Prakriti Thami, Sanjay Sharma and  Neha Choudhary  Nepal, traditionally an agrarian society, used to offer limited employment opportunities. However, since this last decade it has witnessed drastic changes in its labour market. With an approximate 1600 youths leaving for foreign employment everyday and remittances accounting for a large 25 percent of its GDP, Nepal is slowly and duly coming to be regarded as a remittance-based economy. The significance of these large scale remittances on the concurrent poverty reduction seen in Nepal is indisputable and there have been many studies that explore the economic implications of this new trend. However, the role of remittances in bringing about social changes, for the most parts, remains unexplored. This study aims to foray into addressing the issue above by examining the effect of remittances on caste-based…

Harsha Man Maharjan This paper analyzes the notion of stakeholder participation in policy process by examining roles of various actors involved in the making of national media policy drafts. These actors include representatives of state machinery, donors and the media professionals. The standard discourse on participatory and collaborative policy process often finds no return for thinking about the complexity of policy process. To the contrary, the paper highlights the ambiguities of the notion by demonstrating how various actors control the process and the outcome of the drafts policy making. This paper provides an account of the preparation of drafts of Media Policy 2012‐2013 by Ministry of Information and Communications under a three years (December 2010 to October 2013) project funded by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) called ”The project for…

Sudeepa Khanal  HIV is often accompanied by unfavorable attitudes and behaviors of people around in the society. This paper tries to describe the different forms of stigma and discrimination that is prevalent not only in the community, but also in the health facilities in Nepal, resulting in various complexities in the lives of the infected/ affected people. This paper also illustrates some experiences of stigma and discrimination faced by HIV infected/affected people in their societies reinforcing the findings from previous studies, which suggest that despite the strong focus on reducing stigma related to HIV, efforts remain inadequate. This paper bases its findings on data acquired from an ongoing qualitative study, where peer ethnographic interviews are conducted by peers from the HIV network. These peer interviews help in gaining a better…

Swatahsiddha Sarkar Because of its innate ideological complexities and debatable subject matter any attempt to historicise nationalism has always been an uphill task. The study of nationalism in the Eastern Himalayan context has long been known to be the cup of tea of Nepal and West based historians. In this context the contribution of Kumar Pradhan, a historian by training from Darjeeling, India (who died in the recent past on December 20, 2013) seems to have added some fundamentally new dimensions in the Eastern Himalayan nationalist history. Pradhan did question the obsession of ‘glorifying the history of unification’ as the only paradigm of Nepali nationalist historiography at that period of time when we rarely heard about janjati politics that in fact, stymied the Bahunbadi discourse of Nepali nationalism in course…

Nawaraj Upadhaya and Ria Reis The experience and impact of distress (notion of suffering) depends on the geography(ies) where the distress occurs. For adolescents attending school in Nepal, their home, community and school are the three major locations (physical geographies) where distress is experienced due to situations that oppose their expectations in three emotional geographies (individual body geography, inter-personal geography and broader group geography). This paper presents the findings of an ethnographic study conducted among high school students in a rural part of Lalitpur district, Nepal. Out of a total population of 111 adolescents, 35 directly participated in the study by agreeing to be individually interviewed, taking part in focus group discussions or being observed by the researcher in school, home and community.    Considering adolescents to be social actors,…

Jefferson Fox Since the 1980s, Nepal has gained worldwide recognition for path breaking achievements in community forest management. Community forests currently occupy nearly 23% of Nepal’s total forest area, the management of which involves over 18,000 community forest user groups comprising 1.6 million households and nearly 40% of Nepal’s population (DoF 2012). The spatially-explicit impacts of this 30-year transition in forest management, however, have not been documented in part due to the lack of surveys studying the same forest patches through time. The author has studied forest and agricultural practices in a village near Gorkha since 1980 and conducted forest surveys in 1980, 1990, and 2010. This paper describes changes in the village between 1980 and 2010, with a focus on forest status, use, and management. In 1980, the vast…

Rachel Amtzis Nepal, one of poorest nations in Asia, a hub of development institutions and activities, and a testing ground of development-branded projects and lifestyles since the last third of the 20th Century, has also become one of its most socially progressive and least restrictive in online communication, and, arguably, on the ground activism. However, its rapid urbanization , brought about by lack of economic opportunities, land capture, warfare, and destruction in rural areas, has caused a strain on the limited resources of its capital, Kathmandu, population 1,740,977 (National Population Census, 2011), resulting in its listing as one of the planet’s least livable cities (127th out of 140, Businessweek, 2012). Responses to the negative environmental effects of urbanization in Kathmandu engage social media platforms using a combination of textual, photographic,…

Mahendra Lawoti Despite being the oldest state in South Asia and having gone through eight constitutions (two proto-constitutions and six formal constitutions), Nepal is still grappling with constitutional instability as the first Constituent Assembly (2008-2012) could not craft a constitution and it is not certain whether the Second Constituent Assembly elected in November 2013 can craft a new Constitution that would stabilize constitutionalism in the country. This calls for understanding the reasons behind the constitutional instability, which could be useful both for practical and academic purposes.   The paper will examine why constitutional stability still eludes Nepal today by juxtaposing two sets of literature to analyze the contestations over the constitutions that have led to the instability in Nepal and elsewhere.  Democratization literature, especially those focusing on transition to democracy in…

Rishikesh Pandey Climate change studies emerged since 1980s are dominated by natural sciences and studies of its impacts are imperialized by economics. Both of these schools are using positivist methodology so the findings are not translated to citizen science that laymen can understand. Social scientists have to believe that climate change is what the scientists tell, and its impacts are what the economists tell. Social scientists are yet to study social dimensions of climate change at wider context; though climate change is typically a social problem. The climate is constructed through the interaction of social and ecological systems and the change in the climate system is associated with the societies’ actions and behaviours. Hence, whatever the lenses: environmental, economic or political is used; climate change studies should not exclude the…

Pitambar Bhandari After 1950's, Nepal experienced tripartite agendas in the history of state-building-- democracy as a political regime, economic liberalization and diplomatic interdependence in the post-colonial world. Industrialization and the associated labour issues emerged as political instruments and social movement agenda. The trade union activities which were prohibited during the panchayat regime, however, resumed after the reinstatement of parliamentary democracy in 1990. In the context of low scale industrial economy compared to agro- based activities, unionism has grown as a new trend of movement including wider range of labor forces from industrial sector, civil service, teachers and other business entrepreneurs. The functioning of trade unions is not merely limited to the wage and welfare relationship between the employer and employee. It is also extended to Union formation which includes political…