ABSTRACT
The Himalayas, all the experts agree, face serious environmental problems; they are caught in a downward spiral. The rate of fuelwood consumption, for instance, is asserted to be far in excess of the rate at which the forest grows. The interrelated concepts of political development, economic development, and institutional development begin to suggest context-specific criteria for distinguishing appropriate actions and technologies from inappropriate ones. The literature tends to segregate itself into three quite distinct levels — the bio-physical, the micro-social, and the macro-social. The distinctive feature of mountain environments is not that they are relatively closed but, rather, that they exert severe constraints upon the organisation of social life. The chapter proposes the appropriate institutional development approach as a useful way of simultaneously learning about the development process and, through that learning, of identifying the points of leverage that furnish the only opportunities for us to intervene constructively in that process.
