Project Leader: Dr Dil Khatri
Project Partners and Collaborators: NITI foundation
Duration: January to September 2019
Project Description:
Nepal is in the stage of institutionalization of federalism and it requires restructuring of institutions and revising regulatory instruments. Ministry of Forests and Environment (MOFE) of Nepal has also been workign to revise existing policies. Nepal’s history of forest policy processes is often evaluated for not adequately being consultative and deliberative and critiques suggest that the reform happening in forestry sector has not provided adequate space for deliberation and citizen voices. This has raised concerns that both local level democratic practices and the established institutional mechanisms for local self-governance will be undermined. Recently, the government has passed the Forest Policy 2018 and tabled Forest Bill 2019, which stakeholders have criticized for failing to embrace the spirit of federalism and attempt to recentralize power and authority.
The current policy and law-making processes offer an unprecedented opportunity for setting up a precedence for how citizen voices and interest group preference can be legitimately articulated in policies and legal documents that define state-citizen relations. A central question across all sectors of governance is the extent to which these new policies and legislations are developed through deliberative engagement with citizens. Against this backdrop, the project rigorously assesses how seriously the government has taken critiques’ suggestion and stakeholders’ voices while designing the Forest Policy and the Forest Bill, which, indeed, pave future’s pathways of forest governance in federal Nepal. The main objective of this task is to offer substantive contribution to the on-going policy processes across different sectors by informing formal policy-making processes and mobilizing civic voices and alternative discourses. The specific objective of the task includes:
- To examine the process of formulation of Forestry Policy 2018 and Forest Bill of 2019 in light of deliberative quality and accommodation of citizen voices.
- To analyse the content of the forest policy and regulatory instruments, in particular, the proposed draft forest bill and use it to inform key policy actors.
- To deepen public debate on enhancing state-citizen deliberation in multi-level governance for effective policy processes.
Project Team
Dr. Mani Ram Banjade
