Techno-bureaucratic Doxa and Challenges for Deliberative Governance: The Case of Community Forestry Policy and Practice in Nepal

Abstract

Despite repeated pleas for participatory and deliberative governance of environmental resources, there is still a predominance of technocratic values in environmental decision-making. This is especially true in the context of forest management in the Global South where centralised and technically-oriented colonial approaches of the past continue to be reproduced and exclude affected people to have their say and share in forest related decision-making and benefit distribution. Taking a case study from Nepal's Community Forestry Program, this paper shows that despite major shifts towards practices of participatory forestry, the technocratic domination of forest science in governance has taken new and more subtle forms (considered “doxa” – taken for granted forms – after Bourdieu) of control over forestry practices. In this paper, techno-bureaucratic doxa is problematised as a key challenge to deliberative governance, and specific ways are illustrated through which it constrains deliberation in forest governance. Emerging moments of crisis in this doxa are also identified to explore possibilities for greater citizen-public official deliberation in forest governance.

The use and usefulness of inventory-based management planning to forest management: Evidence from community forestry in Nepal

“…Concerns have been raised that inventory-based management serves to strengthen the control of forest administrations, rather than facilitating participation by forest-adjacent communities (Ojha, 2002;Hull et al, 2010). This is linked to evidence that a lack of resources to implement inventories and elaborate or update management plans have led to decade long delays in devolution processes (Scheba and Mustalahti, in this issue) and to large backlogs or expired management plans (Ojha, 2002(Ojha, , 2006Rutt et al, in this issue). Further, the technical framing of forest management implied in inventory-based planning has been observed to lend itself to elite capture in forest-adjacent communities, as people who are educated or have received training in the management procedures use their superior knowledge to garner authority (Nightingale, 2005;Green and Lund, in this issue).…”

De jure versus de facto institutions: trust, information, and collective efforts to manage the invasive mile-a-minute weed (Mikania micrantha)

“…Despite this prior work in Nepal (Varughese and Ostrom 2001;Poteete and Ostrom 2004;Ojha 2006;Ojha et al 2009), little is known about how different governance relationships between community forestry groups may mediate socialecological challenges like invasive species management (Epanchin-Niell et al 2009) or what this means for how institutional analysis may be most effectively conducted (i.e. studying the on the ground situation versus the formal situation).…”

Social capital, conflict, and adaptive collaborative governance: exploring the dialectic

“…This is in line with the FAO's (2006:17) noting that community forestry could be equally referred to as "committee forestry." The CFUGs' conservation-orientation was reflective of the alliance between the techno-bureaucracy and CFUG elite (Malla 2001, Nightingale 2005, Ojha 2006). This phenomenon of domination is not limited to community forestry, but poses a risk in community development more broadly (Fritzen 2007).…”