Sharad Ghimire The notion of climate justice has received importance in academic, activist and political circles globally and in Nepal. Political leaders, climate change activists, movement leaders as well as the academics hardly miss the point about justice—whether explicitly or implicitly—while they refer to climate change. Nepal's climate change policy has also incorporated the concept. While being so attractive to many groups, the notion has been hardly discussed to its nuances in Nepal as to how it is implicated to policies and practices. At the global level, climate justice is mostly understood in relation to the division between the global North and the South in relation to their contribution to generation of green house gases (GHGs) and hence the responsibility to reduce it, bearing the negative consequences and having the…

Hari Dhungana The political discourse in Nepal’s post-2006 transitional period privileges “consensus” among powerful actors as a model of decision-making. As this model takes shape in local government structures as all-party mechanisms—that continue to be powerful even when they have been disbanded in early 2012—governance and service delivery functions of local government units have been impacted in significant ways. The perpetuation of APM and the informality of its decision-making add another layer of challenge to the efforts on devolved local governance that came up right from the promulgation of local governance legislation in 1999. Elected officials were displaced during the Maoist insurgency; no elections were held after the expiry of term of elected officials in 2002; the decision-making in local bodies was entrusted to bureaucrats against the ethos of local…

Lokranjan Parajuli (alias Ramesh Parajuli) After the popular movement of 2007 v.s. (1950-51) the Nepali language print media sector saw a significant growth. With the publication of Jagaran weekly and Aawaj daily in 1951 from the private sector, the Nepali press also came out of the state's direct purview. This paper assesses the status of press freedom in the decade of media growth between 1950 and 1960. By studying the actions taken by the state agencies (mostly the Kathmandu Magistrate Office) against various newspapers, it seeks answers to the following questions: under what legal regime did the newspapers function during that decade? To what extent did the newspapers enjoy the press freedom enshrined in the Interim Constitution? And what were considered ‘objectionable contents’ during that decade? By answering these questions,…

Harshaman Maharjan The dominant narrative about janajatis during the Panchyat period (1960-1990) focuses on the discriminations practiced by the Nepali state against them. Little has been said in the research literature about overt janajati resistance to such state discrimination during that era of Nepali history. Such resistance was possible from groups which had the social capital to question Panchayati oppression. One such group was the Newars, some of whom practiced such resistance through a weekly newspaper Inap, published during the 1980s. This paper focuses on the content and content makers of Inap, founded in 1982 and edited by Krishna Sundar Malla (alias Malla K Sundar) as a way to analyse the oppositional representations of janajati issues. It argues that this Newar weekly not only countered state policy related to the…

Ananta Koirala, Deepak Aryal, and Shamik Mishra This paper assesses the historical development of Nepali magazines between 1899 and 1960. It describes the major objectives behind their publications and the themes covered by them. It also outlines the presence of particular groups (ethnic, caste, gender) that held sway over the writing, editing and publication of these magazines. Furthermore, this paper traces the influence of the Indian nationalist and Hindi language movements upon the Nepali magazines during the early decades of the 20th century. Based upon the study of a total of 59 magazines (46 general and 13 specialized), this paper argues that magazines played a vital role in popularizing the discourse of ‘Nepali nationalism and identity’ and in promoting the Nepali language as a symbol of national identity.

Shrochis Karki Education can be a poisoned chalice, particularly for indigenous and marginalized communities, because it can raise their hopes and expectations without providing them necessary skills or knowledge to achieve those outcomes. This finding of an unstable expectation-outcome nexus is based on fieldwork research carried out in a rural village in Chitwan, and in Kathmandu, Nepal. The Chepangs, a highly marginalized indigenous community, have harboured great hopes of escaping their poverty through education. Given the relative success of the few “educated” people in their village, Chepang parents perceive education to be extremely important and enthusiastically send their children to school; enrolment in the village has rocketed to almost 100% in the last decade. However, the state of Chepang education is found to be dismal, with students facing severe structural…

Mahendra Lawoti The paper investigates the role of the political elite in exclusion in Nepal through an analysis of their attitudes (structured survey) and behaviour (public policies/institutions). A survey of 101 Nepali parliamentarians in 2000 demonstrates a complex scenario. While the elite were highly tolerant, which indicate that they did not possess exclusionary attitudes, some level of racism existed among them. The apparent contradiction between the tolerant but racist attitudes can be reconciled if we distinguish between the lack of exclusionary attitudes from that of having inclusive attitudes. The elite may not have been exclusionary but they were not inclusive either. The attitudinal findings are supported by an analysis of policies that affected inclusion/exclusion during the 1990-2002 and post 2006 years when regime change led to a political transformation. While…

Katsuo Nawa This paper is an attempt to analyse the changing ways people of Nepali Byans articulate themselves in formal oratorical occasions from a linguistic anthropological perspective. Byans VDC lies in the northernmost part of Darchula District, Far Western Nepal, and main inhabitants there are people who call themselves ‘Rang’ in their language, most frequently called ‘Byansi’ in Nepali, and now officially listed as one of the indigenous nationalities in Nepal. Nowadays most of them live in the town of Darchula either seasonally or semi-permanently, where main audio-visual data for this paper were collected in 2010. There are some traditional occasions, notably in marriage ceremonies, in which several Rangs should give a short speech. This role is usually fulfilled by some elder males who are regarded as phaa tarta, i.e.…

Kyle Knight The human rights of people who do not identify within a male-female gender binary have been alternatively ignored or intensely policed by governments around the world. After a 2007 Supreme Court decision declared full legal recognition and rights for people who identify as not male, not female, but third gender, Nepal has emerged as a leader in the international LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights movement. But how has Nepal as a leader affected politics at home and internationally? Falling in line with the 2006 Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, Nepal’s laws are the most progressive in the world: in order to receive full legal recognition and claim rights, citizens need only to self-identify as third…

James Sharrock A small part of why the transitional period in the peace process has been relatively calm can be explained by the apparent stability in local level politics in Nepal since the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. Unsurprisingly district-level bodies like the All-Party Mechanism, Local Peace Committees and the Indigenous Nationalities Coordination Committee, although widely perceived as entrenching corruption, assisted local level disputes from spiraling out of control by ensuring that an expanded ‘distributional coalition’ gained from patronage and government spending. However, on the ground after the CPA, politics in Eastern Nepal appeared far from calm, especially in terms of accommodating identity-based political actors. I will argue that local politics in Nepal during the transitional period has often seen political parties and other actors demonstrating their power and support -…