Estructura de la Plataforma móvil

Before 1769, Nepal was fragmented into small principalities (states) under the two clusters called Baise and Chaubise. Prithvi Narayan Shah, King of

Gorkha, expanded his state by conquering the other states of Baise and

Chaubise clusters, and finally, led to the founding of a unified Nepal. One

of his major objectives behind the unification of Nepal was to maintain independence and security of his kingdom from the British colonisation (Regmi, 1999).As Nepal was never colonised, one may tend to suggest that there was no influence from the first enclosure movement that started in England in the 15th _{century and expanded in India and other colonised}

nations until the 19th _century.

On the contrary, a closer look at the historical trends of enclosures of natural resources in Nepal suggests that the country did not remain isolated from the trends of enclosures that were common in Britain or colonised countries. A reason is that the country’s resource governance was largely influenced by the then colonised India. For example, while promoting the enclosure of forests for trading timber with the British India Company, in 1927, the government had formed an entity Kathmahal, and in 1942, had established the Department of Forests with the help of a British expatriate and a colonial representative named E.A. Smithies (Bajracharya, 1983; Robbe, 1954).

If the history is any guide, over the last centuries, the state has not just enclosed forests, but also lands and irrigation systems. Though the cases of the enclosures of lands, forests and irrigation systems are not the focus of this research, these have been discussed briefly for three main reasons. First, as PGRFA are not isolated from lands and forests, it is important to discuss Nepal’s situation of the enclosure of lands and forests. For example, as we discuss in Chapter 8, the country’s CBD-compatible Access to

Genetic Resources Bill of 2002 has recognised rights of the state, private persons and institutions, and local communities over PGRFA based on the ownership and use of land.

Second, these cases highlight how common-pool resources have been made subject to restrictions for access and use, undermining traditional,

customary and local practices of natural resource management. This aspect is especially important as the use, management and exchange of PGRFA, as

we discussed in Chapter 4, are closely related to traditional, customary and local practices in Nepal.

Third, a brief discussion on the influence of the first enclosure movement in Nepal gives us an important link to move on to discuss the influence of the second enclosure movement on Nepal’s governance of PGRFA and local, traditional systems of use and exchange of PGRFA.

While describing the cases of these enclosures below, I do not, however, intend to argue that Nepal witnessed these enclosures only due to the first enclosure movement initiated and expanded by Britain between the 15th _and

19th _{centuries. Probably, as is the case for all states in the world, these cases}

of enclosures are also the outcomes of the state’s objective to generate incentives to maximise wealth by economising on the use of resources, reducing the transaction costs and facilitating better resource allocation. Not surprisingly, the state has thus created and implemented measures for the protection of state sovereignty and private property rights in Nepal.

7.2.1 Enclosure of lands

Mainly after the unification of Nepal in 1769, interventions were made in favour of a few feudal, elite groups who largely represented the so-called high caste people such as Brahmin and Chetri. Such favours enabled the high cast people to capture the lands of indigenous people such as Limbu,

Chepang and Tharu in different regions of Nepal. According to Cox (1990),

the Kipat tenure system had enabled the indigenous people to use tribal lands as common property. It meant that the Kipat lands were not supposed to be treated as private property and sold to the members of other ethnic groups. Under this system, each person had a right to exclusively use the land but not to transfer the use right to the people outside the community, or sell the land (Regmi, 1976).

Over a period of time, either as hired labourers or as new settlers in the post-unification period, the high caste people started to cultivate the lands being maintained as common property (Cox, 1990). Gradually, the

government converted the Kipat tenure system into the Raiker tenure system, under which private land ownership was established based on

claims of ownership by whoever cultivating the lands at that time (Regmi, 1976).

This way, on the one hand, the Raiker tenure system enabled the state to generate revenue and exercise the right of foreclosure in the event of tax delinquency (Cox, 1990; Regmi, 1999). On the other hand, since land ownership is considered a symbol of status and a determinant of power in Nepal (Regmi, 1976; Sharma et al., 2014), the conversion of land from

Kipat to Raiker largely benefitted the high caste people to emerge as

politically and economically dominant landlords (Cox, 1990). According to the Nepal Living Standards Survey of 2010-11, only 74 percent of the agriculture households own land, around 53 percent of these households hold less than 0.5 hectares of land, and 32 percent of households operate some land rented-in from others (CBS, 2011). Some scholars assert that the concentration of land in the hands of a few elites or the so-called landlords has negatively affected the landless, poor and indigenous people (Adhikari & Bjorndal, 2014; Adhikari, 2006; Stein & Suykens, 2014). It is one of the reasons that land ownership continues to remain a major source of political, economic and social tensions in Nepal (Bhandari & Linghorn, 2012). An example of this is visible in the disputes at the courts where more than 60 percent of disputes are either directly or indirectly related to lands (Sharma et al., 2014).

7.2.2 Enclosure of forests

The enclosures of commons are not uncommon in the case of forests. Initially, local people were openly accessing and relying on forests for sustaining livelihoods. In the pre- as well as post-unification period, the rulers intensified the enclosure of forests by capturing the forest lands for resource extraction and agriculture, that too, in the interest of their closer allies (Malla, 2001). The enclosure of forests was intensified further in the period of the Rana dynasty (1846-1951).

The Rana rulers reduced the Shah monarch to figurehead by capturing all the political power. The Ranas not only enclosed forests to trade timber with the British India Company, but also enabled a few elites and their families

to capture the forest lands in different forms such as Jagir and Birta (Regmi, 1999). Jagir, which was also practiced in India until its independence from the British colonisation in 1947, was promoted to provide lands to government officials in appreciation of their service to the Rana governments. Birta was a form of land grant for rewarding the priests, religious teachers, soldiers and other closer allies of the Rana family

(Adhikari, 2011).

The enclosure of lands promoted under the Rana regime is well-understood in how Malla (2001) describes the trend of land grabbing by the elites and the Ranas:

“By 1950, one-third of the country's agricultural and forest lands had been granted to private individuals, and of that some three-fourths belonged to the Ranas…A significant proportion of the peasant farmers and their families were eventually forced to work as bondage labor (slaves) in the houses of local government functionaries and large birta owners.”

Following the demise of the Rana dynasty in 1951, the first democratic government abolished the Birta system. The same government then

nationalised the forests in 1957 through the Private Forests Nationalization Act. A major objective was to recover the forests from the private control of the feudal elites. In 1961, when the Shah king regained the political power and sacked the democratic government, all the forests were brought under the administration of the state (Guthman, 1997; Malla, 2001). Until the 1980s, the state largely controlled the use of forests, but failed to control forest degradation. The control of forests by the state also made local lives more difficult by restricting people’s ability to use locally-available forest resources (Fisher, 1995).

Such outcomes under the state-controlled forest regime created the need to think of innovative approaches for forest conservation, use and

management. It led some forest officials to collaborate with the Nepal Australian Forestry Project to involve local forest users in forest

management. Such involvement of local forest users has now been well- structured in the famous national movement of “community forestry”.

Initially, as a new form of collaborative management of forests for empowering local people to exercise use and management rights, community forestry received regulatory space in the Master Plan of the Forestry Sector in 1988. Following the restoration of democracy in 1990, the new government enacted the Forest Act, 1993 and implemented the Forest Regulations, 1995. Both of these strongly favour the creation and expansion of community forests that were/are part of the state-managed national forests (Acharya, 2002; Graner, 1997).

In Nepal’s community forestry, local people are not the “owners” of forests, but play the role of “proprietors” for forest management. Community forest user groups are given only the use and management rights to benefit from forest products and to contribute to conservation and sustainable use of community forests. As proprietors, they use the forest products, buy and sell such products in markets, and manage forest use with their collective choice rules (Agrawal & Ostrom, 2001).

Community forests, with the involvement of 2.24 million households and more than 18,000 community forest user groups, manage over 1.7 million hectares of forests. This represents over 30 percent of the country’s total forest area with a strong potential to expand as many new user groups are being formed for community forest management in different parts of the country. Different cases of community forestry in Nepal have been studied. A number of scholars have provided evidence of local people’s self-

governing capacity to manage forests in an effective way, though there are wide variations in the degree of such success, for instance, between those in the hills and the Terai (low land) (Gautam et al., 2004; Malla, 2000;

Nightingale, 2002; Pokharel & Suvedi, 2007; Varughese & Ostrom, 2001).

7.2.3 Enclosure of irrigation systems

As in the case of lands and forests, the trends of enclosures are also visible in Nepal’s irrigation systems. Historically, Nepal’s irrigation systems evolved and developed either through a religious trust, or individual initiatives and community efforts. This meant that even before the

unification of Nepal, irrigation activities – water acquisition from the source to the delivery to the field – were locally controlled and managed by

farmers based on local rules and norms set for collective action (Pradhan, 1990).

While thousands of such farmer-managed irrigation systems are still operational, since the 1950s, the government has also promoted the agency- managed (government-managed) irrigation systems in some regions of Nepal (Ostrom & Gardner, 1993). Donors such as the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank and CARE are a few major supporters of such government-managed irrigation systems. Comparing their performance and impacts, a series of studies have shown that on an average, farmer-managed irrigation systems have performed better than agency-managed irrigation systems on multiple dimensions, including the physical condition of the irrigation systems (Gautam et al., 1992; Lam, 1999; Ostrom, 2014; Ostrom et al., 1999).