flow of international aid for conservation and development projects, civil conflict and democratic transition, and most recently the policy responses to climate change. The analysis shows how such deliberative politics contributed to the change or continuity of conventional authorities around forest policy and practice. It shows that despite notable participatory policy reform, the conventional authority has become further re-entrenched. Based on this analysis, we argue that efforts to understand forest policy change can be more meaningful if attention is paid to whether and how deliberative politics emerge to challenge the hegemonic claims to power and knowledge about resource governance practices. Such approach to policy analysis can open new possibilities for understanding democratic policy reform by explicating the nuances of deliberation and policy politics occurring at multiple scales.
•We examine how forest authority is (re)produced in the course of forest policy change.•We identify different waves of deliberative politics linked to various forms of forest authorities in Nepal, and explain how and to what extent deliberative politics leads to change or reproduction of forest authorities.•Despite promising participatory reform, the conventional forest authority has become further re-entrenched in Nepal in subtler way than in the past.•Analysis of how deliberative politics emerge enriches our understanding of deliberation and negotiation around policy landscape.
Introduction
Nepalese society has historically been socially, economically and culturally diverse and differentiated. However, the Hindu and patriarchal cultural production of knowledge has been ...dominant throughout the history and has created social inequities and injustice within the society that is manifested in unequal power relations, which are defined by caste, class, gender and regional settlement. These diversities have further created the islands of knowledge communities and value systems of those sections of the society. Poor, women, ethnic minorities and people of remote locations have historically been excluded from mainstream state politics, bureaucratic positions, and denied proportional representation by the government. In the process, feudal mindset and historically constructed social power has legitimised the knowledge of local elites (usually they are from rich and higher caste people) and bureaucrats in every aspects of social life including natural resource management.
In this broader context of the society, forests have been centrally managed by the state from late 1950s. So far the state and the forest bureaucrats have overly relied on the technical and colonial knowledge of forest management. The state has tried to protect the forest by alienating the people from it despite local people's indispensable dependence over the resources. However, the state could not protect the forest from encroachment, deforestation and resource depletion. Simultaneously, there were many successful cases of indigenous knowledge based forest management practices in the remote and rural parts of the country from the long past.
This paper discusses the use of a deliberative approach to governance of environmental resources at the local-level. Used in conjunction with external facilitation, a deliberative approach to ...governance at the local-level can be used to build dialogue between diverse perspectives, interests, knowledge, and ideas of different stakeholders. A case study of a community forest user group (CFUG) in the central hills of Nepal is used to analyse the application of deliberative processes for promoting deliberative governance. The findings indicate that there is great potential for deliberative processes to make local governance of community forests more democratic and inclusive. Effective governance at the local-level can contribute to the creation of social equity and to the sustainable management of community forests. Key words: Nepal, deliberative democracy, community forestry, Participatory Action Research, external facilitation
Viewing resource management essentially through a biophysical lens has provided too restricted a perspective for understanding complex political processes surrounding forest management. The case of ...community forestry in Nepal demonstrates a range of experiences of complex political processes, including conflicts and collaboration, especially between technical forest officials and local forest dependent people. Despite innovative legislative and institutional frameworks already in place, community forestry in Nepal still experiences the effects of techno-bureaucratic control. Such control is manifested in the entire range of processes related to planning, management, and monitoring of forestry activities. To understand this situation, we apply the conceptual lens of deliberative governance, that is, governance whose arrangements have been devised from both scientific and local knowledge. This chapter provides practical examples to offer insights into the application of deliberative governance in forestry practices. We identify how different aspects of managerialist, techno-bureaucratic domination (legitimated by principles of positivist science) are deliberatively challenged by local people, civil society activists, and action researchers to improve governance practices. We also identify situations and deliberative processes through which forest managers themselves begin to realize the limits of an antideliberative scientific approach, and apply more reflexive and deliberative approaches to knowledge and decision-making in forest management. In doing so, we eschew taking an absolute position for or against indigenous knowledge or scientific enterprise, but seek to demonstrate that neither technocratic prescription nor reliance on local knowledge alone is adequate for sustainable management of forests. What is needed, as Fischer (1998) argues, is a deliberative engagement between the claims to knowledge by both scientists and citizens. In our experience, this deliberative process provided a foundation for less constrained dialogue, greater collaboration, and mutual learning in the direction of more evidence-based decision-making. This approach is however not free from challenges related to power and techno-bureaucratic control.
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