Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article explores how local civil servants produce the conditions of possibility for bureaucratic authority in Nepal's contested political environment of war and post-war 'transition'. Specifically, it examines the everyday practices of local civil servants as they attempt to influence the distribution of such public resources as agricultural inputs and local government budgets. The article asks: how do local civil servants produce the authority necessary to get things done in the face of changing local government structuresandrival authority claims frombothwartime Maoist People's Governments and resurgent patronage politics in the post-war period? In a context characterized as 'ordinary extraordinary', the article suggests that local civil servants employ a form of practice that has been termed 'tactical government' and proposes three distinct forms of this practice. However, the article also argues that tactical practice tells only part of the story and that it can be insightful to enrich our understanding of tactical government with an analysis of more general life projects. Bureaucratic practices are also motivated by factors such as the significance of the contested resource and paternal ideas of 'the common good'. Such a suggestion is in line with recent work on everyday lives in situations of protracted violent conflict and insecurity, and on the role of culture in producing civil servants/services. Looking at these two forms of practice together, in particular their interconnections, gives us a fuller account of how authority is produced. Furthermore, it allows more nuanced and detailed perspectives into the complex process of state-making.

Anspruch und Wirklichkeit kommunaler Regierungsführung und -praxis klaffen in Nepal weit auseinander. Dies liegt in erster Linie daran, dass es seit Mitte 2002 keine von den Bürger(inne)n gewählte kommunale Körperschaften mehr gibt. Dieses politische Vakuum wird durch besondere Richtlinienvorgaben aus Kathmandu und die Einbeziehung von lokalen Repräsentanten politischer Parteien nur notdürftig kompensiert, da solche Maßnahmen eine echte Bürgerbeteiligung an lokalen Planungs- und Entscheidungsprozessen nicht ersetzen können.

ABSTRACTRuptures that constitute exceptional events in national politics intersect in different ways with local politics, where more ongoing, continuous processes of both contestation and conservation around natural resource use may persist amidst a turbulent political landscape on other scales. Nepal, with its series of unfinished revolutions, civil war (1996–2006), and recurrently contested process of state (trans‐)formation, is a case in point. Through a study of a contested forest in mid‐western Nepal, this article analyses the entanglement of rupture and realignment of contentious claims to political authority across different scales, as well as the continuities of negotiations over claims to recognition of forest use and citizenship rights. The authors analyse some of the messy and complex practices through which authority to govern forests is claimed and legitimated, and citizenship rights are asserted and defined. They show that while political ruptures caused by the war and post‐war dynamics unsettle and reshuffle the political terrain, claims to citizenship and property rights endure, even if the language and form of the claim are adapted. These claims are embedded within existing jurisdictions but, at the same time, actors lay claims to property and citizenship rights by working across scales and re‐negotiating their boundaries. 'Making territory', the authors conclude, is the effect of the entanglement of these different territorial politics and practices.