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The WGD program at CIRED has conducted a monthly discussion series for over a decade. Students, faculty, staff and members of the community are encouraged to attend the discussions and bring their ideas and questions. The series offers an opportunity for scholars and development practitioners to share their research and knowledge surrounding gender and international development with the Virginia Tech community and beyond.

This article examines Nepal’s recently prepared Forestry Sector Strategy (FSS) (as of 2014) in terms of the use of scientific evidence and the quality of stakeholder participation. By reviewing the content and analyzing the context of its development during 2012–2014, we found that the transitional politics and overt influence of international development agencies dominated the process and content of the FSS. Although the FSS was developed through a significant stakeholder engagement, there was limited use of the available scientific evidence. The FSS was narrowly conceived as a deliverable of supporting aid programs, with limited demand for a politically meaningful policy processes. While civil society groups were consulted, they largely failed to present an independent voice due to their dependence on funding agencies. Our assessment calls for rethinking policy development in a way that facilitates assertive and independent participation by a range of actors and make better use of the available research.

This research examines the interplay between gender and adaptation in the context of increasingly uncertain climate conditions and socio-economic transitions, taking a case study of a mountain village in Nepal. This study is conducted at a time when the evidence of climate change has become more visible and more widely accepted than in the past, and also when several other socio-economic changes such as male out-migration, feminization of agrobiodiversity management and increased road networks and market expansion, are also becoming increasingly noticeable throughout the Nepal Himalayas. Combining social-ecological systems with feminist political ecology lenses, this study has generated an in-depth account from a village-level case study of agrobiodiversity management in Kaski district of Nepal, along with the analysis of institutional and policy contexts. Through this, it has demonstrated how gender-based power relations and gender- differentiated knowledge shape adaptation practices in the case study village. It has, in particular, generated in-depth evidence of the ways in which men and women in the case study village respond to the impacts of multiple stressors/pressures in the daily business of managing the local agrobiodiversity, and demonstrates how gender-based power relations and knowledge shape the possibilities for adaptation. This research addresses a particular gap in current knowledge about whether the changing context (climate and social) can have a positive or negative impact towards closing the gender gap as communities and households undertake adaptive actions in agrobiodiversity management. It demonstrates that due to the lack of understanding of the dynamic interplay between gender and complex social-ecological systems (i.e. agrobiodiversity management systems) among policy makers, development agencies and extension groups, people are likely to benefit less from the current adaptation strategies and practices that are being promoted at the local

Based on the review of relevant literature, this paper investigates how forest authority is produced or reproduced in the course of forest policy change, by drawing on the past four decades of participatory forest policy reform in Nepal. We analyze various waves of deliberative politics that emerged in different contexts related to the Himalayan crisis, the flow of international aid for conservation and development projects, civil conflict and democratic transition, and most recently the policy responses to climate change. The analysis shows how such deliberative politics contributed to the change or continuity of conventional authorities around forest policy and practice. It shows that despite notable participatory policy reform, the conventional authority has become further re-entrenched. Based on this analysis, we argue that efforts to understand forest policy change can be more meaningful if attention is paid to whether and how deliberative politics emerge to challenge the hegemonic claims to power and knowledge about resource governance practices. Such approach to policy analysis can open new possibilities for understanding democratic policy reform by explicating the nuances of deliberation and policy politics occurring at multiple scales.