Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Opinion

Dev Raj Dahal, Head of FES Nepal Office

Nepal is a torn state. The SPA-led government controls only urban parts while CPN (Maoist) does its activities in rural areas of the country, raised its own People’s Liberation Army (PLA), collects tax, dispenses justice through people’s courts and musters the loyalty of citizens. This shows that the state of Nepal has lost legitimate monopoly on power and the ability to maintain security; impose law and order, regain the periphery and restore its capacity to pursue common good so that it is seen as a civil association. Restoring this monopoly is important to overcome security, democratic and development deficits and shape the “rule-based conception of ethical life”. Nepal is also caught in the contesting visions of political parties regarding the drafting of the interim Constitution, nature of the state (unitary versus federal), forms of monarchy, economy, foreign policy, educational and health policy, etc. Due to growing incongruence between the state (ruler) and society (ruled), inability to manage growing discontents of ethnic, Dalits, women, workers, Madhesis and indigenous peoples’ demands and provide service delivery in the periphery, donors call Nepal a “fragile state” and have accordingly defined the principles for engagements. The House of Representatives has been restored, the country has been declared secular and King and the Nepal Army have been constitutionalised but the intractable differences among the SPA and between SPA and the CPN (Maoist) political leaders are only muddling around the peace process than marching ahead for the resolution of various types of conflict.

The Nepalese market too is spatially fragmented. There are hundreds of pockets of small markets unconnected to each other. This condition has defied the national political economy of scale and increased difficulties for social and economic integration of the nation. The earlier belief of planners in the infallible wisdom of market to allocate goods and services and specialization has been shattered as it is too weak to support the pattern of cooperation across’ national societies, modernize workforce and strengthen the backward and forward link ages of the political economy. The ideology of state minimalism, espoused by Nepalese planners, limited the power of the state to create security, maintain harmony with the society, formulate rules and authority and seek the loyalty of citizens to polity. Corporate elites, concentrated in urban areas, preside over a grossly inequitable division of wealth that is both the source of their supremacy, disenfranchisement of the mass of Nepali people and the crisis of public life. Nepal’s economic classes require a policy to orient themselves towards corporate ethics of serving public interests.

The societal denationalization by civil society and the market forces in Nepal has produced a class of cosmopolitan citizens who are not obliged by what the notion of citizenship loyalty entails in a democratic polity. This condition has undermined the national ideology of the state and exonerated the market and civil society from constitutional control. Moreover, hyper social activism of civil society contributed to the decline of party politics and eroded the capacity of leadership to inspire mass followers. National territory has become too small for the markets and civil society to function and the government and political parties have not developed any integrative political response to this denationalization. The SPA led government is now facing problem in projecting its policy-making capacity over the territorial sovereignty.

The society-centric governance presumes that there are enough competing centers of power and competing groups, enough citizens competing for influence over pub lic policies and the institutions of governance giving scope for participatory democracy. The Nepalese bureaucracy cannot be divorced from this reality. The transitional nature of politics has posed a problem for civil servants is how to remain neutral, seek to pursue institutional interests and manage to bring social and collective goods to the citizens. Autonomy of public administration from special interest groups of society is possible only with highly selective merit- based recruitment, long-term rewards for career improvement, fair penal system and a system of rule of law.

Representative democracy defines the basic norms of governance where bureaucracy is bounded by general policies, structured by division of labor and hierarchical control and reviewed for rough conformity to some principles and policies of the state, the Constitution, laws and international regime obligations. The expanding nature of welfare state has added more power to bureau cracy in planning, policy making and service provisions and their increasing control over money, infrastructure development, technical expertise and information. The road map of governance reforms articulated in the Governance Act is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to address the question of national integrity system that plagues the functions of governance. Political will is necessary to carry out reforms in Nepal. The culture of confidentiality has further eroded the trust between the government and the governed and bred corruption and a culture of impunity.

In this era of globalization the Government of Nepal needs to ensure to its citizens — liberation, entitlements and social opportunities. International community has become an equal stakeholder of policy regime. As a result, development policies in Nepal are negotiated with the donors and tailored to the strategic pursuit of the “rational choice” followed by most of its development partners regardless of the “political framework condition”. The rational choice model is a historical, grounded in the neo liberal ideology and does not fully take into account the existing irrational, unresponsive and tenacious social, economic and political obstacles to change. It also contradicts both social rationality and Constitutional responsibility to create an open society based on social justice, freedom and solidarity of capital and labor mediated by class-neutral state. Economic performance is largely determined by the structure of incentives, “public choices” accorded to the stakeholders by the government and the delivery of basic services, such as education, health, social welfare provisions, water and sanitation, communication, technology and ecological resources underlined in Service Delivery Guidelines. Persistence of chronic poverty in Nepal implies the deficiencies of economic policies to trigger production revolution and foster the social integration of Nepalese society. At the moment, development discourse in Nepal centers on the following approaches:

• Political economy approach focuses on a just system of production, exchange, appropriation, distribution and progressive tax to subsidize the poor. Political economists believe that distribution of property especially land (land reform) and alteration of power relationship in society through inclusion is the key to empowerment. This will lift the individuals and groups caught in rock bottom of development.

• Governance approach lays emphasis on building public-private partnerships, replaces social and political hierarchy by the market forces and allows the articulation of the rational choice of individual actor, such as the state as facilitator, the market as producer and allocator of goods and services and civil society as a mediator of public policies as well as an actor on behalf of poor and powerless sections of society.

• Collective action and right-based approach lays stress on the power of sovereign people to act collectively through civil society organisations such as media, civic associations, NGOs, local government institutions, etc and induce gradual change in society. Transformation of poor societies requires giving the poor legal property rights.

• Community development approach

reveals the concentration of individual and institutional incentives in society. To avoid re-distributive and patronage- based goals of politicians and bureaucrats, this approach nurtures the principles of subsidiaries, decentralization and local self-governance.

If poverty alleviation is meant to overcome powerlessness there must be a political will and strategy of the political class. A political structure must be created in such a way that right to livelihood is constitutionally guar anteed, poverty alleviation becomes a participatory process, a new social contract of the poor with the state is negotiated where the state serves as a helping hand to them and the root causes of conflicts are addressed in time before they escalate into unmanageable proportion.

Resolution of conflict in Nepal requires a transformation of the rationalist conception of politics where power is pitted against power for survival, supremacy and identity thus sidetracking the question of social justice. Political actors in Nepal must learn from the failure of power-mediation approach of 1950, 1979 and 1990 where social contracts created their own enemies and rendered democratic peace unsustainable. Hierarchical nature of conflicts in Nepal entails multi track and multi-step conflict transformation strategies. This means peace-building measures require simultaneous strengthening of security, order and welfare.

Ordinary citizens, working at the grassroots level, are now coping with various types of conflict and devising the change process. But, they need full agents of change—information, skills, organisations, networks and resources. To change the structural causes of underdevelopment, the organization of the poor must have critical mass of change agents to reform the unreasonableness of political order that does not bring well being, freedom and identity, and articulate a vision for things higher than those offered by today’s government, political parties and civil society.

Conclusion

Good governance in Nepal requires the citizens to forge a single national identity, an identity sustained by a democratic partnership among the stake-holders—the state, the market, the civil society and citizens. The greatest strength of polity lies in their capacity to enlist the confidence of ordinary citizens to shape society. Without a legitimate social contract through Constituent Assembly, unifying the torn state, strengthening the national integrity system and proper separation and devolution of power, transparent, just and responsive governance cannot be realized. The tissues that link the citizens to governance, such as legislatures, political parties, civil society and a myriad of mediating social and economic institutions, now require a coherence, trust, cooperation and collective action based on human essence.