Sudeep Jana Thing and Hemant Ojha This paper problematises the recent participatory turn in conservation policy and practices through the experiences and struggles of Sonaha ethnic minorities in relation to Bardiya National Park, the largest protected area in the Nepalese lowland. Claims of Sonaha elders suggest that their long standing occupancy and association with the riverine and riparian territory of the lower Karnali River delta has met with a progressively exclusionary conservation regime of the national park. Traditionally leading a semi mobile life in and around the delta, and engaged in small scale fishing and gold panning for subsistence, the lives and realities of Sonahas have been heavily implicated by the state intervention in the name of nature and biodiversity conservation. In the global conservation domain, Nepal is portrayed as…

Soma Kumari Rana and Shiva Kumar Shrestha Since 1999 (2055 BS), the Swiss-funded Sustainable Soil Management Programme (SSMP), which is implemented by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation, has been promoting a decentralised extension system, the Farmer-to-Farmer approach (FtF), as a means to disseminate appropriate agricultural technologies to mid-hill farmers unreached by government extension services. The importance of this approach has been realised by district and local level stakeholders, as well as in the national policy arena.  The FtF approach aims to improve agriculture service delivery to rural farmers in Nepal, especially rural women and the disadvantaged in remote areas, which has been limited by poor access to extension services and information, poor access to and control over resources, and a lack of a gender sensitive extension system. The Local Self Governance Act…

Sanjay Sharma The number of Nepali youth seeking foreign employment overseas, especially in the Gulf countries and Malaysia, is higher now than in any other time in history; this accounts for the escalating volume of remittance received by the country, which is also at a record high. Among the various frameworks that have been put forward to explain the causes of labour migration, the ‘Rational Choice Theory’ is one such approach that has gained much acclaim. In this context, the theory claims that the labour migrants calculate the costs and benefits of migration before going abroad for employment and decide ‘rationally’ to migrate. It therefore follows that a labour migrant’s decision to go abroad is made on the rationale that it is more beneficial to work abroad than inside the…

Pauline Limbu One  of the  major  challenges around  state  restructuring  in  Nepal  is  to  address  the  aspirations  of movements demanding so-called identity-based federal states. This paper provides one example to show how current claims about history and federal states are situating themselves in a shared understanding of territory and land.   I will look into the current Limbuwan movement’s demand for an autonomous Limbuwan federal state, through an analysis of the Limbuwan movement’s territorial claims based on readings of history. I will reference the recent history of Limbus related to land – in particular the kipat system that legally existed until the 1960s and practically until the completion of cadastral survey in 1990s. I argue that kipat is important to the movement because it denotes continuity of the groups' autonomy over…

Lok Ranjan Parajuli In the education history of Nepal, the Rana era (1846-1951) is almost always portrayed as an era in which citizens were denied access to (formal) education. The less than two percent literacy rate at the end of the Rana regime and the concomitant figures (related to schools/teachers/students) give credence to this line of argument. There is no denying that the Ranas in general barred their 'subjects' from having access to education, but this uni-linear narrative masks a number of experiments (e.g., Bhasha, Shresta and Basic education) that the Ranas conducted over the years in this sector. This paper charts the trajectory of the Basic Education System, introduced in 1947. The introduction of the Basic Education System was, I argue, a radical policy turnaround. With it, the Rana…

Khem Raj Shreesh and Sudhindra Sharma Paul Collier, a professor of political economy and a well known conflict scholar points to the vicious conflict traps, which entrap a country into a vicious trap, from which it becomes difficult to get out. Nepal’s current predicament, i.e., a protracted post-conflict transition, resonates with Collier's argument that there is a high probability of post-conflict countries returning to conflict within the first decade of the peace agreement. This paper makes an attempt to engage with the ideas of Paul Collier through a discussion of Nepal's political economy. Paul Collier, who is associated with ‘greed not grievance’ hypothesis, has subsequently revised his theory into what is called the ‘feasibility hypothesis’ viz. where it is feasible, a conflict will occur. Collier has also demonstrated how it…

Kanako Nakagawa This paper examines the shift in the inter-caste relationships brought about by the commercialisation of the meat markets in Kathmandu Valley, by focusing on every day practices of Khaḍgī caste, who have been engaged in slaughtering, processing, and trading of livestock as a caste-based-role in Newar society.  Recently in Kathmandu, the people from other castes and religious groups, including Muslim ‘foreigners’ have involved in the process of distributing meat which used to be primarily dominated by Khaḍgīs. In the meat distribution process, they have usually retained their own norms and ethics which have rendered the meat market a cultural and religious mosaic. For example, Muslims keep practicing halal even when they slaughter the animals for the markets. Rai and Limbu, who are indigenous ethnic groups from eastern parts…

Joanna Morrison, Aman Sen, Rita Thapa, and Tanja Houweling Introduction Progress towards the MDGs has been highly uneven. Inequalities in maternal and child health and health care are huge. To make things worse, effective interventions are known, but rarely reach those who need them most. Little is known about what works, and why, to reach lower socio-economic and otherwise vulnerable groups with health interventions. We examined the extent to which our maternal and child health focused intervention has affected women from different socioeconomic and socio-demographic positions. Specifically, we examined attendance at the women’s group meetings, paying particular attention to attendance by poor, less educated and young primigravida women. We also explored barriers and facilitators for attendance among different social strata. Methods We used population surveillance data from two cluster randomised…

Shrochis Karki Although public schools have been rapidly on the decline in Nepal, this paper traces the circumstances under which a school has emerged as a quality education provider in the region. Positive deviance (PD), which first gained prominence in the field of nutrition and public health, provides the theoretical grounding to understand why and how certain actors and/or institutions flourish in hostile environments. Secondary schooling is a major component to the transition to becoming an ‘educated’ youth and while most analyses focus on the severe problems that public schools face, this PD approach helps find possibilities for change. However, the picture is not entirely rosy because even these graduates then face harsh realities where their success does not translate into meaningful higher education or employment. The category of ‘educated’…

Michael Hutt In his seminal book Literature, Popular Culture and Society, Leo Lowenthal argues that studies of the representation of society, state, or economy in the literature of a particular country or time contribute to our knowledge of ‘the kind of perception which a specific social group—writers—has of specific social phenomena’ and therefore to our knowledge of the ‘history and sociology of shared consciousness’ (1961: 143). This discussion will focus on five Nepali novels published between 2005 and 2010, i.e. during the final months of the internal conflict between the CPN (Maoist) and the monarchical state, and the period of political transition that followed. The novels were selected mainly because they have been widely read and discussed, at least in Kathmandu, and can therefore be seen as possessing sociological as…