ABSTRACT
The environment in Nepal has been a site of struggle for livelihood, health, and survival for those marginalized by caste, class, gender, ethnicity, language, and geography for millennia. Environmental justice – a critical analysis of the ways in which certain populations and places are overburdened by environmental hazards and/or excluded from environmental resources – is a relatively new, but potent framework to encompass these struggles. Yet, there has not been a comprehensive framework that brings together the rich scholarship on topics such as community forestry, women in agriculture, fortress conservation, Indigenous land and resource sovereignty, climate justice, equitable access to drinking water, and urban air pollution among others.
To develop this integrative framework for Nepalese EJ studies, this chapter presents the results of a systematic literature review (encompassing 43 peer-reviewed articles, books, and reports dating from the late 1980s to present) as well as interviews with ten prominent Nepalese EJ scholars. The chapter is not intended to be exhaustive but does attempt to capture the temporal and topical breadth of the field. The sources were all in English with an emphasis on those by Nepali scholars as well as authors from other countries. The chapter will first sketch out some basic contours of Nepal’s distinctive historical characteristics as the context for environmental conflicts. It will then survey the past two decades of environmental justice scholarship based on major topical themes and conclude with a synthesis of a proposed EJ paradigm fit for Nepal. I argue that a framework capable of accommodating Nepal’s wide-ranging experiences with EJ problems and movements must not only include but integrate both livelihoods and environmental quality struggles as intersecting and simultaneous not sequential.
