Bharat B Shrestha Deforestation and land use change are among the much debated environmental issues of the Nepal Himalaya. Forest degradation, deforestation and the subsequent expansion of agriculture land have been dominant phenomena in Guthichaur area of Jumla district in north-western Nepal. Population increase, inefficient use of forest resources (timber and firewood) and lack of new opportunities appear to the drivers of land use change from forest to farmland. Keywords: Forest fire, deforestation, land use change, Jumla, Nepal.  

Saumitra Neupane While the need to access, involve and empower citizens to the heart of public governance and decision making for effective and accountable policy formulation and implementation remains a celebrated ideal, its outcomes, in reality, have been unyielding to a large extent. Controlled arenas of public policy deliberation and deficits within traditional electoral representation system have curtailed actual voice and concerns of citizens in public policy, leading to failure in policy adoption and implementation. Increasingly, actors and institutions outside the government have been found identifying themselves with traditional functions of the government. Involvement of the third sector in complimentary roles in service provisioning, resource distribution and infrastructure management has enabled alternative modes of mainstreaming marginalized voices within public policy functions. Changing notion and dynamics of traditional political constituency has…

Marion Wettstein When I took my first dance steps and initially began to note them down on paper nine years ago, the Sakela dance of the Rai in Eastern Nepal still was a rural phenomenon, closely interwoven with local mythology and ritual. Nowadays it is the urban youth of Kathmandu dancing a new form of the Sakela on the big festival grounds to celebrate Kirat cultural events organised by the Kirat Rai Yayokkha. But not only in urban and diaspora environments the Sakela dance has seen a revival. Also in the villages and in Rai communities that did hardly know or perform it before, Sakela is booming during the major agricultural rituals. In my currently running research project about the dance – which is based at the University of Vienna…

Claire Femenias Among many communities of the Kirat of Eastern Nepal the funerary rituals are extended over many months and consist of several steps. The mourning and funerary process is closely linked to notions of local identity that finds one of its most evident expressions in the chautaara, the resting platforms that are built for the deceased and the living alike. Taking the example of the Bahing Rai, among who I am conducting my PhD research, I will analyse these expressions of local identity in the funeral approaching from three perspectives: A first approach will be to examine the importance of religious syncretism in general, as the Bahing funerary process and believes are strongly influenced by both, Hindu and Kirat worldviews. Secondly I will focus on the building of the…

Alban von Stockhausen Among the Rai of Eastern Nepal, the recitations pronounced during shamanic rituals include countless references to the natural and sacred topography of the landscape and to aspects of the natural habitat inhabited by the performers. For every Rai group, often even for every clan of it, these references are “localized” to an great extent and therefore every social entity has its own way of being “rooted” in their natural and sacred environment. In a Post-Doc project by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the Department of South Asian, Tibetan and Buddhist Studies of the University of Vienna, I explore these connections in great detail with a focus on the Dumi Rai, an ethnic group settling in the northern parts of Khotang district in Eastern Nepal. By re-travelling…

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.