Community, social marginalisation and adaptation to climate change

© 2016 Dr. Prativa SapkotaClimate change has become a key challenge to sustainable development in the Nepal Himalayas, a region with some of the world’s poorest and most climate vulnerable communities. Adaptation to climate change is therefore an urgent task and there has been an upsurge in research and policy responses to enhance adaptive capacity of local communities. This includes community-based and ecosystem-based approaches to adaptation. Although the forests constitute an integral part of the livelihood system in Nepal and in the developing world generally, their role in supporting adaptive capacity has often been neglected in both scholarly research and policy. The interactions among institutions, marginalized groups and forests are also poorly recognized in contemporary adaptation studies. This study analyses the link between forests and people, taking the case of the community forestry system (CFS) in the Middle Hills of Nepal. In combining a social-ecological system perspective with the concepts of vulnerability and resilience, this study investigates the prospects for community forestry enhancing the adaptive capacity of marginalized groups. The study focuses on the Thuli Community Forestry User Group in Kavre district, a region that has experienced dynamic socio-economic and ecological conditions associated with increasing population, changing living conditions, infrastructure development, land degradation and climate change. The study uses a mix of social science and natural science tools to understand the socially constructed realities and analyse the attributes of forest conditions to establish possible causal relations between the community forestry system and the adaptive capacity of the forest dependent communities. In doing so this study analysed changes in forest condition, people’s dependence on forests, institutional dynamics, forest management practices and decision making systems. The findings suggest that existing community based institutions may potentially worsen the disparity between marginalized and elite groups and increase the vulnerability of the marginalised people, for three reasons. First, socio-economic heterogeneity tends to produce different interests and conflicting values and these cannot be addressed using a common set of rules for resource management and utilization. Second, regulatory mechanisms often obstruct autonomous responses by restricting use or access to resources. Third, genuine representation of marginalized groups in decision making is hampered by first, their limited knowledge of complex vulnerability conditions and second, their poor awareness of their capacity to change current conditions. Moreover, an institutional analysis of the CFUG indicated a need for deeper understanding of how vulnerability is constructed upon the historical socio-cultural practices that maintain the status quo in social and economic contexts. The community forestry system provides many potential sources of resilience that are useful for both reactive and anticipatory adaptation in both social and ecological aspects of the system. Increased species diversity, incorporation of native species and sustainable forest product extraction can improve ecological resilience. Translation of those ecological parameters into societal adaptation is possible through collective action, innovation and feedback mechanisms. Nevertheless, existing policies, socio-political and bureaucratic processes have hampered the potential of community forestry to increase adaptation of vulnerable communities. A key implication of this finding is that policy makers have the opportunity to consider the effects of community institutions not only on forest management, but also on various aspects of climatic change-induced vulnerability of marginalized groups. Forest managers could consider how forest management actions and consequent ecological processes enable or constrain the capacity of the poor and marginalized groups to cope with climate risks in specific localities. This thesis concludes by arguing that decision makers at the local community level must be more responsive to the needs of marginalized groups in relation to various climatic risks. However, inclusive adaptation can be achieved only through ensuring the meaningful participation of marginalized people in decision making. This requires a radically new approach to adaptation in the context of a highly heterogeneous society like Nepal where adaptive behaviours can result only from a transformation of existing power relations, movement away from knowledge based supremacy and reconfiguration of cultural economy of symbolic power. Societal complexity has been taken for granted in many aspects of climate adaptation and in other natural resource management policies and practices. Recognition of system complexity should be the first step towards adaptation policy prescriptions and their implementation. Failure to do so will result in the policy and practice that may instead increase vulnerability of some section of society.