Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

ABSTRACT

Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post-conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community-based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.

INTRODUCTION

This article seeks to contribute to a theory of power and authority that explains why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable than others and, in light of that, the extent to which radical/contentious politics can reformulate authority. The authors draw on two key theoretical foundations, namely Bourdieu's (1977) ideas of symbolic violence and the cultural codes (doxa) that underpin and legitimize authority, and Butler's (1997) conceptualization of subjectivity and power. This somewhat unusual synthesis stems from the desire to build a truly collaborative vision of social change. Through their joint knowledge of forestry in Nepal and their respective conceptual foundations the authors show how a partial commitment to structure, through Bourdieu's cultural codes/doxa,¹ combined with a post-structuralist understanding of power, can illuminate how and why particular forms of social inequality and authority are more likely to endure than others.

In this article, we investigate the social conditions required to contest established authority, and the possibilities for fostering such conditions in contentious political contexts like Nepal. By examining these issues in the forestry sector, we show how the conflict/post-conflict environment triggers politics where antecedent forms of authority are simultaneously challenged and reinforced. We demonstrate that a more nuanced understanding of power and authority needs to complement institutionalist and rule-driven formulations (Agrawal, 2007; Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001; Ostrom et al., 1999). Such an understanding reflects complex trajectories involving the symbolic as well as the material, local practice as well as the wider discourses of legitimation, compliance and contention.

The current transition in Nepal's political system began in 1990 with the People's Revolution (Janandolan) and accelerated after the end of the Maoist People's War and overthrow of the monarchy in 2006. It has remained in turmoil since the formation of a Federal Democratic Republic in 2007. The conflict period (1996–2006) animated the political agency of people across Nepal with profound implications for state processes (Gellner and Hachhethu, 2008; Hutt, 2004; Thapa, 2004). What is focused on here is the manner in which and the types of institutions through which the central state and donors sought to engage in the forestry sector (see also Sturgeon, 2004; Vandekerckhove, 2009). Such ‘institutional choice’ (Ribot et al., 2008) significantly structured local autonomy and centralized authority. We frame such structuring and authorizing in terms of three deeply held cultural codes — the feudalistic, techno-bureaucratic and developmentalist — that have remained pervasive in the governance of forests in Nepal's southern plains (Terai). These three cultural codes continue to shape who controls what aspects of forestry despite both populist rhetoric of devolving forest management to local communities, and social movements for federal restructuring of the state. We argue that authority in natural resource governance rests with the immanent forms of symbolic violence and the subjectivities involved in the politics of contention.

Following Sikor and Lund (2009) and others, we conceive of ‘authority’ as a relation that requires continual renewal; any given authority or authorizing practices will be legitimate to certain actors. Drawing on Bourdieu and Butler, we see that authority emerges from contestations over legitimacy, and those contestations occur through subjection at the level of unconsciousness and through naturalized performances. In other words, a village headman or a nation state continually reinforce their authority through everyday practices and the underlying cultural codes related to caste, class, gender and development. But this does not mean such authority remains uncontested. Even when widely considered legitimate, there will be some people and institutions who will question this authority (Nuijten and Lorenzo, 2009; Vandekerckhove and Suykens, 2008). Such situations raise three interesting questions: a) what are the processes of authorization?; b) why are some forms more acceptable to certain groups than others?; and c) what produces recognition of what we refer to as ‘authoritative institutional forms’ that are able to exercise authority over significant numbers of people? (Peluso, 2009; Ribot, 2009; Roth, 2009).

In the next section more background information is provided on forestry in Nepal. Our analysis is then framed in relation to other work on authority, the state and development to show how authority is enacted within a complex institutional context in Nepal. Next, we discuss why linking Bourdieu's understanding of symbolic violence with feminist conceptualizations of subjectivity is a productive lens through which to develop a theorization of power and authority. Turning our attention to the forestry sector in Nepal, we discuss three cultural codes that underpin much of the symbolic violence evident and we explore how they have been operating within the Nepalese political context. Through this analysis, we arrive at a theory of power and authority that explains how what are perceived to be ‘institutional failures’ are in fact a reproduction of authoritative institutional forms which are sustained by deeply held cultural codes embedded within the domains of bureaucracy, development and patronage politics.

NEPAL'S TERAI FORESTRY AND CONTENTIOUS POLITICS

The Terai, colloquially referred to as madesh, is a flat sub-tropical plain along Nepal's southern border that directly supports the livelihoods of about half of the country's people. It contains the nation's most productive agricultural land, it has relatively large blocks of high value Sal hardwood forests (Brown, 1998), and it is the habitat of endangered wildlife such as tigers, rhinos and crocodiles. Despite its cultural and ecological importance, the Terai is under-studied (Lal, 2002) and, until recently, its value as a region and the influence of its residents on national governance has been limited. The resulting sense of marginalization by Terai residents has caused numerous protests, blockades and violence since 2007 as groups have galvanized politically (Dahal, 2008). These movements are driven by demands for political recognition of a Mahadesi identity, demands which often mask gender, ethnicity and caste differences, but which are certainly linked to issues of resource access and governance.

Nepal is considered a global success story for its community forestry (CF) programme which began in the early 1980s and was widely promoted after 1990 in Middle Hills areas. The programme in many respects placed forestry at centre stage for the contestation and promotion of ‘democracy’ as people began to oppose established authority through the programme. Notwithstanding a number of internal issues of power and authority, including gender, caste, ethnicity and class (Khadka, 2010; Neupane, 2003; Nightingale, 2002; Paudel, 1999; Rai-Paudyal, 2008), CF has been largely successful in promoting forest conservation and support for rural livelihoods across large parts of Nepal (Gilmour and Fisher, 1991; Ojha et al., 2008).

In the Terai, however, the programme has become embroiled in a complex, multi-scalar politics of recognition and authority, calling into question conventional explanations of natural resource management conflicts that are presumed to be based on tenure and material incentives (cf. Larson et al., 2010). After 1990, multiple interest groups emerged to claim their rights to the country's vast and productive Terai forest, raising significant questions over what ‘community-based forestry management’ means. Community forestry became politicized and alternative models of community participation were designed — namely Collaborative Forest Management (CFM) — that offered an alternative symbolic space to Terai-based political leaders. As a result, the conflict over resources occurred at multiple scales, from within local communities to national level political party politics. These conflicts have yet to lead to any workable reformulation of power and authority; there has not been any change in the conventional regimes of authority surrounding forests. As a result, a state of chaos and disorder continues, primarily driven by timber and land mafias, but also political unrest, including the mobilization of deprived people — all of which has led to large-scale deforestation in places. In order to understand how ordinary people could come to feel threatened by a programme (CF) that hands over management and all rights to forest resources to them, and prefer to place their support behind CFM, which gives them less control and fewer resources, we need to explore how forestry becomes embroiled in contests for authority.

ENACTING AUTHORITY

To better theorize how authority emerges from contentious politics, we turn to recent work in the social sciences that has sought to deconstruct the state and other institutions with authority. It is no longer a question of understanding what ‘the state’ does, but rather by which individual, department or unit and through which discursive and material means state power is asserted and legitimated (and resisted) (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Hansen and Stepputat, 2001; Lund, 2007; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). Underpinning our analysis is the understanding of the state as ‘the quality of an institution being able to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on members of society’ (Lund, 2006a: 676). The state is not clearly distinct from civil society and thus it requires us to investigate the production of ‘institutional forms as well as the processes that bring about the idea of the state’ (ibid.). Yet in this field of research, how and why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains under-theorized.

In the context of Nepal, a particular blurring between ‘the state’ and ‘civil society’ occurs in government sponsored forestry institutions such as District Forest Offices, as well as state/donor sponsored programmes that are predicated upon civic associations, like Community and Collaborative forestry. They are blurred because of the ways all parties engage in forestry management, but also because of the ideas they draw upon to claim the right to govern (see also Lund, 2009; Nightingale, 2005; Nuijten and Lorenzo, 2009; Ribot, 2009; Sivaramakrishnan, 2000). As we explore how key institutions engage in forestry governance in Nepal, we see more clearly how cultural codes of legitimacy produce authority and the ways they intersect with subjectivity to shape the emergence of (authoritative) institutions.

Our analysis is further built on the ontological presupposition that ‘global’ discourses of development and conservation intersect with antecedent conceptions and institutions in the forestry sector (Escobar, 1995; Peet and Watts, 2004). Such intersections subject people in a variety of different ways, producing subjectivities including ‘developed person’, ‘caste or indigenous’ groups, ‘village-user’ and ‘forestry official’. Here we are using ‘subjectivity’ as the process through which people come to be disciplined by and identified with certain discourses and practices (Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1995).² Subjectivities are a key foundation of social inequalities as it is through subjectivities that societies come to be differentiated and often hierarchical (Foucault, 1995). They arise within an historical-cultural context that we argue is vital to how and why these particular subjectivities come to be important.

SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY

Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, which constitutes a key element of his well-known ‘theory of practice’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 1998), begins by delineating tentative social fields such as sports, music, education, politics and media. The field is not a level space, however, nor is it a neatly demarcated arena impervious to the influences of other social fields. It is structured and differentiated through access to different forms of capital³— that is all the resources valued in the field by the various groups of social agents active in it. Symbolic violence refers to a situation in which more powerful actors enjoy unchallenged privileges in accessing resources and power through which they dominate social interactions. Social agents occupying both dominant and dominated positions in the field accept the existing order and practices as being ‘natural’— an idea which also resonates with notions of subjectivity as elaborated below.

Each field of practice contains an array of assumptions on values/risks/uncertainties that are available to social agents. These tacitly held assumptions are part of what Bourdieu calls a ‘doxa’, which we refer to as cultural codes (Bourdieu, 1998). Cultural codes comprise principles and values embedded in a social field that serve two key functions: first, they limit the space of inquiry to a manageable level to make decisions; and second, they provide legitimacy to authoritative relationships. While useful in organizing social practices and interactions, cultural codes are also a potential breeding ground for symbolic violence by those rich in different types of capital. Such individuals are able to deflect challenges from competing values by repressing their expression in decision-making contexts. In other words, people can draw on cultural codes, both consciously and unconsciously, to exercise power over others, leading to certain forms of authority and power relations. Bourdieu's notion of human agency therefore assumes significant degrees of internal structuring, having a dialectical interface with wider social structures. When an actor's cultural codes mismatch the field, a crisis occurs through which the actor is likely to become more self-conscious and reflective about what s/he does in practice, bringing the cultural codes into view. Bourdieu argued this was a precondition for social transformation.

In feminist and post-structuralist theory, power and agency are conceptualized somewhat differently (Allen, 1999; Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1990, 1995). Importantly, the subject is understood as the effect of power, and subjectivities such as caste, ethnicity, race and gender are produced out of practice (‘performance’, in Butler's words) as well as symbolic domains (Allen, 1999; Butler, 1997). Subjects are both the product of external influences — the subjection of the state or other institutions, for example — and the internalization of this subjection by the subject itself. In other words, the subject must at some level take up the subject position assigned to them (Butler, 1997; Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). Power does not necessarily imply ‘power over’. Rather, the subject is produced out of the multi-dimensional aspects of power. It is power that produces the subject, and power gives the subject the ability to act (Butler, 1997; Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). The subject, however, is not merely a passive recipient of power, rather the subject emerges out of the exercise of power in contradictory and multifaceted ways (Butler, 1997). In each interaction, there is the possibility for power to be enacted as ‘power over’ and ‘empowerment’simultaneously, in addition to more blurry movements of power that can be best visualized as lateral or diagonal (Nightingale, 2011). In Nepal, caste offers an excellent example of this. People of ‘lower castes’ (often unconsciously) accept and participate in their own subjection every time they avoid entering a space considered off limits to them as well as when they claim to resist their caste status (Nightingale, 2011; Rankin, 2004).

Power is thus always already present in all social interactions and is the means through which subjects can act. When we bring these ideas into conversation with Bourdieu's ideas of cultural codes, we can understand how symbolic violence creates, sustains and legitimates particular power relations in everyday practices. Here, we are conscious that Bourdieu's ideas are predicated on a structuralist understanding of society whereas feminist theories of subjectivity are post-structuralist, emphasizing how discursive forms are dependent on practice. Yet, we suggest that such distinctions are less clear cut than some like to argue (Sheppard, 2008). By recognizing that subject performances operate within symbolic fields that are ‘structural’ in the sense that they are rooted in history and unconscious assumptions of ‘how the world is’, we are able to better explain why certain forms of authority are more durable than others. Authority, then, arises from the mobilization of particular cultural codes and the performance of particular subjectivities. Which codes and subjectivities are invoked is not ‘accidental’ or random, but rather rooted in the field of practice. Relating this understanding back to our concerns with institutions and contentious politics, we understand them to be always already infused with power. It is through contentious politics that power is enacted among different groups; power allows them to be transformative, rather than evidence that social change cannot occur.

To recapitulate, our conceptualization links together an understanding of the exercise of power, derived from feminist theory, with the ways radically transformative spaces are produced out of crisis and the multi-lateral exercise of power. We retain a partial commitment to structure — cultural codes — whilst embracing a post-structuralist understanding of the importance of everyday practices and performances in the (re)production of those codes and forms of inequality. As such, we are able to explore both how some forms of authority become entrenched and the conditions under which far-reaching shifts can occur. In other words, we argue that the (re)production of authority occurs through the performance of subjectivities in relation to certain authoritative forms; forms that are rooted in underlying cultural codes. To be more specific, in Nepal's Terai forestry, we find that Community Forestry, Collaborative Forestry Management, the District Forest Offices (DFO) and advocacy NGOs like the national Federation of Community Forest Users Nepal (FECOFUN), are all institutions that are able to claim authority by mobilizing particular understandings of the state, particular subjectivities, as well as other forms of power that are widely considered legitimate. These other forms of power derive from antecedents that are particular to the Nepal case such as gender, caste, ethnicity, political affiliation, but have resonances with other places as well (Chhatre, 2007; Lund, 2006b; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999; Vandekerckhove and Suykens, 2008). We now turn to a brief account of three cultural codes that emerge from a historical analysis, drawing on secondary sources and our long-term experience in the forestry sector in Nepal (over eighteen years each) to articulate them.

FORESTRY AND AUTHORITY

‘Nepal's Wealth is her Green Forests’⁴

The history of forest governance in Nepal is dominated by the strategic interests of ruling feudal elites and forest technocrats; until recently, there was limited scope for civil society to participate in the formulation of policies. Yet because of the importance of forest products to any attempts at accumulation, whether in the agricultural sector or through semi-legal commercial forestry endeavours, and their communal nature, forestry matters are able to mobilize people in ways that many other issues cannot (Ojha and Timsina, 2008).

In our view, three cultural codes or doxa can be identified in the forestry field, which can be described as ‘feudalistic’, ‘techno-bureaucratic’ and ‘developmentalist’. While it is in some respects problematic to draw clear distinctions between them, we anchor them in discrete historical antecedents. In this section we begin to provide a historical basis for how authority emerges by briefly outlining the origins of and elaborating upon these codes.

Feudalistic Cultural Code or Doxa

Historically, forests were central to the Rana and Shaha governments’ strategies to maintain sovereignty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ruling elites awarded large tracts of land to military leaders and other aristocrats to ensure their loyalty (Regmi, 1978). While the tenure arrangements were varied and complex, all allowed some form of taxation and control over natural resources by feudal landlords, in effect disfranchising villagers from their resources. The old feudal terms luhar (servant) and bista (master), referring to bonded labour arrangements, or mukhiya (headman) reflect subjectivities that arose during that time. Until the Private Forest Nationalization Act was enforced in 1957, all forests were technically controlled by state-sponsored local functionaries (Bhattarai et al., 2002; Mahat et al., 1987).

Forests were thus institutionally embedded within (and significantly productive of) a hierarchical and highly feudalistic society, cut through with caste, ethnicity and gender inequalities. The feudal system was characterized by patron–client relationships wherein peasants had to provide labour and grain to landlords in exchange for rights to tenure and share cropping arrangements (Bista, 1991). This system thus entrenched exceedingly unequal social relations. However, landlords had obligations towards their luhar, and people could call on these obligations to receive food or money at certain times of year. These arrangements did not serve to unsettle the hierarchical nature of authority — rather, we suggest it helped cement it — but nevertheless illustrates some of the complex workings of power.

In this feudalistic mode, authority is claimed on the basis of rights and is firmly grounded in entrenched subjectivities (Dahal, 2008; Ojha et al., 2007). In present day Nepal, the feudalistic mind-set remains strong even as a number of recent processes — the conflict most notable among them — have significantly challenged these hierarchies (Gellner and Hachhethu, 2008; Hutt, 2004). As a result, there is still a sense that one needs to have ‘source-force’⁵ or one's ‘own’ people (aphno maanche) in strategic positions within various institutions in order to have influence (Bista, 1991; Kumar, 2008). While these ideas persist, the cultural codes of the social field cannot be brought into conscious view and transformed through contentious politics. Therefore in the forestry sector, we argue that different groups of people have come to see different institutions as beneficial to them (or not) on the basis of this feudalistic cultural code.

The Techno-bureaucratic Codes

During the Rana period in the early part of the twentieth century, ‘modern’ (Latour, 1993) technocratic ideas of forest management began to infiltrate down to localities through the land grant process. By ‘techno-bureaucratic’ we mean a system of forestry that is predicated on scientific management and controlled through a bureaucratic planning structure (Bhattarai et al., 2002; Khadka, 2010; Scott, 1998). Two features of this approach are important: the valorization of ‘professional’ expertise in knowing how to manage trees properly (creating the subject ‘forester’) (Khadka, 2010; Nightingale, 2005), and the homogenization of forests into stands of trees as opposed to diverse ecosystems. It is possible, of course, to retain a technocratic approach and shift the emphasis towards ecosystem management (indeed, such schemes are highly technocratic), but in Nepal, technical forestry continues to be dominated by ideas of forest (timber) management. Evidence of such techno-bureaucratic thinking can be found in the types of management practices that are considered ‘necessary’ for a good Community Forestry Operational plan, for example.⁶

Centralized and technically oriented colonial approaches continue to be reproduced and dominate policies and day to day practices of forest management in the global South more generally (Peluso, 2009; Sarin, 2005; Sivaramakrishnan, 2000). As a result of such a culturally embedded techno-bureaucratic approach to forest governance, the institutions that have authority over forestry management need to be fluent in these cultural codes. Of course, which institutions have authority is in part derived from those codes and ‘professional’ subjectivities.

We see this clearly in Nepal's forestry history. The Ranas, presumably influenced by European trends, began to propound ideas of technical forestry as early as 1918 by issuing written guidelines on forest management (Nightingale, 2010). But the technocratic symbolic code in forestry really took full force in the 1950s with the establishment of the Department of Forests and the appointment of technical forestry experts to run it (Khadka, 2010). It is in this era that the forestry profession, schooled in colonial and professional practices of forestry, was transplanted to the bureaucracy and a series of laws were enacted to enforce national control over forests (Bhattarai et al., 2002). Although it was assumed that state control of what were previously private (or village) forests would enhance people's access to resources, by instituting stringent regulations to exclude people from controlling forest resources the state effectively created a strong techno-bureaucratic field (Malla, 2001; Ojha, 2008). In this regime, we see authority produced through an idealized notion of the state, one that is based on notions of expertise and creating a subject, ‘villagers’, from whom the forest needs protection.

Developmentalist Codes

International concern over an impending environmental crisis in the 1970s (Eckholm, 1975) led to an environmental turn in development away from an emphasis on infrastructure (Cameron, 1995) to environmental conservation and community participation (Ives and Messerli, 1989; Thompson and Warburton, 1985). Nepal's environmental condition and strategic geopolitical location attracted multilateral donors (Guthman, 1997),⁷ who took forestry and environment as the central elements of integrated conservation and development projects. This led to participatory forestry practices (Hobley, 1996; Malla, 2001), catalysing a substantial shift in how the state approached forestry and opening up more space for local-scale actors.

‘Developmentalist’ is therefore used to capture the environmentalist/conservationist codes that have permeated the forestry sector and helped to cement the importance of ‘expertise’ in management. Here, the importance of management plans, training and record keeping as well as decentralization became the norm (Berry, 2009; Nightingale, 2005; Ojha 2006), along with subjectivities based on ideas of ‘awareness’, ‘education’ and their opposite, ‘backwardness’ (Leve, 2007; Pigg, 1996; Rankin, 2001).

Nepal was at the forefront of a global trend. Community-based forest management has evolved as a key strategy of conservation as well as to promote local livelihoods globally, especially in developing countries (Arnold, 1998; Chhatre, 2008; Colfer and Capistrano, 2005). Decentralization of forest management has been advocated across the developing world and, increasingly, in Europe and the USA (Agrawal, 2001; Colfer and Capistrano, 2005; Ribot, 2003; Taylor and Zisheng, 1998). One of the assumptions behind this strategy is that local communities, when legally empowered to take control of forest resources, can develop local-level institutions to organize sustainable use of forest resources (Poteete and Ostrom, 2004). Yet it remains unclear whether these efforts can unsettle the persistence of the taken-for-granted hegemony of ‘forestry science’ in management institutions. Such a technocratic emphasis tends to hide the politics inherent in policy making and local-level forest management (Berry, 2009; Nightingale, 2005; Peluso, 2009), and hence minimize the opportunities for radical and participatory policy processes that can unsettle entrenched authoritative institutional forms.

COMMUNITY FORESTRY VS COLLABORATIVE FORESTRY MANAGEMENT IN THE TERAI

To further illustrate how processes of symbolic violence, subjection and the kinds of authorities they produce play out, we use the example of recent forestry conflicts in the Terai. Here we draw on ethnographic observations made during numerous field visits conducted between 2004 and 2011, par-ticipant observation during regional and national forestry meetings, interview materials, and the eighteen years of professional experience working in the forestry sector by Ojha. We also use Nightingale's ethnographic and qualitative research conducted in the Middle Hills as a comparative counterpoint. The Terai has been a particularly contentious site for community-oriented forestry programmes for three key reasons: the value of the timber, the complexity of forestry tenure rights, and the embroiling of forestry into the recent contentious politics of ethnic and cultural recognition.

We illustrate how these processes have been playing out by exploring the conflict between community forestry (CF) and collaborative forest management (CFM). We focus in particular on some of the political and ethnic conflicts in which two subjectivities emerge as important: madeshi indigenous groups (which are splintered within themselves, but these splits have so far not manifested as significant in terms of forestry governance) versus pahade (hill) immigrants (Conway et al., 2000; Dahal, 2008; Muller-Boker, 1999). Questions of gender and caste are relevant here, but an in-depth discussion of these elements of subjectivity falls beyond the scope of this article. This is partly because dominant contestations in the Terai are presently framed around ethnicity and geographical origins, but also because they have been extensively discussed elsewhere.⁸

Valuable Forests and Community-based Management

The valuable hardwood Sal forests of the Terai have been a vital source of income and wealth for contractors, government forestry employees and, increasingly, village headmen or user-group chairpersons (usually male). About one-third of forests here are still officially government-managed and about one-fifth have been afforded protected area status, reflecting the influence of a western environmentalist discourse. Such discourses coincide with the vested interest of local feudalistic and techno-bureaucratic actors in central control over natural resources. Community forestry first emerged in the Terai in the mid-1990s and over 1,000 community forestry user groups (CFUGs) have been formed (Kanel and Kandel, 2004) in contrast to the over 15,000 groups in the Middle Hills (Khadka, 2010). The slow progress of implementing community-based forest management in the Terai is certainly linked to the high value of the forests.

Yet community forestry in the Terai has achieved some successes largely due to the struggles of locally-based forest users supported by NGOs. These CFUGs mainly consist of new hill migrants and often include civil society activists linked to FECOFUN who act together to claim their rights. In an earlier study, we found that CFUGs in the Terai consider themselves more independent than those in the hills because they were patronized less by forest officials, and had to struggle for their rights (Ojha et al., 2002). By-passing patronage politics in this sector is no small feat. As a local community leader told us in 2011, ‘forests in the Terai will be conserved only when the DFO [District Forest Office] is dismantled’ (paraphrased) so the community itself can work for forest protection and management.

Here we see clearly the way different forms of authority compete and collude with one another at the local level through processes that are very much infused with power. Village leaders sought to network with national NGOs (FECOFUN being the prime one), allowing them to exercise power laterally to contest the DFO's authority in the forestry sector. They avoided the kind of hierarchical relationships that go with bribing forest department officials for access to resources. Instead, they (re)produced new subjectivities — village mobilizers and responsible citizens — which allowed them to claim the right to community forestry and gain donor support (many donors give training and other input to CF user groups). Importantly, because this process was so fraught, their subjectivities were reworked and a radical transformative politics played out. FECOFUN itself is a product of CF, and its symbolic space is legitimated through its defence of the boundaries of CF against any other forms of government forestry (Ojha, 2009). Both ‘CF user’ and ‘FECOFUN member’ have thus become potent new political subjectivities. We have seen other, less transformative outcomes in the hills where user groups did not struggle for their rights in the same way and instead feudalistic relationships became entrenched (Nightingale, 2005, 2006).

Perhaps because of these successes, the government's 2000 Terai Forest Policy terminated the community forestry programme (GON/MFSC, 2003) on two grounds. First, Terai forests are not only the property of local communities, but also of the nation and the public at large due to the spatially discontiguous claims to Terai forests (and their high value). Second, the forest needs to be preserved for its protective function on conservation grounds. Collaborative Forest Management (CFM), which resembles India's Joint Forest Management (Agrawal and Ostrom, 2001), was instituted. This gave the state more control over management, and crucially, 75 per cent of all revenues, in sharp contrast to CF which allows user groups to keep and control all revenue (Brampton et al., 2007).

The national state, specifically the Ministry of Forests as well as the more locally based District Forest Officers, thus fought against the wave of devolution of forest rights to communities, mobilizing both technocratic and developmentalist cultural codes to do so. They employed a narrow and literal interpretation of community forestry legislation in order to curtail the spaces within which it can be implemented. Building upon their achievements with CFM, government officials have recently mobilized developmentalist narratives to insist on more government control across the forestry sector as a whole. An order of the parliament declared: ‘the forest act [should be changed] so that the forest officials and users both will be responsible when collecting forest products because the forest has deteriorated when forest management (complex responsibility) was provided to illiterate users’ (see also Sunam et al., 2010).

Yet such moves have been counterproductive in many places and, indeed, we would argue that the motivations are not in fact about forest conservation. As one chairman of a proposed community forest in the Terai said:

I spent fifteen years of my life protecting our forest hoping that our community will get a community forest. I am not sure how many more years we have to wait for the registration of the CF. I was actually wedged between the pressures from the DFO and the local community. Later when the programme of CFM came, my community stopped protecting the forest and I also resigned from the ad hoc committee. After that, trees are being cut not at night but in broad daylight. The forestry staff are also indifferent to deforestation.

CFM and moves to give DFO staff more control over forest management appear to be about consolidating authority (and access to forestry revenue) rather than conservation (Peluso, 2011). More recently, a trend of ‘consensus’ among all power holders has emerged which can be found in the obvious collusion in some of the worst cases of timber smuggling in the Terai among local civil society leaders, forest officials, business groups and politicians (PCNR, 2011).

Whose Forests are These? Spatial Discontinuities in Tenure Rights

The fact that usufruct and historical tenure rights to Terai forests are not necessarily spatially contiguous and have been complicated by large-scale migration of people from the Middle Hills to the Terai over the past fifty years (Shrestha, 1990) has been put to strategic use. A key basis of setting up community forestry in the hills was the presence of traditional local institutions for forest management. In the Terai, however, people who live next to the forest do not necessarily have the oldest or most valid claim to manage it. This ambiguity, as well as tensions over madeshi versus pahade, have been mobilized in recent contestations. What is surprising here is that radical politics animated by notions of justice and inclusion has itself become of a site of symbolic violence. Elites in these new movements have emerged, claiming authority to appropriate resources in order to sustain the patronage and loyalties of the groups they represent.

CFM pilot projects were implemented after 2000 in three Districts with financial and expert support from donors and the government (Brampton et al., 2007). The institutional choice by donors to back the CFM programme was crucial here. Forest officials and development agencies were able to create villagers loyal to themselves and to CFM at the pilot sites. The symbolic violence was such that even the groups that initially demanded the establishment of forests as CF (where CFUGs have the right to use all forest products) were later said to prefer CFM (which provides only 25 per cent of the benefits, and the management of which is driven by forest officials). A new NGO, ACOFUN, has been established to lobby on behalf of CFM groups and has advanced its programme as one that represents the interests of Mahadesi people.

Kathmandu-based community forestry NGOs, particularly FECOFUN, fought the CFM policy unsuccessfully, believing it to be a dangerous new direction in participatory development (Brampton et al., 2007; Shrestha, 2001). Yet, FECOFUN failed to adequately ‘represent’ people in the Terai largely because of its organizational composition which is dominated by high caste (mainly men) from the hills (padahes), and its failure to adequately cultivate alliances and networks with Terai groups. The evolution of FECOFUN was such that identity became a mechanism of exclusion, making it difficult for ‘others’ to own it. Mahadesi groups thus embraced CFM — which gives them substantially reduced benefits compared to CF — in order to assert their subjectivities and authority on the basis of cultural recognition. We argue that one of the reasons FECOFUN was unsuccessful was its failure to exercise power laterally and assert subjectivities that moved outside the ‘government official–village user’ binary. FECOFUN sought to engage, but within a dominant/dominated framework, and was thus unable to open out the debate sufficiently to gain the oppositional power needed for transformation of hegemonic cultural codes. Despite massive mobilization of communities in the hills, CF became a context within which the exchanges of funds, interests and investment in the institution helped to cement particular kinds of authoritative forms.

We can understand this complex reworking of authoritative institutional forms by seeing how those who are economically and symbolically excluded from CF because of their distance from the forest were keen to acquire some space in forest control. They saw CFM as an opportunistic political space despite the limited forestry entitlements. What is particularly interesting for us is that, rather than trying to modify CF provisions and actively support excluded southern people in developing measures that would accommodate them, forest officials devised an alternative programme — CFM — which secured state bureaucrat power (GON/MFSC, 2003). It is a programme that reflects power politics as usual: feudalistic rights claimed by the state and legitimated through technocratic justifications. Recent moves to implement REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) have again provided fodder for protectionist arguments. As one official said at a February 2011 Round Table on forestry policy, ‘due to the burning issues of PES [payments for ecosystem services] and REDD in the forestry sector, natural resources belong to multi-stakeholders rather than the local communities only’ (paraphrased from notes). Here the ‘institutional choice’ by donors (CFM) — collaborating with the state and some Terai groups — was vital for the state to be able to institute the CFM programme. We now have similar concerns over donor pressures around REDD+.

Contentious Politics and Forestry Management

In the past three years a new twist has developed in Terai forestry politics as entrenched systems of patronage have been transplanted into the radical politics of the Maoists and Mahadesis. In the present unstable political situation forest officials are seeing new advantages to CF versus CFM. DFOs are promoting community forests in collusion with the ‘iron triangle’— forest officials, community leaders and forest traders (see Peluso, 2011 for an Indonesian comparison). People who need forest land, timber or fuel wood for their subsistence have to engage with any or all of the three groups either in the form of chakari (a cultural practice of sycophancy) or bribery, unless they have an aphno maanche (a connection to powerful people) through which they can mobilize ‘source-force’.

As one civil society leader remarked at the February 2011 Round Table, ‘[recently] seven forests have been returned [to the government], we asked users why. They answered that there was corruption in coordination with the DFO’. Here, the DFO is claiming a new kind of authority, one based on engagement in the ‘iron triangle’ and justified through the techno-bureaucratic mechanisms of CF. The discussion at the meeting went on to elaborate policy challenges that are endemic to the unstable political situation, creating a state of chaos and competing authorities on the ground, in part caused by competition for political power by the main political parties and separatist movements in the Terai. As a result, older forms of authority are being questioned and denied, but without the creation of new authorities that can sustain functioning institutions.

Community forestry presidents and executive members are increasingly drawn into these ‘iron triangle’ relationships. Recent fieldwork revealed that timber mafias sponsor Operational Plans and Constitutions of local community forestry user groups, ensuring they are more quickly approved by the DFO (Banjade et al., 2011). In Morang, we found DFOs inviting local elites to form community forest user groups on paper (only) and issuing timber harvest permits through the community forestry Operational Plan to those in their patronage network. Thus even aphno maanche relationships are progressively commoditized beyond social connectivity, as evidenced in the recent timber smuggling cases in the Terai (Paudel et al., 2006).

Increasingly, violence is used to cement such transactions (International Crisis Group, 2010). In one Village Development Committee of Rautahat district, we observed cultivation of maize in newly cleared forest areas. We were ordered not to take photos, under threat of being shot. We found other cases where the executive committee of proposed CFUGs (with forest management plans not yet approved) do not want to complete the process of approving the plan and giving over rights to the communities. Without formal approval, elite members have more discretionary space to exercise authority and to appropriate resources, often done in the name of political affiliations. An important insight, therefore, is that environmental degradation (such as forest clearance in this case) is sustained by a structure of authority, grounded in a deep cultural-political system, rather than an open-access or free-rider problem, where there is a lack of coordination or rules.

In CFM, then, we see very clearly the ways in which contentious (multi-scalar) politics has the potential to both undermine entrenched hierarchies and to (re)produce them. The state drew from feudalistic and technocratic cultural codes to create a new institution of forest governance (CFM) that fit better within its own authoritative framework, and allowed state actors at a variety of levels to establish clearer authority over community-based groups. They benefit personally from the bribes they can receive, but also from the reinforcement of their subjectivity as hakim (boss/overlord). Community forestry NGOs, particularly FECOFUN, have attempted to retain a voice in the process through continuing to demand that CF be implemented in the Terai (Ojha, 2009). This has had limited effect due to the subjectivities around cultural recognition that serve to associate FECOFUN with the hills — subjectivities and issues of inclusion that FECOFUN has not deemed important to address due to their own embedding within historical feudalistic and developmentalist codes. Finally, villagers and activists in the so-called indigenous communities of the southern Terai saw CFM as an opportunity for them to have a voice in forest management and to regain access to and control over forest resources that were governed by different kinds of institutional arrangements more beneficial to them, that existed prior to large-scale settlement from the Hills.

Certainly, political space was expanded in the Terai as various actors sought to promote their interests in the CF versus CFM debate, yet the actors drew on entrenched authoritative forms and subjectivities to do so. They exercised power laterally to effectively claim more space for themselves in the forestry debate, even if it resulted in diminished material access to forests (compared to CF). In a highly contradictory move, Terai indigenous people aligned themselves with the technocratic state on the basis of their subjectivity as ‘other’, to claim authority for themselves, separate from FECOFUN. In that sense, they were both able to move laterally within the social field and gain greater voice and authority, but also set themselves firmly under the authority of the state.

CONCLUSION

The case of Nepal's Terai forest politics, especially over the past decade of conflict and transition, clearly demonstrates a situation of both change and retrenchment of power relations and authority. By using Bourdieu's lens of symbolic violence and post-structural notions of subjectivity, we are able to examine the contentious politics around claims to material and symbolic resources in the field of forestry, and problematize the ways through which authority is legitimated and de-legitimated. We demonstrate that, despite policy reforms emphasizing participation and devolution of power to local communities, authority in Nepal's forests is primarily asserted through the techno-bureaucratic codes nurtured within state agencies — the Ministry of Forests and District Forest Offices. This has been reinforced by feudalistic codes, which are further entrenched despite the intensified politics for autonomy and self-governance in the post-conflict period, as well as by the developmentalist codes that reinforce formal and apolitical subjectivities, providing limited space for actors to understand and question the reproduction of power relations and hegemonic authority. Participatory policy reforms have themselves been the strategic instruments of power for forest elites. At times this has taken the policy debates towards quite regressive politics, including the creation of cleavages among local communities (such as the debate between CF and CFM) which otherwise could have collectively resisted various cultural codes legitimating top-down control of forestry.

Nonetheless, the national political movements of 1990 and 2006 have contributed to bringing into view the taken-for-granted cultural codes — and the corresponding structure of authority — that have dominated forestry politics in Nepal. The analysis here has shown the value of recognizing the cultural codes that shape processes of subjection and also how they become dominant. On the one hand, as people agitate for their rights, refusing to corroborate the kinds of authority claimed by the state, they are transforming their subjectivities. Space is opened for more radical practices as seen in some of the success stories of community forestry. But due to the underlying cultural codes, these moves have had little impact on changing power relations and authoritative institutional forms. On the other hand, older forms of authority are (re)entrenched and the importance of speaking the languages of development and conservation is reaffirmed once again.

We conclude with the observation that the political agency of local citizens is being capitalized on by elites in the movements promoting community rights, cultural identity and resource sharing from forests. Here, we see the strategic interests of donors, NGOs and government leaders defining the agenda, language and operational procedures of forestry practices. As a result, local, forest-dependent poor people are subjected by hegemonic codes in new ways that advance the interests of leaders, rather than their own agenda and expectations. In many cases, villagers are choosing a regime that may not in fact serve their interests, but they see it as aligned with who they are (aphno maanche) (the feudalistic codes reinvented) and therefore support it. Our case study has demonstrated these contradictions between contentious politics and the reproduction of hegemonic institutional forms. It helps to explain why some actors seek alliances and support programmes that may not promote their material interests, but do allow them to gain a greater stake in particular authoritative institutions. Conceptually, our study contributes to a theoretical framework for understanding how power and authority operate in practice. Through a partial commitment to structure — cultural codes — brought together with a post-structuralist understanding of how processes of subjection help (re)produce those codes and forms of inequality, we are able to illuminate how some forms of authority become entrenched. Authority and ‘authoritative institutional forms’ emerge out of the processes of subjection that are grounded in particular cultural frames.

We suggest there is a need to understand how contentious politics can lead to fundamental social change. In doing so, it is essential to attend carefully to the cultural codes that dominant actors mobilize, to seek opportunities to bring them into view, and to tread cautiously when mobilizing subjectivities — even those that appear to be radical and emancipatory — to enact political change. It is crucial to conceptualize spaces and processes within which marginalized actors can deliberate their choices in such a way that cultural codes and subjectivities are continuously and consciously queried and challenged with the goal of creating more equitable and truly transformative social fields.

Footnotes

• 1

  Throughout this article we use ‘cultural codes’ and ‘doxa’ as synonyms. Bourdieu's term was ‘doxa’ but for audiences unfamiliar with his work, we believe ‘cultural codes’ is a more accessible term. Given that this article is aimed at a wide development and academic audience, we have erred on the side of intelligibility.

• 2

  Subjectivity is often conflated with identity, but we distinguish between a conception of the subject and the identities people embrace and enact. The subject is constituted by power, and often refers to the discursive ways in which people become subjects of states or other types of authority (Allen, 2002; Butler, 1997; Foucault, 1991). It is also used to understand the operation of power in society more generally (Gibson, 2001; Mahoney and Yngvesson, 1992). Feminist theorists often refer to the ways in which people are ‘hailed’ or subjected by subjectivities such as gender, race and caste which, while they may resist, they find very difficult to escape (Bondi and Davidson, 2003).

• 3

  Bourdieu identified four different forms of capital: cultural, social, economic and symbolic. Note that Bourdieu's idea of social capital is very different to the idea of ‘social capital’ that has gained currency within development practice (Adger, 2003; Putnam, 2001; Woolcock and Narayan, 2000). For a good critique of this more recent use see Fine (2001).

• 4

  Slogan enunciated during the Panchayat system of governance in the period 1957–1990, under the direct control of Nepal's monarchy.

• 5

  ‘Source-force’ refers to the ability to mobilize relationships with ‘powerful people’ to gain access to political processes, rights or resources (Bista, 1991; Kumar, 2008).

• 6

  Community forestry user groups develop an ‘Operational Plan’ in consultation with the District Forest Office in order to take over management of their forest.

• 7

  Initially the World Bank and FAO were the key donors, then a group of bilateral and international actors influenced the national government towards devolution of forest governance.

• 8

  See Kharel (1993); Khadka (2010); Neupane (2003); Nightingale (2005, 2006, 2011); Sharma (2005); Paudel (1999); Rai-Paudyal (2008); Timsina and Paudel (2002).