Can Policy Learning be Catalyzed? Ban Chautari Experiment in Nepal's Forestry Sector

Abstract

:Over the past several years, technocratic approaches to forest policy have been challenged and more collaborative processes have been advocated. While these shifts have offered significant space for citizen engagement at local level -such as through community based forest management in Nepal's case -these have not taken roots at higher levels of policy making, especially at the level of formulating or revising legislations, or setting up a protected area. In this paper we critically review a collaborative experiment on catalyzing deliberative policy learning process in Nepal's forest sector. We examine how and to what extent such experimentation could overcome seven identified challenges to forest policy deliberation in Nepal. The experiment, which we named as Ban Chautari, involved three key strategies -conducting diagnostic research, empowering local communities to articulate their voices in deliberative forums, and then acting collaboratively across diverse institutional groups. Our examination of the Ban Chautari process focused around three research questions: a) How can policy learning be catalyzed?; b) How can actors with differentiated capacity and resources collaborate in the policy process?; and c) How can research processes be re-organized so as to contribute effectively to constantly shifting policy agendas and rapidly changing contexts? The experience of Ban Chautari has some good news to share with the wider public policy research community that conditions for collaborative policy learning is possible. And at the same time, it has generated evidence that warns the advocates of participatory and collaborative policy processes on the more subtle, and fundamental challenges that surround any attempts to foster collaborative learning.

Transforming environmental governance: critical action intellectuals and their praxis in the field

“…A coalition of CAI working across donor projects and civil society organisations (most prominently Kaji Shrestha) saw the need to support community forestry groups to come together as a federation so that they could have a collective voice against threats of centralisation. In parallel, politically engaged community leaders joined the community forestry movement across the country, and the Federation of Community Forestry User Groups-Nepal (FECOFUN) emerged in 1996 and quickly became the country’s largest civil society network and a key partner of CAI (Ojha et al 2012 ). Numerous government foresters embarked on post-graduate studies abroad and came back to the country, most undertaking research work on community-based forestry.…”

Speaking Power to “Post-Truth”: Critical Political Ecology and the New Authoritarianism

“…Some political ecologists have taken the notion of learning to another level by trying to translate it directly into policy arenas. For example, Ojha et al (2013) have experimented with policy labs in the forestry sector (earlier called Ban Chautari, but now used beyond the forestry sector to deal with climate and water issues) to generate critical thinking about environmental governance questions for which expertise is inadequate. Policy labs bring together political actors and sectoral specialists (i.e.…”

Pathways to forest wealth in Nepal

“…The EPLs facilitated engagement in policy dialogue, largely concerning community forestry, but also including policy on agroforestry and under-utilised land (UUL). EnLiFT Policy Labs were formulated by blending the work conducted at Harvard and Stanford Universities as 'Policy Labs' and the recent experiments in Nepal around Ban Chautari, Policy Discussion Forums, Nepal Policy Research Network and also drawing on the personal experience of various researchers over the past three decades in Nepal policy processes (Spilsbury & Nasi 2006;Van Den Hove 2007;Ojha et al 2012).…”