(Ben Campbell) Nature's Discontents in Nepal

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Nature’s Discontents in Nepal

Ben Campbell
Abstract: In the last two decades, nature conservation has adapted to new
demands for social inclusion, and people-friendly protected area manage-
ment. This article examines how participatory conservation has introduced
such ideas in the form of buffer zones and policies to make conservation more
amenable to local people’s interests in Nepal. It looks at contrasting institu-
tional situations of an old national park under reform (Langtang), a new na-
tional park combined with a conservation area (Makalu-Barun), and a
conservation area of high tourist interest (Annapurna). The article draws on
extensive ethnographic knowledge in the first case, and discusses the experi-
ence of interactions with local villagers during treks in the other cases, to
question the responsiveness of participatory conservation to local people’s
needs, and their perceptions of changed relationships to their environments
under these different regulatory regimes. It argues that the framework in
which material incentives are provided for villagers to forego traditional en-
vironmental entitlements, fails to recognise the cultural transformation en-
tailed in constituting the environment as an object (for protection), external to
people’s varied kinds of interactive practice. The aim of integrating indige-
nous knowledge with conservation goals is shown to be elusive when culture
is seen as a resource for conservation, rather than a view on environmental
relationships.
Keywords: Nepal, Langtang National Park, participatory conservation,

indigenous knowledge
Ben Campbell, Research Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manches-

ter, Roscoe Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Address for Correspondence

Ben Campbell, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester, Roscoe Building,
Brunswick Street, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: Ben.Campbell@Manchester.ac.uk
Conservation and Society, Pages 323–353

Volume 3, No. 2, December 2005
Copyright: © Ben Campbell 2005. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and distribution of the article,
provided the original work is cited.
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324 / Ben Campbell
INTRODUCTION
NARRATIVES OF THE RELATIONSHIP between the Himalayan peasantry and the
environments they live in can seem strikingly polarised. On the one hand
there are the nature-protective tree-huggers of the Chipko movement sponta-
neously taking responsibility for guarding forests against commercial spoliation.
On the other hand there are the environmentally profligate and increasingly
numerous marginal cultivators whose deteriorating poverty pushes them to
turn forests into precariously perched fields, and to keep more livestock than
the grazing can sustain. Both of these representations have been revealed as
unsatisfactorily simplistic characterisations (Guha 1989; Ives and Messerli
1989), but both narratives are products of seeing particular relationships of
marginal agricultural communities to the processes of development through
the filter of modernist conceptions of nature. In the first case, the tree-huggers
in effect protest the reduction of nature to a utilitarian resource that supplies
raw materials for industry and development. The Chipko activists are seen to
derive ecological legitimacy by identifying themselves and their livelihoods
with respectful and close relationships with sustainable natural bounty. In the
second case, the scape-goating of Himalayan farmers as responsible for defor-
estation and soil erosion has been taken to justify state intervention in imposing
protected areas for the sake of biodiversity. Threatened nature can then be al-
lowed to regenerate under regimes that regulate processes of human-induced
environmental degradation. This article is concerned with ethnographic examina-
tion of ways in which Nepalese cultivators and herders respond to projects of
environmental conservation. It deals with the effects of imposing protected
areas, where nature becomes objectified as a domain of the non-human, and
people’s action on it are limited for the purpose of restoring its integrity. Con-
cern for nature’s apparently fragmenting autonomy in modernity is given pri-
ority over people’s relationships with nature, yet since voices of discontent
with exclusionary protection surfaced in the 1980s, a re-working of conservation
policy to include the needs of people affected by environmental protection has
introduced a blurring of the simplistic natural/social dichotomy.
The argument I take is that the narrative filters of modernist conceptions of
nature which construct it as a material context for development, or as an autono-
mous domain of the non-human world, are flawed on conceptual grounds (Latour
1993; Ingold 2000), and in terms of their practicability when operationalised
as policy intervention (Ghimire and Pimbert 1997; Stevens 1997; Brechin et
al. 2002). In the comparison of three protected areas in Nepal, I describe vari-
ous encounters and conversations with people confronted by the arrival of in-
stitutionalised nature. Each area has had a different history and context for the
creation of protected area status, which is important given the ahistorical and
de-politicised framing of nature as the non-human. In these protected areas,
attempts are being made to negotiate social legitimacy for conservation. Here,
the themes of culturally constructed human agency in the environment that
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Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 325
Ingold (1992; 2000) critiques theoretically are being acted out in the flesh, in
dispute on the ground. Nature as an object of symbolic construction has been
imposed on dwelt environments, whereby people’s direct relationships with
what the environment affords them have been regulated, classified and valued
according to externally designed conservation priorities, that now include the
mobilisation of local consent for environmental protection. Instead of under-
standing people’s environmental relations through attending to their practices
of engagement, in the way Ingold argues for, human agency in the bio-
physical world is imagined by the language of conservation policy to be de-
termined by cultural constructions towards biotic resources. Conservation phi-
losophy and other modernist approaches to ecology see the environment ‘out
there’ and culture ‘in peoples’ heads’, rather than being interactionally consti-
tuted. Such thinking makes the human component amenable to modification
via substituting alternative resources for livelihoods, and the environment
available to be protected as an external object in regimes of devolved, grass-
roots responsibility. Conservation makes disparate elements of interaction into
an objectified entity with the humans separated out, even if present in the
background as managers or custodians.
A wholesale narrative transfer of semantic linkages conjured up by the
western concept of nature (Williams 1976; Thomas 1983) is not at issue here.
As Pigg (1992) has argued for the appropriation of development discourse in
Nepal, the entire symbolic package of nature is not simply devolved, but finds
points of articulation in the life projects of people, and becomes to some de-
gree domesticated as a mode of understanding local social change. However,
in contrast to Pigg’s analysis of how development discourse became popular-
ised and made local, the argument and evidence presented here is that envi-
ronmental protection discourse, in the guise of protected areas, has fallen on
less compatible cultural and political soil. There are fewer people whose life pro-
jects and understandings of socio-cultural change are receptive to the agenda
of non-human nature, as compared to development. The agents of environ-
mental protection are networks of donors, institutions, officials and social
groups, who have very different sorts of identifications with the conservation
agenda. These range from former elite hunters turned wildlife enthusiasts
(Tucker 1991), to promoters of environmental justice for the poor and mar-
ginalised.
Partly as a result of movements such as Chipko for defending biodiversity
‘from below’, changes occurred from the mid 1980s that re-incarnated con-
servation policy in a more people-friendly, participatory approach (Brandon
and Wells 1992), recognising the pragmatic ineffectiveness of coercive con-
servation in areas surrounded by poverty. Contributions to the policy debate
by anthropologists and cultural geographers have also highlighted more posi-
tive advantages of translating conservation goals into local frameworks of
meaning and accountability (Stevens 1997).1 However, seeking to address de-
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326 / Ben Campbell
velopment needs along with conservation goals, brings with it conflicting pri-
orities as compared to nature protection pure and simple (Dobson 2000). This
was reflected in the IUCN’s functional gradations of protected area categories
in 1994, and their implications for traditional conservation targets.2 Despite
the promotion of participatory language, and the highlighting of terms such as
‘inclusion’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘innovation’,3 when viewed on the ground, pro-
tected areas are revealed as sites for practices of power, negotiations of inter-
est and value, and the messy compromises of life in remote places. In this
article, I present accounts of the problems experienced by people affected by
nature protection, which suggest that the mutuality of people and their envi-
ronments in protected areas has been inadequately problematised in the recent
rhetoric of participatory conservation, designed to overcome the original
shortcomings of top-down conservation models that depended on human ex-
clusion. The cases deal with a traditional national park’s attempts to become
inclusive, a ‘new paradigm’ national park with an inclusive ‘conservation
area’, and a conservation area dispensing with national park status altogether.
They show how protected areas generate contested frontlines, and discontinui-
ties of communication and exchange in the social landscape of power rela-
tions. They indicate how people’s strategies of livelihood, senses of
relationship to place, and understandings of environmental justice engage with
the global environmental discourse that has opened the door to admit social
dimensions of conservation, within generically managerialised constraints.
Protected Areas in Nepal
The Langtang National Park of north-central Nepal was established in 1976 in

the first flush of creating protected areas in Nepal (Figure 1). The conception
of the park was broadly that of the ‘Yellowstone’ model (Stevens 1997) advo-
cating ‘minimum human interference’ within its borders (Borradaile et al.
1977). Apart from conserving a representative area of biodiversity in central
Nepal, ranging from sub-tropical to alpine conditions, where rare stands of
trees such as the Himalayan larch, and the red panda are found, the park was
considered valuable to protect the watershed catchment of a hydro-electric
plant, and to regulate tourist access to the trans-Himalayan valley of Langtang
(Borradaile et al. 1977). The Langtang National Park is the most heavily
populated of the parks in Nepal (figures given in official park literature suggest
for its area of 1710 km2, a population of 3450 in 1993, which I presume to be
an underestimate of actual numbers at any given time), and covers sections of
two administrative districts. In Rasuwa District, most of its predominantly
Tamang-speaking population practise extensive transhumant agro-pastoralism,
and moreover, not being grain-sufficient were historically used to exchanging
and bartering forest produce for lowland villagers’ grain (especially woven
products of temperate bamboo, herbal medicines, and forest foods such as
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Figure 1
Protected areas in Nepal
ferns and mushrooms). The impact of park regulations on villagers’ subsis-

tence was hard felt. Their most common complaints are of being prevented
from managing shrub and weed growth on rough land through burning, not
being permitted to hunt the animals that invade crop areas (Campbell 2000),
having to pay large sums of money for house-timber licences, not being per-
mitted to barter bamboo products beyond Village Development Committee
borders, having to cease occasional swidden clearings (mrangshing pheeba),
and finally, occasional mistreatment (including extortion and sexual harass-
ment) by military guards. Officials working for park authorities tend to be
high-caste lowlanders whose perception of the Tamang population is as rough,
undeveloped, jangali people. Urban, educated, Hindu government officials
posted to Rasuwa commonly describe the place, that for them is an environ-
ment devoid of recognisable Hindu civilisation, as a ‘wilderness’.
In the face of growing realisation, internationally and in Nepal, that coer-
cive, top-down conservation models had not built adequate consensus for en-
vironmental protection, a revamping of the minimal human interference
principle was initiated in Nepalese parks by the mid-1990s. The buffer zone
concept had been piloted in Africa (Stevens 1997: 55), and was intended to
give park residents legitimate access to specified areas for limited subsistence
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328 / Ben Campbell
needs. In principle, it converges with changing approaches in development

thinking to promote bottom-up initiatives, participation of non-government
organisations (NGOs) and civil society, empowerment of the disadvantaged,
and appreciation of the value of indigenous knowledge for sustainable devel-
opment. The national parks of Nepal’s lowland Terai area were the first to be
given buffer zone projects, supported by the UNDP People and Parks project.
Efforts to extend the idea to mountain parks followed thereafter. In November
1997, I visited a project intended to introduce the buffer zone idea in demon-
stration plots in two villages of Langtang National Park, Thulo and Sano
Bharku. The park had agreed to let an NGO organise the fencing off with
stone walls of two sites of about one hectare each for planting tree crops, and
some vegetables for the benefit of the village demonstration plot committees.
However, rather than plant valued tree and shrub species occurring locally
such as bamboos, walnut, and wild fruit and fodder trees, it was mostly unfa-
miliar, more lowland-suited species such as citrus that had been planted.
Though the villagers had been paid wages for constructing the walls, it was
evident that weeding had been unsatisfactory since the plantings. Domestic
livestock had also clearly broken through the walls several times, and the
plots appeared to have received minimal attention.
Discussing the situation with the NGO worker and villagers, it emerged that
the villagers were primarily interested in getting as much money as possible
out of the NGO in the duration of its presence, and they did not take the plots
as meaningfully theirs’, because the park authorities had refused to discuss the
villagers’ main agenda, which was whether the land title to the plots would be
granted to them. Without proper ownership they considered looking after the
plots a very low priority in their expenditure of time and effort, and thought
that the park would probably reclaim the areas after the short lifetime of the
NGO’s involvement. Uncertainty as to future funding of the project cast an
atmosphere of temporariness over relationships with NGO workers, and over
expectations of future direct benefit to villagers through employment. For
their part, the NGO workers appeared very constrained by the specific goals
for the implementation of the buffer zone project. Their overall objectives
were to help villagers establish more confident positions in relationships with
park authorities, but the very fact of belonging to a Kathmandu-based organi-
sation and being tied in to park decision-making made a gulf that was hard to
cross. Even when I spoke to these workers about issues like indigenous envi-
ronmental knowledge, there was a response of some bemusement about the
idea that village people could know anything of conservation value, though
after reflection and revealing the privilege in which education is held, I was
advised to talk with local Buddhist lamas, for at least they were seen to use
books in their knowledge system. The indigenous knowledge of shamanic
healers and other oral knowledge practitioners was generally considered with
disdain as mere superstition.
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What was interesting in how the Bharku villagers contested the land title is-
sues to do with the demonstration plot, was that they sought to counter the en-
vironmental and land-ownership authority of the park by arguing for the
constitution of the proposed buffer zone management committee to be regis-
tered not with the national park, but instead with the Chief District Officer.
The latter was seen as more accountable to democratic processes of local gov-
ernment. (I found this confident stance surprising compared to the less skillful
dealings with authorities in another village of the area). Hence, they attempted
to make use of the fact that conservation authorities are only one organ of the
state among others, many of which have not only quite contradictory projects
for developing village communities in the mountains, but have very different
structures and agendas for local participation in these projects. There was ul-
timately no alternative to registering the management committee with the park
warden, as the committee’s central purpose was to facilitate villagers to ac-
cess 30–50% of park income, following a standard model applied in other
buffer zones around the world.4
Talking with a regional elder statesman who had defended the principle of
the park since its inception, he said the villagers had from the beginning only
perceived the inconveniences of park regulations affecting subsistence activi-
ties of wood and fodder collection, rather than see advantages such as the re-
striction of outsiders from using natural resources of the village. The balance
of park impact for livelihoods was one of loss rather than gain in their eyes,
and the statesman did not in fact try to persuade me otherwise. On our parting
he also gave me a packet of prickly pepper seeds (Zanthoxylum armatum) har-
vested from the wild, and showed me how to slip it in an inside coat pocket to
avoid detection at the park checkpost.
Introducing this article, I referred to the way aspects of development dis-
course have been domesticated to the contexts of Nepali society. An example
of this in terms of the cultural translation of environmental protection with a
human face, is the way that villagers’ complaints about the burgeoning num-
bers of crop-seeking wildlife are dealt with. No monetary compensation is
available for the considerable losses that befall households without the labour
power for constant nocturnal guarding of fields, but government hunters from
the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation are sent periodi-
cally, and yet their aim is only to cull the wild boar population. Speaking with
these hunters I asked did they not also need to shoot monkeys, bears and leop-
ards? The answer I received was ‘would you eat monkey?’ When boars are
shot, choice portions of the animals are dispatched to park headquarters and
the Department in Kathmandu, with the hunters and villagers getting a share
too. The impact on the total situation of crop damage is thus very limited, and
the hunters have to be fed by the host village. The boar cull is the major ac-
tion taken by the park to address crop damage. It does not address the problem
systematically, but reproduces culturally embedded, ritualised relations of pa-
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330 / Ben Campbell
ternalism in the distribution of game meat, that make a show of hierarchical

social accountability.
Visiting the Department of National Parks in the capital to enquire about
the further development of the buffer zone concept for villages inside the
Langtang park’s boundaries, I saw a map indicating where the buffer zone
was to be implemented. It merely covered the southern boundary of the park,
and was therefore of relevance to communities outside and adjacent to the
park, but ignored completely the residents inside. The model of boundary
edge buffer had simply been transposed from the plains parks where much
stricter human exclusion had been originally instituted in Bardia and Chitwan
(Müller-Böker 1995). In 1998, the buffer zone for Langtang national park was
officially declared, covering an area of 420 km2. The complex transhumant
use of forests and pastures in vertical seasonality, and the actual interactions
of park residents with varied habitats and species diversity found no represen-
tation in the topology of the map, with its territorialisation of zones of author-
ity and permissible activity. Tamang villagers’ relationships to place are not
simply about resource access, but stem from the life-enabling networks and
motivations of extensive kinship and clan alliance, of ritual peregrinations in
the landscape, and the mythical locatedness of human health and welfare in
pathways of movement between the ecological contrasts of the high and the
low (Campbell n.d.).
With the unlikelihood of the park ever ceding land title over de facto areas
used by villagers, or that the concepts of buffer zone and, related to it, that of
‘facility zone’, can ever effectively cover the entirety of villagers’ sites of
significant environmental engagement, it seems that a continuing tension will
exist between designed classifications of where nature and society find their
proper places, and the everyday and largely unseen practices of local people’s
procurements. The Tamang phrasing for this activity is ‘amrangnale yo laba’
(‘invisible stealing’). During my years of fieldwork in the Langtang National
Park, it has been very rare to ever encounter a park official on forest paths.
Even when villagers do procure forest produce like timber legitimately
through licences, and suggest to park officials possible specimens for felling,
the officials are likely to say I’m not going up there!’ and select instead a tree
with closer access. The politics and places of environmental engagement are
thus negotiated and enacted through socially selective administrations of visi-
bility, silence and agency. This kind of compromise between perspectives in
everyday exchanges over use rights contrasts with McNeely’s exaggerated
characterisation of an administrative void in protected area management:
‘By...establishing national parks that have no management, the author-

ity of governments tends to be spurious. While many governments have
claimed power over resources, they lacked the capacity to implement
their responsibilities, thereby creating among indigenous peoples a
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lack of confidence in the capacity of either state or local institutions to

regulate access to local resources.’ (McNeely 1997: 178–179).
‘Invisible stealing’ is unfortunately a contemporary skilled practice of envi-

ronmental engagement, that involves a level of self-conscious reflexivity5. I
was witness to a scene of public embarrassment when an infringer of wood
cutting regulations was caught in a chance encounter and held by a park
ranger. The culprit had come from a village outside the park and was unfamil-
iar with skills of concealment necessary to park-dwellers. He turned out to be
the hired animal keeper of the brother-in-law of a lodge owner who also acted
as the main contractor for supplying the park administration’s kitchens with
stores of food and vegetables. After two days of negotiation among the ranger,
the warden, the contractor and the brother-in-law, the wood cutter was repri-
manded by all of them and set free with a token payment, and business as
usual resumed. (His employer pointed out the branch he had lopped should
have been axed into unremarkable logs.) The letter of the law had to take sec-
ond place to the fragile pragmatic network of relationships sustaining the so-
cial and economic conditions necessary for the park’s institutional survival.
A revisit to the area in 2005 revealed that despite the Maoist insurgency
that has escalated in Nepal in the intervening years, the buffer zone projects of
Langtang national park have extended in villages where the army and national
park officers maintain some presence. ‘User groups’ (samuha) based on set-
tlement areas have succeeded in drawing on funds from park income (from li-
cences, fines and tourist fees) to organise a variety of projects, such as
rotational credit schemes, small-scale cheese factories, toilet construction to
attract tourists, and fencing of school grounds to facilitate tree nurseries. Vil-
lage representatives are thereby able to demonstrate competence in interac-
tions with state authorities, and if some of the projects themselves tend to
conform to what the authorities consider beneficial and worthwhile, rather
than spontaneously emerging from villagers’ own agendas, at least a channel
for communication of villagers’ interests with the park administration is visi-
ble, and reciprocal interaction with the park has tempered the stark one-
sidedness of power in people–park relations that was characteristic of the
early 1990s.
Experiencing ‘Participatory’ Conservation in Nepal
For a comparative look at how a relatively new national park had managed in
getting over its message of people-friendly biodiversity protection, I went for
a 17-day trek to the east of Nepal in May 1998. The Makalu-Barun National
Park and Conservation Area was set up in 1989 with the intention to be ‘par-
ticipatory’ in its approach.
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Information posters about the Makalu-Barun Conservation Project (MBCP)

were widely distributed in offices and lodges announcing: ‘The purpose of the
MBCP is to involve the local communities of Makalu-Barun National Park
and Conservation Area as partners, to develop a greater stake in biodiversity
protection through the use of traditional and new management capabilities for
improved community development, biodiversity protection, and natural re-
sources management.’
The motivation for this new protected area had come primarily from the
prospect of dramatic socio-economic and cultural change anticipated from the
construction of the Arun III hydro-electric dam. A decision was made to cre-
ate a separate administrative structure rather than extend the neighbouring Sa-
garmatha (Everest) National Park, in order to implement from the outset a
participatory conservation policy, rather than add to a reforming, but older
generation national park (Shrestha et al. 1990). Apart from the many dam pro-
ject workers who were expected to move into the area on a new road infra-
structure, the area’s potential as a tourist destination was predicted to attract
many thousand foreign visitors every year (Shrestha et al. 1990). The man-
agement plan contained an ambitious set of goals to attend not only to biodi-
versity preservation within its 2330 km2, but also to cultural conservation. It
further aimed to provide sympathetic treatment of issues such as the sustain-
ability and tenurial security of swidden cultivation, and the continuing impor-
tance of collective land rights (kipat) for resource management in the area
(Shrestha et al. 1990).
Compared to the experience of long term ethnographic fieldwork of the
kind I have from Rasuwa District and the Langtang National Park, I had to
adapt my ethnographic techniques and enquiry to the conditions of a trek. The
value of a Himalayan trek as a rapid fieldwork method is both insightful and
partial, relying on direct encounters with people and places. Interactions with
people are often momentary encounters while pausing for rest, or sharing a
stretch of a pathway. The pedestrian linearity of movement through the land-
scape induces an awareness of the invisibility of places to each side. One al-
ways has the sense of walking along one path rather than another, of being a
visitor at a particular season rather than another. The push towards the day’s
destination is enhanced by the insistent pace of the people who are walking
the paths for an economic rationale of carrying so many kilos of rice in so
many days between the market and the hungry mouths back home. The social
encounters one makes are also experienced as chance convergences; a wed-
ding party, a schoolteacher, a woman prodding a buffalo along. Most will stop
and talk, and exchange questions, but there is always the thought that the in-
formation one gathers could be so different on another day. One sees a field of
some crop, a feature of the landscape, an inscription on a stone by a resting
place, and if you are lucky someone might come by and answer your query.
So it was in Makalu-Barun I had a list of questions to begin finding out
about the park’s activities and policies. As chance would have it, at the par-
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ticular time I walked the trek, all the key park personnel had left the area for
training and meetings in Kathmandu. Some questions were not going to be an-
swered. Comparisons and contrasts with the Langtang National Park stood
out, and enhanced the sense of a mountain to climb in moving from participa-
tory rhetoric to inclusive practice.
One of the topics that people spoke about with regularity was khoriya,
slash-and-burn agriculture. In the Langtang national park, this had been a
rather minor source of grievance, but in eastern Nepal it has had a much
stronger historical role in subsistence repertoires (Schmidt-Vogt 2003). Be-
fore even arriving in the park boundaries, I heard that a man of Hatiya village
had been caught in this illegal activity. ‘All the village’ had gone to defend
him at the court case. The same day I had passed through an area of extensive
khoriya. When I asked a 60-year-old Sherpa about these fields he replied sim-
ply ‘You have to eat’ (khanu parcha). The imperative realism of this response
was to promise throughout the trek a frequent dissonance with the sentiment
made by the invocation ‘Let’s protect the environment’ painted on signs along
the way in English and Nepali. Instead of the joint enterprise of the first per-
son plural I heard stern articulations of us and them, pitting subsistence priori-
ties against the park’s proscriptions, and its professed adherence to ‘a
participatory model of land management that balances the needs of local peo-
ple with protection of the environment’ (Shrestha et al. 1990: 10).
On the fourth day of walking from the small airstrip at Tumlingtar, I de-
scended to the gushing Arun river and crossed the bridge into the park’s terri-
tory. Three hours later I was nearing the park headquarters in a final, steep,
wooded ascent. I asked directions for the best path to take from an old wiry-
bodied, bare-foot Brahmin farmer carrying a sack of rice, and we continued
together. We stopped to get our breath back, and he instructed me to drink the
clean water spouting from a source beside the path. He informed me he had
come from the last little farm enclave on the other side of the river where I
had noticed finger-millet sprouting up in patches of recent khoriya. He was
seventy years old and was delivering the sack of rice to a son. In a long, con-
sidered tone he told me ‘This park is no good. They don’t let you cut wood,
they don’t allow you to make spaces for paddy seed-beds,6 they don’t permit
doing khoriya’.
He then pointed up to a few patches of green finger-millet about a quarter
of a mile away, saying those places had been prepared for sowing by burning
at night, so no-one would see. He said the park takes money for everything
and also spends much on buildings, staff, etc. He wanted to know how much
it cost me for the permission to enter. He repeated ramro chaina (‘it is not
good’). I thought here is an old Brahmin complaining of rheumatic knees and
intestinal pains, carrying 6 pathi (24 kg) of rice barefoot 3000 ft up, and he
hadn’t one good word to say about the park. Brahmins of course constitute the
priesthood of Nepali society, and were instrumental in spreading the Hindu
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334 / Ben Campbell
state’s reach in the east of Nepal two hundred years ago (Caplan 1970; Sagant
1976; Gaenszle 1991). The immigrant high castes brought this remote area of
Kirat7 into the unified kingdom of Nepal by an agricultural and political colo-
nisation. They introduced comparatively advanced technologies of paddy cul-
tivation, and the language of the ruling class. How could this old man, whose
history is so tied up with furthering the hold of the Nepali state, and its social
hierarchy, be so disaffected with this new park promising community devel-
opment and environmental protection? The mission of his ancestors had been
to bring this periphery into civilisation by turning forest into productive fields
and integrating the area into tax regimes. Now the state’s environmental
agenda turned him from civiliser to criminal.
The next day, having learnt that the senior personnel of the park were all
away, I persuaded the local sector officer at Seduwa to give me a short inter-
view. He confirmed to me that within the park, slash-and-burn was only al-
lowed on private land, not in community or government forests, and fires had
to be prevented from spreading.8 I asked about crop predations from wild
animals, having researched the seriousness of this issue in Langtang National
Park, but he said that in Makalu-Barun, this was not a big problem. However,
if boars did come into people’s fields, the farmers would not be allowed to
kill them, nor would they receive compensation. I asked about monitoring of
economically important ecological events such as the flowering of bamboo,
and he replied though there was no overall scientific monitoring, but commu-
nity forestry groups reported on such matters. The running of the park and
conservation area depended to a large degree on the functioning of community
forestry groups, though in several Village Development Committee areas
these had not yet been set up, eight years after the establishment of the park.
The sector officer mentioned that only 600 tourist trekkers passed through
the park each year. This was a hundred times less than the numbers which at
the time went to see the wildlife of Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park. The
paucity of tourist numbers was a matter of deep local concern, as it is through
tourist income that most of the parks stay financially afloat, and the local
residents are promised economic development through the prospect of attract-
ing larger numbers of tourists as an explicit benefit of protected area status,
compensating for diminished resource access. The chairman of the main Vil-
lage Development Committee informed me on this issue that the lodge keep-
ers, guides and porters were extremely frustrated by the recent trend for
mountaineering groups to Mount Makalu (the fifth highest peak in the world)
to be transported by helicopters. These land just below the base camp, by-
passing the need to spend time and money accessing the peak via cash-
expectant villages on the lower approaches. The VDC chairman told me vil-
lagers were preparing for a ‘movement’ (andolan)9 to ambush the helicopters
and pelt them with stones.
Further on at Tashigaon, the main Sherpa village catering to tourists before
the trail to the base camp, I was chased by lodge keepers for my custom. The
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next day, I took on a young man to carry my pack and show me the way over
a pass to the next valley. He told me he needed to get back later that day to
look after his sheep, as a leopard could kill up to five of them at one time. He
left me by early afternoon with Sherpa cousins in a hamlet of three houses and
some fields. Exhausted by the walk, I managed some conversation with my
new hosts. ‘Did the national park do good work?’ ‘They do not do good’ came
the answer, mentioning specifically the cost of building a house. For the sort
they had, made with beaten bamboo matting for walls and roofs, the licence
cost about Rs 1500 (£15). For a more substantial house it would cost at least
Rs 5000 for the timber alone. Asked about crop damage, the man of the house
seemed to confirm what the sector officer had told me that wild boars were
not a big problem, as my host replied that the boars did not descend this far
down from the higher forest (we were at an altitude that just supported wild
banana trees). But most other animals certainly did come to eat crops, includ-
ing bears, barking deer and monkeys, all of which they are not allowed to kill.
Turning into the next valley of the Apsuwa Khola along which was my goal
of Khenpalung cave, I lost the main path and scrambled up over flights of
field terraces and scrub pasture. Eventually the sound came from above of
Radio Nepal’s hourly jingle, which promised the likelihood of the main path
through this Rai village of Maksuwa. I sat down beside the radio’s owner to
catch my breath. After only a couple of introductory formalities, it was he
who asked me ‘tapai ko vicar ma nikunja ramro cha ki chaina?’ (‘In your
opinion is the park a good thing or not?’). I tried to avoid giving my opinion
straight out, in the interests of non-directive information collecting. But he in-
sisted again, what was my opinion? I answered that I thought people found
hardship from the park, to which he intoned agreement and gave the usual list
of complaints, not being allowed to cut wood, not to make khoriya, and not
being allowed to protect crops. ‘That is how it is in our Nepal’ he sighed, and
rolled off the national environmental slogan ‘Hariyo ban, Nepal ko dhan’
(‘Green forest is the wealth of Nepal’). I sensed that his use of ‘Nepal’ here
had a familiarly ambiguous connotation. Nepal could be taken as meaning the
state in Kathmandu as opposed to the villagers, whose former ownership of
the forest has been supplanted by the authorities of the national park.
Clearly very few trekkers indeed came this way, but I was told of one house
on this side of the valley, that would put me up for the night. Here at Chirk-
hang, a 19 year-old Jimi Rai, son-in-law, of the house agreed to act as porter-
guide and take me the next two days along the path up to Khenpalung cave.
As with most of my encounters on the trek, the fact that I spoke Nepali led
people initially to think I was undoubtedly working for the park. The next day
the son-in-law told me his story of having applied for a job with the park. He
said that he had passed an interview, being capably literate, but then the job
was given to a Sherpa who had not given a strong interview. The Sherpa was
appointed because of having ‘aphno manche’ (‘one’s own people’) on the in-
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336 / Ben Campbell
side. A few days later I met a young Rai woman who complained also of be-
ing turned down from a national park job even though she had a School Leav-
ing Certificate, in favour of someone without an SLC, who was supported
‘from inside’.
Crossing the Apsuwa Khola on the flimsiest of seasonal bridges, and as-
cending the other side, we joined a much more substantial trail and learned
this had been built by the park to improve access to the Khenpalung pilgrim-
age cave. Looking back across the other side of the valley, my companion
spontaneously pointed out several patches where forest had been cut down but
not fired. He told me these intended khoriya sites had not been agreed to by
the park authorities. It seemed the notion of legitimate clearing for cultivation
was still assumed until official intervention prevented further action. He said
in the days of his grandfathers, people simply cleared at will, and marked
field boundaries with stones to claim cultivation rights. Also if you made a
goth (animal shelter) somewhere, that was your kharka (pasture). He indicated
an area of forest on the far side where he had spent several years keeping a
flock of sheep, and that a bear had once killed six of them, smashing the
lambs against the rocks. The care devoted to livestock is more than an eco-
nomic relation, and I learned later the tending of sheep formed part of the
myth connected to the Khenpalung cave. It is said a shepherd was puzzled as
to where one particular animal of his kept disappearing to. Following it, he
discovered the cave where Guru Rimpoche (the culture hero of the Buddhist
Himalaya) had supposedly hidden to avoid his enemies. This cave is looked
after by Sherpa lamas whose ancestors migrated from the Everest area of
Solu-Khumbu. It is linked in a sacred landscape complex with a higher lake
that is also a pilgrimage site (Ramble and Chapagain 1990; Diemberger 1993;
1996).
Over another 10,000 ft pass, I reached Tamku, a major village with a
weekly market and a national park sector office. I heard further accounts here
of how the Mewahang Rais till the 1960s held land in common title (kipat).
Talking to a septegenarian veteran of the Gurkhas’ Burma campaign, he said
in the old days as much land as you could cultivate would be yours. Not all
the ethnic groups in this area held kipat rights, however. I heard there was a
community of Tamangs above the main settlement of Tamku and went to in-
vestigate. I learned from two of their elders that the Tamangs had been invited
here generations ago, and had been given land to settle by the Rai headman
(jimmiwal) in return for mining iron. They did not practise the transhumant
agro-pastoralism of the Tamangs I knew in central Nepal, but clearly had con-
siderably relied on khoriya till the establishment of the park. I was told that
since the park was established, numbers of Himalayan chamois (tahr) had in-
creased dramatically, barking deer come ‘like flocks of sheep and goats’, and
many bears come and eat maize. Porcupines also come with increasing fre-
quency and all these animals are not permitted to be killed by the farmers. I
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asked an octagenarian Tamang lama if he thought the park was good.

‘Chaina’ (‘It is not’) he replied with an emphatic stop, and then listed the
usual complaints: no khoriya, no wood cutting, and no bamboo collection in
the way these livelihood supports had been available in the past. The message
about people-friendly, participatory conservation had not got through to this
level of critical elders.
One afternoon in Tamku a huddle of people were looking at a metal spring-
trap snare that a teenager was carrying home. I was told it was for catching
jackals (which steal chickens) and porcupines. Asking whether this was per-
mitted by the park they told me you have to put it out at night so no-one sees.
Among this group was a government agricultural extension worker, who did
not denounce the practice, but said such technology was to be used out of the
park’s gaze.
Making efforts to find expressions of the park’s point of view on its relation
to the local population, I visited the sector office in Tamku. The assistant
warden was away, but I found there was a one-time research assistant for an
American anthropologist. A Rai of another valley in the region, he had ini-
tially worked on one of the more innovative aspects of the Makalu-Barun
park’s design, namely ‘cultural conservation’. This aspect of the park’s work
had now been relegated to a very low priority due to budget cuts, and he him-
self had been moved into simply doing administration. He expressed some
dissatisfaction with how the whole context of the Makalu-Barun Conservation
Project (MBCP) had evolved. One of the original motives for setting up the
park had been to mitigate the likely effects of the development of the hydroe-
lectric project, Arun III. After widespread criticism of inappropriate mega-
dam projects, the World Bank had withdrawn support, and the plan was
shelved in 1995. He saw his district remaining a remote and infrastructurally
detached backwater. It was ‘disaster’ for the area. The park was having an ex-
tremely hard time attracting tourists and their income, as it did not have the
attractions of rhinoceros and elephants that lowland parks offer. He confirmed
the long-term aim of the park was to hand over running the conservation area
from government responsibility to local and NGO control.
The MBCP appears as a case of an idea designed with foresight to prevent
the damaging effects of regional economic transformation that was to have
been expected by the construction of the Arun III dam. With the connecting
road infrastucture not being built, and the tourist numbers not materialising,
its original economic and environmental rationale has disappeared. This one-
off visit to MBCP of two and a half weeks duration, is of course a partial ac-
count, and the particular timing of the visit probably contributed to my inter-
pretation of the impact of this protected area. On leaving the park, the image I
carried was of a remote local farming population which had lost all its paddy
crop in 1997 due to unseasonal rains in November, and was having to pay
high prices for portering-in rice, or try to extend khoriya into areas for culti-
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338 / Ben Campbell
vation deemed illegitimate by the park. The park management plan had rec-
ognised that 73% of households surveyed in the area had food deficits, lasting
up to as much as nine months (Shrestha et al. 1990), and in the conditions as
they were during my visit, it appeared the pressure to intensify production was
meeting an unresponsive policy on opening lands to swidden. The inability of
the park to address acute subsistence needs in the short term had not con-
vinced the local population of its participatory intent.
Meeting a Sherpa from the Khenpalung settlement in 2005 in Kathmandu, I
learnt that since the Maoist insurgency had taken hold in the Makalu-Barun
area, the park administration had retreated to Khandbari, outside the park lim-
its, and that Tamku in particular had become a rebel stronghold. A US em-
bassy communication in 2005 has highlighted the threat to conservation of the
insurgency, warning of ‘serious ecological damage’ as a result of the conflict,
and the abandonment of protected areas to ‘environmental criminals’ includ-
ing poachers, and increased rates of deforestation.10 From the limited evidence
of my visit, it is not wholly surprising that the local population of Makalu-
Barun may have become a recruiting ground for the people’s war.11
ACAP
The Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP) has been heralded since
its inception in 1986 as an exceptional attempt to redirect policy for nature
conservation. It represented a move away from culturally inappropriate Yel-
lowstone-type models of pure nature and minimum human interference, to
constitute ‘a multiple land use principle of resource management that com-
bines environmental protection with sustainable community development’
(ACAP brochure 1998). In the information centre of Ghandruk on the ap-
proach to the Annapurna base camp, a poster stated ‘neither the people nor the
natural resources of this area need suffer for the sake of the other’. ACAP’s
world renown as an innovative, people-friendly protected area was reflected
on in its first decade report (Adhikari and Lama 1996), and is celebrated in
comparative academic discussions of participatory conservation (Stevens
1997; Igoe 2004).
On a brief four day trek in the lower reaches of ACAP (it covers an area of
7629 km2), I went with my family in 1998 in search of flowering rhododen-
drons and conversation about the project. Just an hour’s walk from the road-
side start I pointed out to my daughter a troop of rhesus macaques scrambling
through the understorey of woods above the path. A village woman obviously
tired of tourists’ fascination with these mundane and bothersome creatures
asked me why I was so interested in them, ‘do you like the red monkey?’
(tapailai rato Bandar man parcha?) she inquired with disdain.
Of all Nepal’s mountain trekking destinations the Annapurna area is the
most popular. Some 50,000 foreigners went trekking here each year by the
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late 1990s, even attracting European royalty and rock stars. At 1000 rupees
(approximately UK£10) per entry permit, this amounts to a huge income, and
unlike those national parks which spend around 75% of their budgets on mili-
tary enforcement of park regulations, ACAP does not depend on the army. It
decentralises responsibility for much forest control to village conservation
management committees. Speaking with a woman lodge owner in the Magar
ethnic group village of Ulleri I heard some dissatisfaction with this arrange-
ment: ‘ACAP is not very good for us. We have to buy firewood from our own
forest to cook food. We have to pay money. People of the village [manage-
ment committee] eat this money. The people from here eat the money from
the wood. It has not been good.’
The next day, after walking along a north-facing forested ridge where
months before a storm had blown down a large number of snow-laden trees, a
tea shop owner explained he had only been allowed to take wood from the
fallen trees that actually obstructed the path. All the rest had to be left on the
order of ACAP. He was clearly not well disposed to this policy. Later he
joked with a couple of porters passing through that he would report them for
having collected some high-value edible fungi.
Lodge owners who build premises outside villages on the trekking routes
are required to pay Rs 1500 per year for the site rent. One owner on the trail
complained ACAP does not do anything in return for this money, and grum-
bled about not being allowed to cut firewood. However, he insisted ACAP in
itself was a good idea, and the fact that soldiers were not used to police it
made a massive difference compared to the national parks. It should do more
for the lodge keepers though. He told me anyone caught hunting was fined
Rs 100,000 (£1000). Further on I heard that if anyone is caught taking timber
for house construction without prior permission a similar fine is imposed,
whereas if agreement is sought the permit would cost around Rs 1000.
Speaking with a Gurung woman in ACAP’s office in Ghandruk she con-
fessed that there was indeed ‘back-biting’ among the village management
committees, but her key positive experience was that ACAP had succeeded in
getting a considerable number of women actively involved in meetings. At
first they had been shy, but they have now been emboldened to make forceful
demands themselves.
One Nepali environmental consultant’s advice for the further project devel-
opment of ACAP’s participatory approach was that ACAP should tell the
people exactly how much money they have. This advice was rejected but it
highlights a problem in the notion of participation. Just how far does the shar-
ing of goals and information extend? There is little doubt that when it comes
to the crunch, what ACAP says goes. How far participation in reality extends
beyond rhetorical reinvention and limited inclusion of those disadvantaged by
more conventional conservation needs to be considered. Sacareau’s (2003) de-
tailed and perceptive study of a valley within the Annapurna area highlights
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340 / Ben Campbell
the project’s continuing ideological reliance on the theory of Malthusian

overpopulation to explain causes of deforestation. She provides an analysis of
change over the last fifty years, to suggest most of the broad changes claimed
by the project (substitution of dependence on local resources by alternative
livelihood strategies) had already been initiated by village organisations prior
to the project’s existence (Sacareau 2003). Sacareau further critiques ACAP’s
reliance and focus on the sites of greater tourist presence for the success of its
works, to the detriment of less-frequented villages in more need, and notes the
project’s lack of anticipation of how tourism could be likely to transform
away from trekking models, towards for instance activity centres, which
would affect the mechanisms for benefit distribution to the population as a
whole. She concludes ACAP ‘has only followed pre-existing dynamics, with-
out however reducing the inequalities between touristic villages and those that
are not’ ( Sacareau 2003: 445, my translation).
By 2005, most ACAP posts had been abandoned by its officials faced with
the escalating insurgency. These included the model site office village of
Ghandruk. ACAP’s patronage by Prince Gyanendra (after 2001, King Gy-
anendra), through his chairmanship of the King Mahendra Trust for Nature
Conservation during the 1980s and 90s, provided too close an identification of
ACAP with the regime to avoid coming under attack. It has been noticed
however by a number of observers12 that many of the community forest com-
mittees set up under ACAP, and indeed by the wider community forestry pro-
grammes in Nepal, have continued to operate when either protected area
authorities or Forest Department officers have retreated from the scene due to
rebel threats. It appears that through this most unintended set of circum-
stances, the community groups’ organisational sustainability has ironically
been shown to have been effectively devolved, and their grassroots value
demonstrated in the absence of central direction.
DISCUSSION
Negative responses to the introduction of protected areas are often portrayed

as knee-jerk peasant conservatism. In contrast to this, I would suggest there
are two sorts of reasons why nature conservation is not highly popular in Ne-
pal. The first is quite straightforward and has to do with reducing people’s en-
vironmental relationships to a reordered rural economy of costs and benefits,
though this alone is not sufficient to explain the depth of resistance. For all
that the designation of protected nature might seem to imply removing pres-
sures of human production from a certain area and diminishing the direct in-
fluence of market values on it, commodification is not removed but rather
reconfigured. As Escobar (1995) describes it, there is a ‘re-capitalisation of
nature’ at work in the guise of sustainable eco-development discourse. At the
ground level there are sets of agreements or deals about use and exchange: li-
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censing, restricted group memberships for resource access, and promised fu-
ture benefits from the protected area. On the more ‘global’ level, there is
clearly an expectation that continuing environmental degradation outside pro-
tected areas will enhance the relative value of the ever-scarcer bio-wealth they
contain: both in terms of a ‘bank’ of resources for nation states and biotech-
nology research, and in terms of world heritage stakes (Hay-Edie 2000). Im-
poverished nations are very aware of the value added to their international
symbolic capital, and tourism potential, by a profile of having many protected
areas. From the villagers’ side, one of the few resident women I met who sup-
ported the Langtang National Park said quite plainly the main perceived ad-
vantage in protecting wildlife and forests was that they attracted tourists.13
The objectification of nature as a cultural process of re-viewing the world,
even when in the guise of wilderness, is then significantly linked to concomi-
tant processes of commodification. The history and future of national parks
and protected areas in Nepal is bound up with the conversion of once freely
obtained materials into prohibited or licensed goods, and the funding of the
system of administrative control by the marketing of nature to foreign tourist
consumers. The creation of enclaves considered to be of global environmental
value can simultaneously be represented as a sacralisation of nature, where
the progressive extraction of planetary surplus value is held at bay. The tour-
ists visiting these areas experience profound sensations of getting-away-from-
it-all, primarily due to having to walk, but also to the incredible cheapness of
food, lodging and human porterage.14 From the perspective of people living
under the regimes of ‘ghetto’-ised nature, however, they experience their lives
as subjected to distorted exchange values. Nature protection in populated ar-
eas involves making demarcations of places, where certain activities are
deemed un-natural, and assigning measures to charge for use and punish
transgressions. The veneer of modernist nature sacralisation does not perco-
late down to meet a participation from below. Meanwhile, severe pressures of
poverty on ecosystems become relocated away from protected areas to inten-
sify in the most fragile sites of biodiversity which are not protected (Ripert et
al. 2003).15
In the three cases of protected areas discussed here, we have seen that un-
certainties surrounding particular project funding cycles (the buffer zone in
Langtang National Park) scenarios for infrastructural development (Makalu-
Barun and the Arun III dam), and transparency of funds (ACAP) have inhib-
ited prospects for long-term relationships of participation between communi-
ties and protected area authorities. Other policy attempts to mobilise
community consent for conservation have depended strongly on prospects of
tourist income compensating for diminished access to forest resources, yet
several examples show how tourism is a very partial and unreliable means of
distributing benefits from the creation of protected areas. My conversations
revealed a further constituency beyond discontented cultivators and lodge
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342 / Ben Campbell
keepers; one of aggrieved educated people in the Makalu-Barun Conservation

Project. Local literate young adults were not finding openings for careers with
the park. The park was seen as controlled by interest groups extending patron-
age among their own people. The possibilities for promoting participation and
having local people identify with its aims encounter difficulties when em-
ployment and recruitment practices for protected area administration entail
winners and losers, who recognise that access to favour is as scarce a resource
as cultivable land. In MBCP, a participatory knowledge agenda may have
been intended by original programmes of research into khoriya and cultural
conservation, but these had been shelved, leaving an implementation deficit in
key areas where local interests could have been engaged. The main evident
priority instead is the promotion of ‘eco-tourism’ favoured by the interna-
tional donor organisation for MBCP, the Mountain Institute. The planned am-
bushing of helicopters indicated how desperate the local people were to keep
what little tourist income came their way, and to have some say in the economic
topology of this traffic.16 Even in the tourist hotspot of Annapurna, Sacareau
(2003) has identified ACAP’s ineffectiveness at addressing the inequalities of
its outreach to villagers that are less visited by tourists. Participatory design
for conservation may be an improvement on traditional national parks, allow-
ing at least a principle of some local control, but as Baviskar has written on
the Great Himalayan National Park of Himachal Pradesh, the notion carries
with it a whiff of paternalism. ‘Participation is seen as purely instrumental
here, as something that promotes programme implementation rather than a
right that villagers have as interested parties to the changes being contem-
plated by the state’ (Baviskar 2000: 113).17
Coming to Terms with Place
Taking the cost–benefit line, many of the problems discussed could be re-
duced simply to a bad deal for locals. The costs have been too immediate and
are getting worse in impact, whereas the benefits have been too few, too un-
evenly distributed, too slow in coming, or remain vague promises made with
little conviction. Land title to the buffer zone plots in Langtang National Park
was unlikely to be conceded, devolved institutions for participatory resource
control in ACAP have not escaped being seen as presenting some people with
opportunities for un-participatory self-advantage, and the tourist numbers vis-
iting MBCP remain disappointingly low. This failure to deliver tangible bene-
fit would not alone be adequate explanation for the extent of discontent. I
would argue that the ontology of politics, culture, history and identity plays a
part in what is the second basis for discontent towards nature conservation.
This is not to suggest that all bases for discontent are similar, and that the
three areas discussed here share the same conditions for antipathy to certain
kinds of restriction. Very different dynamics of ethnic groups, and of relation-
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ships to the state, to patterns of trade and agriculture, to land tax systems, and
to the global economy have characterised the three mountain regions dis-
cussed here. There is not the space to enter into systematic comparison, and
my point is rather that the treatment of conservation as an issue to be resolved
primarily by putting participatory structures of management in place creates
silences in what is at issue, when people’s relations with their lived environ-
ments are transformed.
Analysts of environmental ‘governmentality’ (see introduction) such as
Agrawal (2005) have produced sophisticated accounts of how the logic of forest
protection by local stakeholders can be effectively decentralised in certain po-
litical circumstances, thus making the tensions of local-state relations pursued in
this paper seem inappropriate. From an anthropological perspective, however,
a qualitative shift is involved in moving from villagers’ self-understanding of
their homelands as places of practical intimacy, ancestral settlement, and of
supernatural and species-rich conviviality, to seeing forests as ‘an entity discrete
from humans’ (Agrawal 2005: 201). This is a leap that needs careful reflec-
tion, ‘cultural’ problematisation and an attendance to the qualities of people’s
environmentally interactive experience in the round, that Agrawal’s definition
of environmental ‘subjectivity’ leaves virtually untouched. Recent arguments
within environmental anthropology for recognising people’s sociality with the
non-human world are especially at odds with the notion of an objectified non-
human domain (Descola 1996; Milton 1996; Ingold 2000).
What all participatory conservation initiatives have in common is the recon-
figuring of environmental relationships in terms of scarce resource manage-
ment. Agrawal takes this as the major achievement of colonial foresters in
Kumaon, to the West of Nepal, in the 1920s. While his account accords little
explanatory value to issues of culture, in ACAP’s decennial review it ‘has
considered culture as a resource as it contains a body of knowledge that is
useful for coping with the environment’ (Adhikari and Lama 1996: 15). This
framing of culture attempts to contain and assign a place within the scheme of
things to religious practice and ethno-linguistic difference, fixing up temples
and sponsoring rituals. It does not recognise culture ontologically in the envi-
ronmental practices of marginalised communities. Protected Areas, whatever
their participatory design, have rarely acknowledged their effects on resident
peoples’ ways of interacting with their environments, whereby fundamental
formations of collective identity and self-hood are produced through conjunc-
tures of property systems and relationships to the state. Writing of the Lim-
bus’ of East Nepal Caplan argued:
‘The state has assisted—whether inadvertently or not—the dominant

peasant groups to acquire tribal lands through a concerted legislative
programme which transformed the way in which these indigenous groups
held land, historically regarded as the possession of the collective, and
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344 / Ben Campbell
thus as inalienable... [T]raditional customs which regulated the alloca-

tion, use and transfer of land among tribal people have been superseded
by state laws which led to the loss of this land.’ (Caplan 1991: 306).
While the terminology of ‘tribes’ now looks antiquated (both in Nepal, see
Gellner et al. 1997; and elsewhere in Asia, Li 2000), it is this historical context
in which protected areas become a further factor in the erosion of villagers’
livelihood base and local social agency, involving a transfer of control over
productive resources, that resident people cannot ignore when confronted by
exhortations to protect the environment. Other accounts from east Nepal such
as Forbes (1999) stress the deep sense of collective self-reliance and genera-
tional continuity that come from practices of cultivation which are far from
simply instrumental resource management, and that through activity make the
social and physical landscape one and the same.18
At the same time, the effective reach of state promulgations into far-flung
regions can be over-estimated. Centrally made decisions over village property
regimes can have very slight impact. In their report to MBCP on cultural di-
mensions of conservation, Ramble and Chapagain comment on the effect of
the 1964 Lands Act on the indigenous system of resource allocation in several
villages of the Makalu-Barun area as having been ‘practically none’ (1990:
15). The introduction of a park, however, constitutes a different order of state
intervention. These authors continue ‘when the matter of a rastriya nikunj—
national park—was raised ...[it generated] antipathy towards what they sus-
pected would be an infringement of hereditary rights by the government’
(Ramble and Chapagain 1990: 24). How villagers respond in such circum-
stances to regulatory surveillance, does introduce an important aspect for eth-
nographic research into new skills of negotiation (Pottier 2003) with diverse
state and other presences, that create positions of brokership and translation.
At the same time, new learned practices of concealment of activities may en-
able some continuity with provisioning in ways done before.
The second phase of protected area policy in Nepal since the late 1980s,
characterised by adjustments to the ‘Yellowstone’ model to include buffer
zones and participatory conservation, has not transformed the relationships of
difference between conservation enforcers and rural populations.19 There was
evidence of a new reflexive pragmatism in the case of a United Nations De-
velopment Program project in Langtang National Park, that wanted to address
environmental issues, but avoided all reference to ‘environment’ in its public
presentation, and stressed tourism as its focus in order to attract local interest
rather than antagonism (Chandra Gurung pers. comm.). In MBCP, the relega-
tion of ‘cultural conservation’ down the agenda appeared as a case of losing
ground for building common interest in the goals of conservation. Behind this
loss of priority could be seen a centrist neglect for the issue of local knowl-
edge, that was brought up in the Langtang example where Lamas’ texts were
this journal
given more credibility by the NGO than oral sources. In ACAP headquarters,
my enquiries about whether research had been conducted into cultural aspects
of conservation elicited the response that only a few foreigners may have done
something in this regard, who had cultivated close sympathies with local sha-
mans (a path of enquiry clearly spoken of as suitably trivial for foreigners to
indulge in!).20
Since the people’s war took hold in Nepal at the end of the 1990s, the pro-
tected areas have operated in restricted circumstances. To think that all con-
servation initiatives cannot survive the insurgency would be to suggest no
effective devolution of environmental control had taken place under participa-
tory initiatives. Anecdotal evidence mentioned above contradicts this fear, but
in the meantime autonomous regions are under discussion between the Maoist
command and representatives of the ethnically diverse (Janajati) rural popula-
tion where protected areas are located. A new articulation (Li 2000) of cul-
tural politics and environmental interests could be under consideration, that
would shift the previously imagined kinds of connection between culture and
conservation, to take cognisance of historical injustices done to Nepal’s ethnic
minorities, of which carrying the burdens of protected area regulations were a
recent manifestation.
CONCLUSION
It remains in doubt whether radical perspectives on indigenous knowledge can

be taken on board as relevant to Nepal’s nature conservation within main-
stream approaches. These have been heavily reliant on the language of capac-
ity building, social capital and creating a good impression for visitors,21 where
folkloric culture and ethnic handicrafts appear as a window-dressing optional
appendage, rather than attending to people’s environmental relations beyond
resource object utility. Escobar is sceptical about eco-development’s appro-
priation of local knowledge.
‘This new capitalization of nature does not only rely on the semiotic
conquest of territories (in terms of biodiversity reserves and new
schemes for land ownership and control) and communities (as 'stew-
ards' of nature); it also requires the semiotic conquest of local knowl-
edges, to the extent that ‘saving nature’ demands the valuation of local
knowledges of sustaining nature... Local knowledge is not seen as a
complex cultural construction, involving not objects but movements
and events that are profoundly historical and relational. These forms
of knowledge usually have entirely different modes of operation and re-
lations to social and cultural fields’. (Escobar 1995: 204)
The way out from spreading discontent could require dismantling the edifice
and artifice of ‘pure’ nature, which as a non-human domain consequently re-
this journal
346 / Ben Campbell
quires re-integration with the social for effective environmental projects that
people can identify with, rather than simply comply with. For Latour, nature
is a purification, that is inadequate for the task of understanding how things
actually operate, in hybrid interchange. Latour claims that transcendent modern
nature is made distinct from the fabric of society, ‘thus contrary to the con-
tinuous connection between the natural order found among the premoderns’
(Latour 1993: 139). In the current state of relations between protected areas
and local populations in Nepal, the networks of continuous connection have
yet to come out of hiding, beyond the one-sided pronouncements of participa-
tory conservation that profess concern for, and need to work with, local inter-
ests. Of course, beyond policy rhetoric, protected area conservation relies on
many kinds of compromises and tacit acceptance of less than ideal practice,
that defy the ring-fencing of nature. Being seen to defend pure nature has to
be done for funding, but its administration by real people involves achieving
modus vivendi in local terms to create the conditions of pragmatic institutional
survival (of which the woodcutter’s infringement in the Langtang national
park is an example). Alternative modernist ideological ways of thinking about
the networks of connection reclaim biodiversity for rural people, ‘tribals’ and
women, against patriarchal and scientistic tendencies of development policy
and discourse (Shiva 1989) though essentialist constructions of women and
indigenous people’s relationship with nature are all too easy to confound
when faced with local ethnographic complexities. The danger would be of re-
placing one modernist version of purified nature with another. The role of an-
thropologists should be to contest strategic purifications of nature and culture
to reveal connections (biological, social, commercial, political and ideational),
that brings insight to the analysis of human–environmental relations rather
than assist in reproducing isolated domains generated for political, administra-
tive or scientific convenience.
‘Nature’ as produced by protected area status generates discontent because of
disrupted patterns of organic connection,22 exchange and reciprocity, or ‘media-
tion’ as Latour puts it, in lived worlds. The productive, ongoing engagement
with processes of growth and species interactivity constitute a fundamental
subsistence ontology of belonging and agency for many people, who have to
live with the effects of modern worldviews that categorise nature as a domain
distinct from the human. Regulations limiting areas for swidden farming, crop
damage inflicted by increasing numbers of unrestrained wildlife, or prohibi-
tions on collection of forest products, are consequences of protection which
both destabilise the fragile viability of marginal livelihoods and the hold people
have on an understanding of the interactive world of real presences, entities
and non-human sentient beings, that they do not see as necessarily polarised
between nature and society. Participatory approaches to conservation have in-
troduced a limited reflexivity over environmental policy for protected areas,
but the challenge is to move beyond mechanical models of integrating social
and natural concerns that offer material inducements for local inclusivity to
this journal
better understand how people’s environmental relations are as intimately so-

cial as are the discourses of biodiversity under threat from people, and the in-
stitutions that seek legitimacy from this tension.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an award from ESRC (R000237061). I thank the
villagers and protected area authorities of Langtang, Makalu-Barun, and An-
napurna for their time and cooperation, the Department of Social Anthropology,
Manchester for discussion and support, and the editors and reviewers of Conser-
vation and Society for critical appreciation.
Notes
1. In his book on environmental relations among the Everest region Sherpa,

Stevens demonstrated the unfavourable outcomes of coercive conservation,
commenting that the Sagarmatha National Park's confrontation with the
Sherpas, especially over forest, use had ‘assaulted their sense of land own-
ership and homeland’, engendering ‘continuing resentment and fear and a
local lack of support for the national park which has remained widespread
ever since’ (1993: 313).
2. See www.iucn.org ‘Protected Areas for a New Millennium’.
3. The joint IUCN–WWF discussion paper states ‘Protected areas may be seen
as less threatening because protection does not necessarily mean a complete
block on human activity. They are likely to lead to new management op-
tions in a wide range of situations, and open up the possibility of innovative
partnerships between conservationists and other interest groups, such as in-
digenous peoples, the tourism industry and small-scale agriculture.’
(www.iucn.org/themes/forests/ 6/notitle.html)
4. See www.UNDP.peopleandparks.org
5. There is not room here to discuss issues of the treatment of ‘indigenous re-
source management’ and Nepalese environmental governmentality in any
detail. Very briefly, concerning Tamang-speaking villages of Rasuwa, there
was a certain local regulation of forest use in operation before the estab-
lishment of the national park that centered on village headmen (mukhiya).
This was essentially to do with coordinating livestock movements with the
seasonal availability of pasture, the synchrony of livestock with crop har-
vests, the assertion of pasture rights on the margins with neighbouring com-
munities, and the collection of fees from visiting herds. The headmen’s role
was further to collect taxes, organise corvée labour for state projects, and al-
locate fields to the landless. That he was spoken of, to me, as ‘saying
nothing’ about villagers, who cut timber for sale or took other forest prod-
ucts for barter, need not mean that a free-for-all operated. Producing and
this journal
348 / Ben Campbell
selling forest products was an extremely laborious and time-consuming ac-

tivity (especially the several days of portering), undertaken in times of food
deficit. It is perhaps better to see the villagers’ former freedom of procure-
ment as part of a moral ecology, in which the villagers were bound in return
to render multiple forms of tribute to the headmen. ‘Saying nothing’ was
understood to speak volumes of the conditions, and obligations, of peoples’
livelihood entitlements and accountability in a citizenship of kin-related
householders. For further discussion see Campbell n.d.
6. Seed-beds are frequently made in clearings of scrub and secondary wood-
land just adjacent to fields.
7. The East of Nepal inhabited and originally ruled mostly by the ancestors of
contemporary Rai and Limbu ethnic groups.
8. Anne Forbes (1999) and Hildegard Diemberger (1996) give excellent ac-
counts of disputes, relationships, and claims over what constitutes property
entitlement in this region, and the effects of private land registration and the
government administration of public lands on collective histories of belong-
ing to land.
9. The same word used to describe the ‘movement for democracy’ of 1990 in
Nepal which resulted in a multi-party political system, until the combination
of Maoist people’s war and the palace takeover by King Gyanendra in 2001
suffocated electoral politics.
10. <www.south-asia.com/USA/hub_impact.htm>
11. See Karki and Bhattarai (2004: 57–58) for geographical and historical
background to the insurgency in this district of Sankhuwasabha.
12. Ram Chhetri, Sara Shneiderman and Mark Turin personal communication,
Upreti (2004: 295).
13. Sacareau comments on discussions with Nepali villagers in a number of dis-
tricts that ‘the idea that the conservation of the environment is a condition
for the advent of tourists has made its way into people’s heads’ (2003: 443,
my translation).
14. As part of a UNDP tourism-cum-environmental project, a trekking booklet
Easy Trek: the lower Langtang in Nepal’s Himalayas was produced on au-
thentic ‘Nepali’ paper. Like so much of the trekking literature, it markets
mountain village life as one ‘which has changed little in centuries’ (Pradhan
and Harrison 1997: 4), portrays a benign view of protected areas as allowing
‘the local people to follow traditional land use practices that ensure the con-
servation of the natural and cultural resources of the area’ (Pradhan and
Harrison 1997: 8), offers tantalising enchantment ‘the old people have sto-
ries too about the Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, the never-quite-seen
apelike creature of the high wastelands’ (Pradhan and Harrison 1997: 15),
and repackages rural poverty as naturalised picturesque ‘A visit to Syabru is
above all a cultural experience, an opportunity to join in the life of a Ta-
mang community. It is an experience that will enrich your life if you take
this journal
the time to relax into the pace of a day set by the sun, the animals and the
crops, watching the nimble fingers of the weavers and the skill of plaiting
bamboo’ (Pradhan and Harrison 1997: 20). The booklet reassures visitors
that though they can expect other-worldly experiences, accommodation is
provided by the locals and ‘your favourite soft drinks are now available on
every mountain top’ (Pradhan and Harrison 1997: 43).
15. Straede and Treue (2005) give a detailed reckoning of the inadequate eco-
logical provisioning available to households from buffer zone and commu-
nity forest resources in southern Nepal’s Chitwan, without the additional
input of materials sourced from within the national park there.
16. Conservation can lead to a ghetto-isation of nature and problems of eco-
nomic dis-integration experienced by mountain communities needing to ex-
change and trade. In the spring of 1998, there was a front page story in the
Kathmandu Post ‘Conservation causes famine in Humla’. Because of pro-
tecting tree plantations and community forestry projects in this far western
district, flocks of sheep and goats traditionally used for transporting food to
inaccessible villages had been abandoned and sold off, as they no longer
had access to grazing. When the crops failed there was then no means of
distribution from southern markets.
17. Cooke and Kothari (2001) offer a sustained deconstruction of the policy and
practice of participatory approaches in development.
18. Forbes writes ‘Land rights express the web of social relations in time and
space, and the land itself expresses the character of the household members
through the quality and care with which they farm. The hours and energy
invested in the soil are evident in the harvest. This time and labour is in-
vested to provide enough food for one’s family, but land is also a way of se-
curing one’s place in the social and physical landscape, literally, a foothold
in the world. It is the one place where villagers can do things their own way
on their own land, where they can still be kings on their own land....It is this
agency and autonomy that the Yamphu express in the concept of kipat.’
(1999: 122).
19. Ripert et al (2003: 397) argue there has been an inadequate correspondence
between conservation measures taken, and reliable assessment of their ef-
fects, over the last twenty years, on the state of the natural environment.
20. For an example of creative research in this direction see Pettigrew (1999).
21. The Parks and People Programme Annual Report for 1997 identified parks–
people conflicts as the ‘most complex problem of the country’ (p. 51), and
yet in its list of programme ‘weaknesses’, there are only managerial issues
identified. It is as if the fact that most people in Nepal see the environment
as far more than simply a managerial issue (e.g. histories of territorial ap-
propriation by ruling classes, and the environmental dimensions of caste hi-
erarchy) can simply be ignored. Marie Lecomte-Tilouine (n.d.) has covered
this journal
350 / Ben Campbell
the ways in which environmental issues and injustices have figured in de-
bates among Nepal’s Janajati ethnic activists.
22. I use the word ‘organic’ here to echo the deeply substantialised view of hu-
man connectedness with the environment, that Tamang villagers speak of in
understanding human life as having originated from a combination of wood
ashes, and chicken and eagle droppings (see Campbell n.d.).
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Nature’s Discontents in Nepal

Keywords: Nepal, Langtang National Park, participatory conservation,

Ben Campbell, Research Fellow, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manches-

Address for Correspondence

Conservation and Society, Pages 323–353

324 / Ben Campbell

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 325

326 / Ben Campbell

Protected Areas in Nepal

The Langtang National Park of north-central Nepal was established in 1976 in

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 327

Protected areas in Nepal

ferns and mushrooms). The impact of park regulations on villagers’ subsis-

328 / Ben Campbell

needs. In principle, it converges with changing approaches in development

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 329

330 / Ben Campbell

ternalism in the distribution of game meat, that make a show of hierarchical

‘By...establishing national parks that have no management, the author-

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 331

lack of confidence in the capacity of either state or local institutions to

‘Invisible stealing’ is unfortunately a contemporary skilled practice of envi-

Experiencing ‘Participatory’ Conservation in Nepal

332 / Ben Campbell

Information posters about the Makalu-Barun Conservation Project (MBCP)

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 333

334 / Ben Campbell

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 335

336 / Ben Campbell

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 337

asked an octagenarian Tamang lama if he thought the park was good.

338 / Ben Campbell

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 339

340 / Ben Campbell

the project’s continuing ideological reliance on the theory of Malthusian

Negative responses to the introduction of protected areas are often portrayed

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 341

342 / Ben Campbell

keepers; one of aggrieved educated people in the Makalu-Barun Conservation

Coming to Terms with Place

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 343

‘The state has assisted—whether inadvertently or not—the dominant

344 / Ben Campbell

thus as inalienable... [T]raditional customs which regulated the alloca-

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 345

It remains in doubt whether radical perspectives on indigenous knowledge can

346 / Ben Campbell

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 347

better understand how people’s environmental relations are as intimately so-

1. In his book on environmental relations among the Everest region Sherpa,

348 / Ben Campbell

selling forest products was an extremely laborious and time-consuming ac-

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 349

350 / Ben Campbell

Adhikari, J. and T.T. Lama. 1996. Annapurna Conservation Area Project: A

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 351

352 / Ben Campbell

McNeely, J. 1997. Interaction between Biological Diversity and Cultural Di-

Nature’s discontents in Nepal / 353

Stevens, S. 1997. Conservation through Cultural Survival: Indigenous Peo-

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