Governing caterpillar fungus: Participatory conservation as state-making, territorialization, and dispossession in Dolpo, Nepal

Abstract

Protected areas account for nearly a quarter of the total area of Nepal and over eighty percent of its Himalayan region. National parks—which are governed by top-down policies enforced through militarized infrastructures—have become a crucial avenue and site for the Nepali state to expand its authority and territorialize its peripheral spaces. But such state-forming effects of the park are obscured by the stated goals of biodiversity conservation which are often implemented through participatory conservation policies that claim to promote local participation and development. Through a case study of Shey Phoksundo National Park and the contested governance of caterpillar fungus in Dolpo, Northwest Nepal, this paper examines the role of participatory conservation in state-making, territorialization, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Himalayan borderlands. After a brief background on the relationship between Dolpopa and the Nepali state, I introduce state-making, territorialization, and dispossession as corollary processes that define the experiences of conservation for Dolpopa. I conceptualize state-making and territorialization as intertwined state efforts and strategies to systematize local spatial practices and reorder socio-natural relations in ways that justify state authority and establish state territory in Dolpopa spaces. I approach dispossession as an ongoing, relational process of domination and removal, particularly of Dolpopa's ability to access and govern their collective land including caterpillar fungus. In so doing, I neither reify the state as a monolith nor assume dispossession to be totalizing. Rather, I show how “the state” is constituted in moments by a range of actors, institutions, and processes; as well as how Dolpopa contest dispossession by asserting their claims to collective land both within and beyond state structures.

The making of a conservation frontier: Nation‐building, green productivism, and environmentalism in Patagonia

“…In practice, however, co‐management is often less symmetrical or equitable than the term might suggest. Within the conservation frontier, participatory approaches should be critically interpreted for how they may potentially further state territorial projects and rural dispossession (Gurung, 2022). Even as multiple forms of knowledge and authority come together in conservation management, claims to national sovereignty continue to shape the political and economic significance of the frontier.…”