Protected Areas, People and Tourism: Political Ecology of Conservation in Nepal

Abstract

While Protected Area based Tourism (PAT) has become a global phenomenon, its social, economic and environmental implications are also widening. Almost half of the entire tourists coming to Nepal visit protected areas (PAs). The country has embraced this as an opportunity for conservation, poverty reduction and economic development. However, only limited groups, often outsiders or elites, are reported to reap benefits of PAT whilst poor and marginalized groups struggle for both rights and benefits. Further, the distribution of tourist as well as the revenue generated is not even across different PAs. Policy and legal ambience are partly muddled with numerous approaches for resource management. However, recent ‘paradigm shift’ in the management and governance of PAs offers optimism to address social, economic and environmental anomalies. In the pretext of limited rigorous site specific studies and complexities to measure trade-offs between problems and gains, this article stresses on transformation in PA governance so as to realize full and equitable sharing of benefits from PAT.

Factors Associated with Conservation Participation by Local Communities in Gaurishankar Conservation Area Project, Nepal

“…Prior to the establishment of GCAP, there was an active community forestry program. Although the community forestry programs claim lack of benefits for the poor and marginalized residents [26,31,53,54], fulfilment of basic needs of forest products (e.g., fuelwood and fodder) is considered as one of its strengths [76]. Thus, skepticism with regards to the implementation of GCAP and its expected outcomes (e.g., more focus on conservation rather than on livelihoods) may have played a crucial role for non-participation, especially among residents with high dependency on natural resources.…”

“…Direct benefits, such as financial assistance, income generation, and fuelwood/fodder supply received by HH from conservation areas are related to their participation in conservation programs [16,21,31]. However, benefits have not necessarily been accrued by the poor and socially disadvantaged as distributions have largely been controlled by affluent HH and those from a higher societal class of caste/ethnicity [26,31,[53][54][55]. In this context, caste refers to a form of social class in Hinduism characterized by endogamy and hereditary transmission of occupation, status in a hierarchy, customary social interaction, and exclusion [56,57].…”

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

“…Driven by the rationales of democratization and justice (McCarthy, 2005) and the logic that local knowledge and participation would generate more efficiency, inclusion, and accountability (Ribot et al, 2006), decentralization entailed the transfer of powers to the lowest level of governance (Larson & Soto, 2008) often through community participation in a multi-stakeholder process (Bixler et al, 2015; Ojha et al, 2014). In Nepal, this post-1980s global trend toward decentralization was driven by local resistance to antecedent top-down projects that were often coercive, international funding practices, local resource conflicts, and later the Maoist movement (Nightingale, 2018; Ojha et al, 2014; Paudel et al, 2007). This “participatory wave” (Ojha et al, 2014: 5) took several geographically specific forms.…”

“…The subsequent Buffer Zone Management Regulations (BZMR) of 1996 and the Buffer Zone Management Guidelines of 1999 outlined the formation of a three-tiered structure to govern the collection and redistribution of revenues from areas adjacent to then-existing park boundaries. These new institutions include the Buffer Zone User Groups (UGs) at the household level, Buffer Zone User Committees (UCs) at the Village Development Committee (now Rural Municipality) level and an umbrella Buffer Zone Development Council (BZDC) at the national park level (Heinen and Mehta, 2000; Paudel et al, 2007). In addition to the decentralization of resource management, the point of departure of these regulations from earlier conservation policies was the provision to redistribute 30–50% of the total revenues collected by the park for community development projects.…”

“…Indeed, dominant conservation narratives in Nepal celebrate participatory conservation as “progressive” (Heinen and Shrestha, 2006), asserting that its “socio-economic benefits outweigh the costs” (Bajracharya et al, 2006: 2765). However, critical scholarship on the region has shown that participatory conservation bureaucratizes village political process and recentralizes state power (Campbell, 2004; Dongol and Neumann, 2021; Heinen and Mehta, 2000; Ojha et al, 2014; Ribot et al, 2006), marginalizes Indigenous peoples, their knowledges, management practices, and lived ecologies (Campbell, 2004, 2005b; Stevens, 1997, 2013; Thing, 2019), reinforces unequal power relations in deciding the terms and outcomes of participation (Campbell, 2004: 163), and reproduces social hierarchies and intersectional inequalities (Nightingale and Ojha, 2013; Paudel, 2006; Paudel et al, 2007).…”