Hemant Ojha

University of Canberra · School of Social Sciences

In this final chapter, we synthesise key lessons learnt from practical experiences addressing climate risks to water security across the Asia Pacific. While concerns for climate change impacts are clearly growing, policy responses must further embrace the multi-sectoral and cross-scalar nature of risks to water security. In the various socioecologi...

This chapter introduces the scope, the approach and focus of the book, which aims to deepen our understanding of how various sub-regions and localities in the Asia-Pacific region are facing the intensifying impact of climate change. This chapter clarifies our interdisciplinary and practice-oriented approach to understanding and tackling questions a...

Nepal’s community forestry is touted as a development success, especially in relation to how local community groups can be empowered by the state to conserve and manage communal forest areas for local livelihoods improvements. However, this success is limited in relation to the production and supply of conventional forest products or a narrow range...

This chapter provides an overview of 23 chapters included in the book. The book aims to present recent knowledge on issues and topics related to agriculture, livestock, and forestry systems across the three agroecological regions of Nepal. Chapters in the book are grouped into four themes: (a) Agriculture, horticulture, and post-harvest management;...

Understanding Loss and Damage ahead of COP27. We are pleased to share IFSD - Institute for Study and Development Worldwide's new Policy Insight paper on #lossanddamage titled "Loss and Damage from Climate Change: Building Knowledge and Capacity in the Most Vulnerable Countries" produced in collaboration with International Centre for Climate Chang...

Nepal's community forestry is well studied and widely acknowledged, but its experience of Community Forestry Enterprises (CFEs) as a form of community entrepreneurship has not been part of a robust scholarly debate. While CFEs are considered a means to enhance community livelihoods and reduce poverty, a growing body of literature suggests that it i...

Achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is increasingly challenging due to widening inequality in access to scientific and technological knowledge and resources. With science remaining too discipline based, and policymakers too often science averse, there is a need for greater understanding of the opportunities and challenges of...

Nepal’s transition to federalism in 2015 involved a significant redistribution of authority across three levels of government, with a greater level of autonomy granted to provincial and local levels. We examine multi-scale climate policy and politics in Nepal, focusing on three elements that are important for policy development and implementation:...

A growing body of research analyses institutional dimensions of adaptation and disaster risk management at the local level, highlighting the positive role of local institutions. However, the question of when institutions could also limit adaptation is much less explored. Drawing on the case of a landslide in the Nepal Himalayas, this paper advances...

Over the past decade, widespread concern has emerged over how environmental governance can be transformed to avoid impending catastrophes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and livelihood insecurity. A variety of approaches have emerged, focusing on either politics, technological breakthrough, social movements, or macro-economic processes a...

en Nepal's urban regions are facing increasing levels of water insecurity under a changing climate. The country has a long history of water policy development while climate-related policies are also emerging at different levels of the new federal republic. It is unclear whether public policy is on the right track to ensure urban water security in t...

en Gender-based inequality has long been recognized as a challenge in water governance and urban development. Women do most of the water collection-related tasks in the majority of low-income country's urban areas, as they do in rural areas for drinking, household consumption, kitchen gardening, and farming. However, their voice is rarely heard in...

Numerous scientific reports have established that the water future of humanity and the entire earth system is at risk. Solving contested water problems require new ways of harnessing dialogues, reflections, empathy, research, and visions. Too often, water policies and practices tend to take shortcuts, missing out on the benefits these powerful soci...

This paper critically reviews the outcomes of internationally-funded interventions aimed at climate change adaptation and vulnerability reduction. It highlights how some interventions inadvertently reinforce, redistribute or create new sources of vulnerability. Four mechanisms drive these maladaptive outcomes: (i) shallow understanding of the vulne...

Studies of sustainability transitions and transformational change are common in energy and transport sectors. However, there is limited research on how these transformational change processes play out in the natural resources sector, particularly in developing economies. This paper seeks to address this gap, with a case study of the community fores...

Anthropogenic climate change is creating numerous challenges for rapidly urbanising countries. Foremost among these challenges is securing potable water for the urban population, while at times, mitigating flood risks. This article presents research on urban water issues in the rapidly growing city of Dhulikhel in Nepal within a global purview of c...

The objective of this study was to understand the impacts of COVID-19 crisis in agriculture and food systems in Nepal and assess the effectiveness of measures to deal with this crisis. The study draws policy implications, especially for farming systems resilience and the achievement of SDGs 1 and 2. The findings are based on (i) three panel discuss...

The rapidly urbanizing and highly populated South Asian region is facing a water crisis. As a key response, large centralized water systems are being put in place, replacing small and community-based systems. In this discussion note, we present the case of Nepal's town of Bidur to show that Himalayan South Asian towns cannot ensure water supply by...

The Himalayan region is facing a new crisis under climate change, rapid economic transformation, and escalating geopolitical tensions. A large body of Himalayan sciences has endeavored to understand this challenge but has failed to engage meaningfully with the local people and policymakers. I argue for a new engaged Himalayan sustainability science...

Policy Perspectives Water and Development in South Asia

In recent years, growing water insecurity in the Himalayan region has attracted new scientific research and fresh attention on policy. In this paper, we synthesize field research evidence from a sample of five Himalayan cities—three in Nepal and two in the western Indian Himalayas—on various forms of water insecurity and cities’ responses to such c...

This commentary paper examines our local expert engagement methodology that we developed to understand water supply issues as well as to inform the direction of our action research conducted in Dhulikhel, a small town in Nepal. Through three years of field-based research at Dhulikhel, our inquiry uncovered a range of data ‘gaps’ and emergent as wel...

We consider water security as a vision which can be achieved through the means of inclusive water governance. This perspective is strongly rooted in a social and environmental justice perspective which uncovers the multiple relational ties through which diverse and differently powerful actors interact among themselves and with the environment. The...

We reflect on methodologies to support integrated river basin planning for the Ayeyarwady Basin in Myanmar, and the Kamala Basin in Nepal, to which we contributed from 2017 to 2019. The principles of Integrated Water Resources Management have been promoted across states and regions with markedly different biophysical and political economic conditio...

Whether and how science can improve public policy is a highly contested topic in both the scholarly domains and the world of policy and practice. The research community often finds itself frustrated over the continued neglect of research evidence by policy makers. At the same time, policy makers see researchers as addressing their own questions of...

This paper traces the logic, goals and changed socio-ecological relations and water norms introduced by donor- and state- led drinking water supply schemes to small urbanising settlements across the lower Himalayas of India and Nepal. While urban development and water planning tend to boundarise needs and interventions to city limits and city- dwel...

Examining the boundaries of state–society–citizen–environment after the federal restructuring in Nepal, we ask how do people claim authority or citizenship rights? We theorise state power through the socio-environmental state framework as a set of socio-natural relations in the making, formed by struggles over authority, recognition and environment...

After the introduction of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, existing development institutions are being assessed for their roles in achieving SDGs. In this context, we aim to assess how and to what extent Nepal’s community forestry (CF) is contributing to achieve the SDGs. Using an institutional interaction perspective, we conducted pol...

Despite broad scientific consensus on climate change, public views may not always correspond with scientific findings. Understanding public perceptions of climate change is thus crucial to both identifying problems and delivering solutions. Investigations of climate change that integrate instrumental records and people’s perceptions in the Himalaya...

Achieving water security is one of the major global challenges in the age of climate change, urbanization, rapid population increase, and weak water institutions. Despite the proliferation of water institutions and policies at national and local levels, the slow response to address water scarcity remains a puzzle in Nepal. This study investigated t...

As climate policies incentivise forest carbon enhancement, forest ecosystems have been reduced to carbon forestry. As a result, the potential of forests for both the natural world and human beings is being severely compromised. Co-benefits to ecosystems and communities have often been presented as a solution but without much effect. In this paper,...

The governance of environmental resources holds the key to the future of sustainable development in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH). 1. Institutional innovation—for landscape level governance, upstream-downstream linkages, and for translating policy goals into action; 2. Upscaling and institutionalizing decentralized and community based resource mana...

This paper analyses prospects for ecosystem-based adaptation, through examining diverse forest-people interactions in Nepal’s community forestry as a social-ecological system (SES). We examine the linkage between social-ecological resilience and societal adaptation in the Middle Hills of Nepal, and based on this, discuss the prospects of this syste...

Nepal has experienced recent changes in two crucial climatic variables: temperature and precipitation. Therefore, climate-induced water security concerns have now become more pronounced in Nepal as changes in temperature and precipitation have already altered some hydrological processes such as the river runoff in some river systems. However, the l...

Conflicts over natural resources are likely to escalate under changing socio-economic contexts and climate change. This paper tests the effectiveness of what we term Adaptive Learning and Deliberation (ALD) in understanding and addressing conflicts over the local management of forests and water, drawing on experimental work in Nepal. Based on a thr...

Many policies on disaster governance and community resilience aim at enhancing justice outcomes at the local community level. In so doing, they tend to focus on equal distribution of a set of rights and goods among the communities. However, these rights and goods are defined by an underlying value structure, and such structures tend to mirror the i...

p>This paper explains what we term the ‘silvo-institutional model’ for a more productive, sustainable and equitable management of community forests in Nepal. The paper draws on four years of action research in six research sites of Kavre and Lamjung districts, complemented by the review of silviculture-based forest management by Government of Nepal...

At a time when many developing countries are preparing to implement REDD+, there is debate on the possible implications for existing community forestry (CF) governance. Drawing on a REDD+ pilot undertaken in Nepal, this paper seeks to investigate how REDD+ has been downscaled into the community forestry context and with what implications for CF gov...

Questions of state formation and public authority have been at the top of the development and political agenda in Nepal since 2006. The post-2006 so-called ‘political transition’ has been characterized by rising ethnic tensions, violence, strikes, and a bewildering kaleidoscope of leaders gaining political leverage, only to be marginalized again. I...

Why should a parcel of agricultural land be abandoned when there is a scarcity of food? In this paper, we address this question in relation to the hills of Nepal, where agricultural land is being abandoned at an unprecedented rate, despite looming food scarcity. Responding to studies that have highlighted land abandonment trends, we conducted in-de...

There is an increasing recognition of the contribution of forests to food security of poor and marginalized people. However, empirical findings remain limited on how forests contribute to food security. Drawing on four case studies of community forestry in Nepal, this paper discusses pathways through which forests are contributing to food security...

This Policy Brief investigates and elaborates on the following three key points: 1) Planning of community forestry (CF) and local governments (LG), currently in silo, should be integrated for food security, livelihoods and sustainable development. 2) Lack of institutional mandate, comparmentalized thinking, reluctance in resource sharing, and the a...

This paper demonstrates that a new crisis has emerged in the Himalayas in recent years, as five decades of well-intentioned policy responses failed to tackle escalating environment and development challenges. It then suggests some practical pathways for achieving what we term transformative resilience in the region. Our analysis draws on a critical...

While impacts of climate change on agricultural systems have been widely researched, there is still limited understanding of what agricultural innovations have evolved over time in response to both climatic and non-climatic drivers. Although there has been some progress in formulating national adaptation policies and strategic planning in different...

This paper demonstrates that a new crisis has emerged in the Himalayas in recent years, as five decades of well-intentioned policy responses failed to tackle escalating environment and development challenges. It then suggests some practical pathways for achieving what we term transformative resilience in the region. Our analysis draws on a critical...

The Nepal government has in the past made several attempts to manage its forests through employing silviculture based interventions. However, most of these initiatives were either not implemented at all, or when implemented, failed to achieve stated objectives mainly because of weak political will, low institutional capacity and poor governance. Cu...

Since the publication of Elinor Ostrom’s seminal work on common property institutions and natural resources management (NRM) in the early 1990s, there have been considerable advances in theoretical and policy debates relating to community-based NRM. While community institutions continue to remain a strong element, the recent shifts in scholarly deb...

This paper explores the social roots of rural communities' vulnerability to climate change, based on a field study conducted from 2012 to 2015 in the Panchkhal region of the Kavre district in the middle hills of Nepal. Drawing upon Bourdieu's concept ‘field of practice’, we identify three themes that are helpful to generate insights into the way vu...

The growing challenge of food insecurity in the Global South has called for new research on the contribution of forests to food security. However, even progressive forest management institutions such as Nepal's community forestry programme have failed to address this issue. We analyse Nepal's community forestry programme and find that forest polici...

The problem of food insecurity is growing, triggering global debates on the gap in understanding alternative ways of accessing foods, including those from forestlands. This paper aims to address this gap by demonstrating a variety of ways in which forests carry the potential to contribute to food security, drawing on the case study of community bas...

Many have pointed to the important role of local governments and other sub-national institutions in climate change adaptation. Yet little is known about the way such institutions are responding to climate change, and how they interact with the central state and local communities in practice. This report brings together key findings from a collabora...

Across both the developing and developed worlds, community engagement has become a key strategy for natural resource management. However, a growing number of studies report that community-based approaches are experiencing formidable challenges, with limited outcomes in terms of livelihoods, decentralization and sustainability. Yet, policies continu...

This article examines Nepal's recently prepared Forestry Sector Strategy (FSS) (as of 2014) in terms of the use of scientific evidence and the quality of stakeholder participation. By reviewing the content and analyzing the context of its development during 2012–2014, we found that the transitional politics and overt influence of international deve...

This chapter outlines a Critical Action Research (CAR) approach to enhance the interplay between research and social movement practices. The authors argue that such interplay is crucial to improve the quality of democratic policy process. Such interplay has the potential to address some of the concerns related to the continued lack of effective del...

As developing countries around the world formulate policies to address climate change, concerns remain as to whether the voices of those most exposed to climate risk are represented in those policies. Developing countries face significant challenges for contextualizing global-scale scientific research into national political dynamics and downscalin...

Based on the review of relevant literature, this paper investigates how forest authority is produced or reproduced in the course of forest policy change, by drawing on the past four decades of participatory forest policy reform in Nepal. We analyze various waves of deliberative politics that emerged in different contexts related to the Himalayan cr...

In the context of this chapter, drivers are considered to be natural or anthropogenic developments affecting forests and tree-based systems for food security and nutrition. They can improve and contribute to food security and nutrition, but they can also lead to food insecurity and malnutrition. For analytical purposes, drivers are separated here i...