Jagannath Adhikari
Over the past two decades, Nepal has undergone two distinct processes of agrarian transformation – growing participation in non-farm economy through migration, remittances, and urbanisation, and a change in rural community lives as seen in creation of new community structures and new challenges for institutions to look into the problems of left-behind members like the children and elderly. This transformation calls for a new approach for community-based resource management and other development.
Even though the practice of moving out of national border is not a new practice in Nepal, the present form of globalisation that is seen, especially after early 1990s, has changed the magnitude and direction of mobility across national borders. This process of globalisation in Nepal is seen in different flows across space – economic (remittances and investment for migration), human (growing number of people from all communities participating in this migration), material (consumption goods), and cultural (information and symbols and their meaning). These flows have led to recent agrarian transformation encompassing both rural and urban areas.
The paper is based on the studies conducted in Pokhara region in the 1990s and early 2000s. Pokhara region has seen a typical kind of agrarian transformation that is seen in Nepal with Pokhara being the centre-stage receiving, from global areas, various flows that are outlined above and in transmitting these flows to its rural areas, which are now more and more integrated with Pokhara because of expansion of transportation facilities and media outreach. As a result, Pokhara has been rapidly transformed as a centre not only of traditional break-of-the-bulk distribution of goods and commodities, but, increasingly as a financial, cross-cultural, and political centre.
The paper shows that agrarian transformation that is taking place has created a dual tendency at the same time. It has created a homogenisation impact in terms of household economic structure, as migration now is not confined to a certain social group, as was the case in the past and due to relative decline in the importance to access to local resources like land and forest. Every social group now participates in the process of migration even though the degree varies slightly depending upon the traditional cultural resources prevalent for migration. The land and labour tenure conditions have changed significantly in favour of tenants and wage workers diluting to some extent the traditional asymmetry in power between households with varying degree of land ownership. On the other hand, heterogeneity has grown in terms of gradual decline in traditional sharing and exchange mechanism like labour exchange and other moral co-operative economies and differential access to remunerative migration opportunities for different groups of people. In a way, access to outside opportunities is increasingly more important in shaping the social and economic position of households, or, the class position. This change calls for new approach in the ‘group-based’ management of community resources and development in rural areas that is practised now.