Self -mediated interactions among community forestry actors in Nepal: A political ecology of the UK's Livelihoods and Forestry Programme.

This dissertation uses a Political Ecology framework to examine bilateral aid in community forest management. Its findings develop Political Ecology as a theoretical framework by focusing on how organizational actors at multiple scales affect local relationships and events, and by incorporating insights from Actor-Network Theory to develop the concept of self-mediation. Self-mediation is the process of implicit compromise and unstated negotiation within an Actor-Network towards goal congruence. The livelihoods potential of community forestry is constrained by local power disparities, which are reinforced by the way community forestry is managed by Nepal's Department of Forests. Nepal forest policy and practice are in turn supported and reinforced by the assistance provided by bilateral donor projects. Thus, donor projects such as the United Kingdom's Livelihoods and Forestry Programme actually enable Nepal government forest policies and practices that implicitly maintain, or possibly even deepen, local power disparities. The Livelihoods and Forestry Programme sees itself as a change-agent working to improve rural livelihoods in Nepal. However, the program continues to provide financial and technical support to the forest bureaucracy even when the it makes restrictive policy and despite its implicit endorsement of local power disparities. This suggests that organizational actors are influenced and shaped by their institutional environment, the contours of which produce a certain momentum carried into interorganizational relationships and Actor-Networks. This momentum influences the trajectory of the Actor-Network, and thus constrains what each actor and the Actor-Network as a whole can and cannot do. The finding that bilateral aid reinforces existing social relations and simultaneously promotes and undermines improvements in sustainable livelihoods is not entirely new. However, the theoretical explanation that this paradox occurs through self-mediation is novel. Self-mediation can be characterized as the filtered flow of intention. Each actor within a network has its own set of goals or its own particular intention. In the process of developing a goal or an intention at the Actor-Network level, actor interactions effectively filter individual and collective intentions to eliminate what is not feasible at the Actor-Network level. Their impact is mediated by the actions and interactions of the community forestry Actor-Network itself.Ph.D.Biological SciencesForestrySocial SciencesSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124581/2/3150108.pd