Reframing Governance : Understanding Deliberative Politics in Nepals Terai Forestry

Contents Foreword. Glossary of Nepali words. 1. Introduction. 2. Understanding governance through the languages of Bourdieu and Habermas. 3. Researching governance using reflexive social science. 4. Doxa deliberation and symbolic distinction in Nepal. 5. Genesis of forest policies and local regimes of forest governance. 6. Forest governance practices in Nepal's Terai. 7. Practices of forest governance in a case study village in Nepal's Terai. 8. Symbolic violence crisis and deliberation in Terai Forest governance. Conclusion. References. Appendices. Index. The book develops a fresh approach to understanding governance using key concepts of Pierre Bourdieu (symbolic violence doxa field and habitus) and Jurgen Habermas (deliberative politics). Taking a case study of forest governance in Nepal Terai the book analyses Habermas's ideal of deliberative governance from the perspective of Bourdieu's theory of practice. The case study shows that despite growing rhetoric of participatory and decentralized governance of forestry in Nepal the actual practices of forest governance in Nepal Terai are controlled by dominant actors (mainly techno bureaucratic and feudal political agents) with limited deliberative spaces actually available to or proactively claimed by the disadvantaged groups of people dependent on forests. The book demonstrates how rhetoric of participation and inclusion is actually a part of symbolic instrument of domination and reproduction of preexisting power relations. The analysis shifts the usual emphasis on conscious will and rational behaviour of individual human agents as the key elements for understanding governance to an approach that interrogates the often overlooked symbolic structures of governance that systematically disadvantage some and privilege others. Thus the book proposes that the analysis of governance and politics should be expanded to include the processes of domination and hegemony in the symbolic domain including language and processes of deliberation through which power relations are reproduced in a society. 328 pp.…