Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Doing it right

(published in The Kathmandu Post, Aug 3, 2011, Wednesday)


After 100 years of counting Nepalis, this year 2011, is a good time for some outside the box thinking on population and development. This essay is an attempt to broaden the discourse to yield effective solutions. Nepal’s population is expected to increase nearly six times, from five to 28.5 million. Our population in the next 100 years will depend on the rate of our fertility decline, expected to step up, resulting in the slowing of our population growth rate.

Contrary to the current Malthusian doom of our population growth rate exceeding food production rate, will our population problem recede in the future? Or, will the population numbers and rate outpace our national aspirations for a better life?

India and China, destitute like Nepal 60 years ago, now chug along happily.  The Human Development Index, a composite of Wealth, Health and Literacy, suggests that we made 100 per cent improvements over a few decades, despite widespread disparity across space, time, class, gender, castes and reservations over its methodology and assumptions. One such reservation is the non inclusion of the environment. It is important to think about whether we are better off now, in terms of environment, than we were 30 years ago. Indeed, the World Bank concluded in 2007 that the environmental costs of progress were 3.5 per cent of the GDP in higher health costs alone, and 50 per cent of the national economy remains linked to natural resources.

How do we protect the environment and reduce poverty? “Integrate pro-poor climate and environmental concerns for sustainable development,” prescribes the Poverty-Environment Initiative (PEI) of the National Planning Commission, 2010. But we have heard this before.

Conflict over the environment and development is an emerging issue driven, perhaps, by an increased scarcity of environmental resources. Some academics even trace the country-scale, red rebellion of the Maoists to the green roots of environmental degradation. Widespread conflicts over natural resources from forests, land and water have spread to the urban environment. A satisfactory means of environmental conflict resolution does not exist. Even the Supreme Court directions to the Government bodies to adhere to environmental laws are routinely ignored.

Is sustainable development a solution to this conflict? Nay, this is a theoretical oxymoron since the unlimited growth credo of development cannot live with the ecology of limits, enshrined in the meaning of sustainability. In which case, one must question how the state can arbitrate sustainable development.  No longer is the state accepted as a secular conduit of development or environmental change. The state, as part of the problem, is now a productive, outside the box, thinking apparatus.

Nepal scholars have noted that the reach of the state has been variegated throughout its 250 year history. For instance, the state’s environmental programmes reveal a non-uniform effectiveness across space, time, class, ethnic groups and castes.  In 1989, I witnessed villagers practicing the traditional Mana-Pathi community management of forests in Kandebas ridgeline between Gulmi and Baglung districts although Nepal was theoretically under the uniform management of the Private Forest Nationalisation Act 1957. In the 1980s, political ecologists like Piers Blaikie documented the role of state as part of the problem in land management and development.. Political ecology matured into Liberation Ecology in the 2000s with the unceasing   de-essentialisation of the state as a contested domain of social and political movements on environmental livelihoods. This discourse anticipates the strident calls for decentralised autonomy in federal Nepal.

Another development is the contestation of power over material means of production such as land and labour expanding over non-material resources of knowledge and discourse. For instance, Jeevan Sharma in 2008 contrasted the dominant development discourse on male migration as a shameful activity with an alternate discourse of the same as a romantic, adventurous activity to be proud of.

Discourses have been a powerful means for negotiating environment and development in Nepal, beginning with Eckholm’s influential The Himalayan Environmental Degradation Theory of the seventies. What was portrayed as self-evident “truth”,  has since been debunked as weak science. This discourse blamed the poor for overpopulation while eliding the role of the state. Today, even neo-Malthusianshave conceded that global environmental change was due to a number of factors in addition to population, such as affluence, technology, institutions and culture.

An alternative to the often alarmist and pessimist neo-Malthusian discourse is a hopeful one on how people adapt to risky situations. Geographers at Clark University looked into Nepal as one of the nine Regions at Risk. Tracing trajectories of environmental change, well being, and wealth along concepts of environmental sensitivity and resilience, Nepal was determined to be “Impoverished to Endangered”, not as “Critical” as the Aral Sea which was on a trajectory of irreversible deterioration. There was some danger of irreversible environmental degradation in Nepal over the coming two generations but there were also hopes of wealth generating human well being and resources for environmental stewardship. This was in 1995.

Today, 15 years later, despite all our problems, community forestry has been greening the Nepal hills. Population growth rate is slowing.  The transformation to a more equitable society can expect to release more energy for nation building.

We are doing something right.



Tuladhar is a professor of Environmental Sciences