Oped»
The centralising onslaught
- (un)common sense
APR 26 -
The current Nepali government is making a series of regressive moves in the forestry sector. The latest among them has been the result of the much-hyped Cabinet meeting at the Everest base camp that decided to set up a few protected areas as a part of Nepal’s commitment to addressing climate change. The immediate outcome of this meeting was the creation of Gaurishankar Conservation Area that, if established, would encroach upon the rights of several community forest user groups across Dolakha, Sindhupalchowk and Ramechhap districts. Many others are in the pipeline. These moves have attempted to undermine perhaps the world’s most successful community-based forest conservation. These new sets of decisions will relegate the role of local people to one of looking after the forests on behalf of an alien bureaucracy. These moves, however, have not gone unchallenged. For one, Nepal’s biggest network of community-based organisations — the Federation of Community Forest Users Nepal (FECOFUN) — has organised a series of public meetings across the country. Called Forest Caravan-2010, these meetings have mobilised people across the country to assert community control over resources. It is necessary that these decisions be resisted from every quarter because this smacks of pre-1990, Panchayat-era centralisation of control over natural resources. We know what the consequences had been during the last 200 years of centralised control over natural resources in Nepal and other parts of the world.
I grew up travelling between Chitwan and Kathmandu in the 1980s and 1990s. Among many things that caught my eyes were the changing hillsides across the Trishuli river. Anyone who has travelled along the highway to Kathmandu over several years can hardly miss the dramatic transformations of the hillsides. The near-denuded hills used to be scarred by recurring landslides in the 1980s. Over the years, the same hills have become covered with species-rich diverse forests. I did not realise that this dramatic transformation took place because of community management until I participated in an international conference organised by International Center for Integrated Mountain and Development (ICIMOD) in 1996.
Until 1990, the consolidation of the Nepali state meant growing control by the ruling elites over national resources — both natural as well as other. For a long time, the land belonged to the royal and Rana oligarchy. Thanks to late historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi, we now know how the rulers devised an elaborate network of functionaries down to the village level to extract surplus from the primary producers and to enforce control over water and forest resources. While the Nepali state became the legal owner of the natural resources within its territorial jurisdiction, in reality this meant that those who controlled the Nepali state privatised these resources. Those who ran the land administration found new ways of extracting surpluses from the primary peasant producers. The forest bureaucrats — ranging from the lowest rung forest guard to the Forest Department head — used Nepal’s forests as if they were their private duhuno gai (milking-cows). Conduct a random survey of how many of forestry sector government employees built new houses or amassed new land or sent their kids to foreign colleges. It doesn’t take long to realise how much Nepal’s forestry meant to them.
The result, however, was denuded forests and marginalisation of local community members in the use and conservation of local natural resource base. These bureaucrats and political elites had no interest in the conservation of the forests. In fact, politicians competed among themselves in sending their ‘people’ to the lucrative posts in forest bureaucracy. The forests of the Tarai — with its thick timber — remained the most lucrative area for a long time. Obviously, Nepal’s royal clans including the top military generals (often times they were the same) had direct stake in sending their own people there.
By 1990, Nepal’s forests were on significant decline. But experiments in community management were proving to be an impressive success. In fact, it was no surprise that the local people had the biggest stake in the maintenance of forest covers. After all, their livelihoods depended on their judicious use of the local resources. However, the expansion of governmental institutions came at the exclusion of local inhabitants. In fact, the forest bureaucracy amassed a lot of wealth by criminalising the local peoples’ use of forest resources. While timber smugglers avoid punishment by partnering with forest bureaucrats, locals who used resources for their daily needs faced imprisonment and had to regularly bribe the government forest bureaucrats. It was not uncommon for government forest guards to have the first say over the healthiest chicken in the villages. One can imagine what the district forest officers thought they were entitled to.
The dramatic turnaround in forest conservation in the 1990s was the result not of the efforts of Nepal’s forest bureaucracy or politicians, but of those who created successful examples in community management. By the end of the 1990s there were already tens of thousands of forest users groups successfully managing local forests. In fact, it would be a misnomer to say that they were managing the forests; in most of the places the forests were revived from barely existent patches — the leftovers of the bureaucratic mismanagement.
Under the guise of mitigating climate change, the current government is now trying to reverse the impressive gains that Nepal has made in truly transferring the responsibility of conservation of forests to the local communities. Is it a mere coincidence that a Panchayat-era politician is in charge of the Forest Ministry at the moment?
These moves also directly challenge the general consensus that has emerged around the idea of federalism in Nepal. Although the form of federal structures is hotly contested, as a principle it has been accepted as a basis of governing multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies. The success stories of community management of forests in Nepal provides yet another reason to devolve power to institutions that are either created by people themselves or are directly accountable to those who are governed by these institutions.
In the context of growing political disillusionment, the FECOFUN-led Forest Caravan-2010 provides some rays of optimism. Much of the political wheeling and dealing in Nepal has singularly marginalised a majority of the people. The Kathmandu-centric model of governance seems to have been too good for the existing political elites to give way to more popularly-controlled governance. However, the widespread network of community forest users will not let the centralising tendencies impose their fiat that easily. That is one important way we keep the substantive element of popular control over governance in place.
Anil Bhattarai
anilbhattarai@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-04-27 07:33
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