Second Annual Himalayan Policy Research Conference (2007)

With the end of Cold War, the nature and consequences of conflict changed significantly in the world. Today there is conflict more between the peoples of a country than between countries. Thus, the reasons of conflict are changing with the lapse of time. As the number of deaths owing to conflict has been accelerating in the recent decades, it is of utmost importance to look into its causes. Against this backdrop the present study makes a modest attempt to find out the causes and correlates of conflict and its intensity using cross-sectional data of 75 districts of Nepal.

There is a growing resistance from Dalits against the ongoing caste discrimination in the Nepali society (Dahal et al 2002; Jha 2004). In this process Dalits are both assertively deploying and redefining their “traditional” identities. Despite the constitutional ban on caste discrimination, there persists an upper caste monopoly on education, jobs, and political power. This research studies the complex and changing dynamics of Dalit identity in Nepal, within a context of growing resistance and organized social movement against caste discrimination and exclusion. More specifically, this paper examines differentiation and variation in the reproduction of Dalit identities during a period of political mobilization and (presumably) heightened consciousness across (i) sociospatial boundaries, (ii) intersections of caste, class and gender, and (iii) dimensions of social consciousness and response/agency.

This paper presents the results of an action research project conducted in Begnas Basin and finds that community actions, planning, organizing capacity and functionality are still possible in such conflict situations for undertaking new and corrective environmental-policy making tasks.

This paper estimates both the households’ costs of coping with the problem of unreliable public water supplies and their willingness to pay (WTP) for improved water supplies in Kathmandu valley. Coping costs are calculated from respondents’ answers on averting behavior, market price and value of time. The willingness to pay for improved water supply is calculated using stated preference method, which is then compared with the value obtained from revealed preference method. This paper also discusses the effects of a household’s socio-economic characteristics on its coping costs and WTP for improved water supply.

Informal institutions or conventions or codes of behaviour play significant role in constraining human behaviour that have important political consequences. Despite a lot of focus on institutionalism, informal institutions' role in political behaviours and outcomes has not been scrutinized thoroughly in political science. This paper investigates the contribution of informal institutions to the political exclusion of marginalized groups such as Dalit, indigenous nationalities, Madhesi, minority religious groups, and women in democratic Nepal (1990-2002).

The purpose of this paper is to discuss heritage issues and conflicts with a case study of Lumbini, the birth place of Lord Buddha. Lumbini has recently been a national icon for tourism promotion and has been able to attract about 40,000 pilgrims and tourists (not including Indians and Nepalis) every year, mostly from Asian countries. From both heritage and tourism point of views, Lumbini is different from many heritage sites. Lumbini is surrounded by non-Buddhist population, which is a major impediment for preservation and management of the heritage. This situation complicates “community involvement,” one of the principles of sustainable development. As a result government and international agencies have been trying to manage the site without much local involvement.

Published reports have indicated that economic inequality greatly increased in Nepal during the era of parliamentary democracy that began in 1990. This paper revisits these inequality estimates by utilizing the same original, Nepal Living Standard Survey data collected in 1996 and 2004, on which the reported estimates are based. But this paper goes beyond the specific resources and methodologies used in the reported, official estimates toward providing a more comprehensive picture of economic inequality.

Full abstracts of all papers along with additional content.

Federal restructuring of the nation state has become almost common agenda after April 2006 revolution in Nepal. Political parties, ethnic communities, and development planners have started to move towards federal direction in their understanding. Expectation revolution of people is ahead of other issues such as institutional framework and working processes. Identification of extractable natural resources meant for the livelihood of local people becomes the basic requirement to meet these expectations.

We empirically examine this association between inequality and conflict. The setting is the Maoist rebellion in Nepal that has claimed thousands of lives since it began in 1996. The regional variations across villages in Nepal afford a rich experiment, without having to use crosscountry data, for exploring the nature of association between conflict and inequality.

The city of Pokhara in Nepal is facing a tremendous growth pressure, and the municipality has not been able to maintain open space for public use. There are no plans for the development of a nature park or green place where people could see, feel, and touch ornamental plants and flowers in nature. Further, Pokhara municipality lacks an open green space where people could walk, jog or spend leisure or free time.

Our research adds to the growing number of remote sensing–based analyses that deal with land-cover dynamics, land use and cover changes in the Center Development Region (CDR) of Nepal during the last three decades. This study spatially identifies deforestation areas by using transition matrices for the periods of 1975-1990, 1990-2000 and 2000- 2005. It uses simple regression analyses for finding relationships of the above variables with deforestation.

A certain minimum level of political knowledge is considered necessary in democracy, and the political knowledge is considered to increase political literacy and competence, which may foster citizens’ engagement in associations and their participation in politics. I have tested the hypothesis that the political knowledge will be a significant factor to promote civic engagement and electoral and other forms of political participation of citizens. I use a bivariate correlation analysis, assuming political knowledge as an independent variable and civic engagement and political participation as dependent variables. The research finds that, compared to other citizens, politically knowledgeable citizens in the village of Bajung in Parbat district of Nepal engaged more in civic and political activities. This finding may provide decisive policy implications towards the enhancement of the level of political knowledge of the people to improve their political participation.

Is it safe to make political predictions in a country like Nepal? It is not; but some people do it and come out right. What makes them guess correctly is something different. Nonetheless they cannot be dismissed in their claims with evidences.

Following Sachs (2005), this paper adopts a clinical economics approach and attempts to undertake a systematic “differential diagnosis” of the nature and scope of poverty in Nepal. Subsequently, we will examine the causes of poverty and the determinants of household per capita income in Nepal. Ultimately, we hope to propose programs and institutions to address the critical barriers to poverty reduction that are identified through the differential diagnosis.

Some of the major risk factors identified in NHP are: i) Over-break in tunnel excavation, ii) Unknown subsurface conditions of geology/ ground contours, iii) Civil disorder/ terrorism, iv) Equipment failure, and v) Unavailability of resources/equipment on time. Similarly, work packages involving tunneling works possessed higher relative risks. These included construction of headrace tunnel, tailrace tunnel, penstock tunnel and underground powerhouse. This is because of the fact that tunneling projects are sensitive to even slight disturbances. Tunneling process is a serial type of production system. Therefore, in such a system the possibility for changing the workplace location is limited, except when there are many tunnel adits.

This paper aims to analyze the various components of the security sector apparatus in Nepal indicating some of the dilemmas and sticking points which have prevented and will continue to create obstacles for security sector reform. An overview of the cantonment process will also be presented along with the characteristics of the arms management negotiations, which provide some insight and framework for eventual security sector reform debates. Finally, policy options will be presented in favor of an integral strategy for the democratic transformation of all mechanisms related to security in Nepal with a focus on the strengthening of the protection of human rights and conflict mediation on national and local levels.

Several patterns can be observed from the modern political history of Nepal, but two deserve special attention. First, political parties have been quite successful in bringing down autocratic regimes in Nepal, but only when all of the major parties work together for a common goal. A single party has never been able to topple an autocracy on its own. Mass participation was also critical in bringing down autocratic regimes in 1950, 1990, and 2006, and occurred only after the unison of the major political parties. What are the linkages between civil society and the party system that explain success in ousting autocratic regimes? Second, although successful in toppling autocratic monarchies, political parties have yet failed to institutionalize democracy. What have been the critical variables missing from past experiments with democracy in Nepal? By offering some initial answers to these questions, this paper has three purposes. First, we draw upon the literature on social movements and protest cycles to explain the causes of mass participation in revolutionary movements. Second, we apply the insights of New Institutionalism to explain the failure of past experiments with democracy. Finally, we assess current prospects for democratic consolidation in Nepal.

This paper replicates and extends a well known model of quantifying categorical fungibility of foreign aid to study the effect of aid on government consumption, magnitude and composition of government investment and revenue mobilization in Nepal. I find that aid intended for a particular sector has, by and large, been spent within that sector and, in fact, induced the government to augment its spending on that particular sector for most categories studied. This broadly corroborates the evidence on the “flypaper effect” of aid not just at the aggregate level but also at the sectoral level. I also find that aid has enhanced the government’s revenue effort but not quite to the extent that would enable the government to self-finance the inflating government consumption, which, I find, has a strong positive aid elasticity.

In 1996 the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) launched a guerilla-based armed rebellion against the government of Nepal. Grounded in long-standing grievances regarding economic, social, and geographical marginalization, the CPN-M garnered widespread support throughout the rural areas of the country. The result was an exponential growth of the organization and a resultant escalation of armed violence. This paper explores how the CPN-M was able to attract and mobilize potential rebel and militia supporters. It argues that while structural variables like social and economic inequalities provided an important context in which the Maoists operated, the mechanism for the CPN-M’s successful recruitment strategy lay in its focus on indoctrination and political education.

Some of the important questions that have motivated my project, in the context of Nepal, include the following: “Do remittances facilitate consumption smoothing (Yang and Choi, 2005), or investments in human and physical capital (Rapoport and Docquier 2004), or help households overcome liquidity constraints (Taylor and Rozelee, 2003)?”

Although Nepal has ushered in a modern system of government, the bureaucracy has hardly changed its pre-modern color. Today Nepal teeters dangerously towards political chaos. Corruption is rampant, unaccountability is rife, and there is a gaping socio-political inequality. The reason why the Nepalese case is so interesting is that, although the governing mechanism has a fairly modern legal rational base, the bureaucracy still holds its “traditional” hue. Is it theoretically possible to have a legal rational political system and a pre-modern bureaucracy at the same time? Does the traditionally inclined, un-evolving retainer bureaucracy act as an impediment to smooth functioning of a democratically elected, legal rational government? The paper seeks to answer these questions.

This paper will analyze migration from rural eastern Nepal to tea plantations in eastern Nepal and Darjeeling and the potentials such migration might represent for coping with rural vulnerability and food scarcity.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has proven particularly difficult to implement due to the complex legal requirements that it places on parties. As with many other nations, Nepal has lacked national implementing legislation which has greatly hindered compliance and effectiveness of CITES in the country and, indirectly, in the region. Here we explore several case studies of actual and potential CITES violations in Nepal that have come to light in the past decade, especially as a result of the Maoist insurgency. We also review draft legislation (not yet passed) that is designed to implement the convention and to close gaps in enforcement.

Remittances from international sources form an important part of the typical Nepalese household’s income. We analyze the effects of household international remittance and non-remittance income on educational achievement and the amount of child labor using Heckman’s two-step analysis.

Among land-change scientists, there is a growing recognition of the need for an integrative multilevel approach to study the relationships of agricultural ‘modification activities’ with global land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) (Moran 2005; Walsh et al. 2004). This new development comes as a crucial step to move beyond the primary area of change – the conversion of forests – to study the changes in agricultural areas, mainly the land-use strategies resulting in different agricultural intensification levels (Lambin et al. 2000; Laney 2004).

The study was initially conceived to identify ten important MAPs and NTFPs to present information to national and international private investors on socio-economic and environmental opportunities available for investment on those species. But, in the course of the study during the various interaction programs organized for feedbacks, participating stakeholders suggested the study team to consider more than 10 species from investment point of view. So, the study considered a list of 30 species already selected by the national level Herbs and NTFP Coordination Committee (HNCC) of the government of Nepal. The study has identified four top priority species for low risk private sector investment in each of the three climatic zones of Nepal, by considering market value, export data, ease of cultivation, parts used in trade, range of distribution of species, threat category, status of legal protection, local processing opportunity, ethno-botanical importance, etc.