Re-inventing the commons: community forestry as accumulation without dispossession in Nepal

Abstract

The commercial appropriation of the commons by displacing communities has been a historical feature of development. In recent years, however, this paradigm has shifted toward re-inventing the commons by creating new relations of production for both the market and subsistence. Such shifts in managing the commons are producing new forms of commoning instead of enclosure and dispossession. Through the analysis of community forestry programs in Nepal, this paper demonstrates that community-based development has been effective in mobilizing the collective potential of local communities and dynamics of commonly held forest ecosystems for the expansion of highly profitable commercial endeavors. Community forestry can be understood neither as an enclosure exclusively for commodity production nor as the extension of entirely subsistence economic activities. In Nepal, community forestry has become a form of accumulation without dispossession where communities’ ownership over the common forestlands is ensured but market apparatuses for commercialization are also institutionalized simultaneously. This paper argues that while transforming the commons and communities as part and parcel of capital accumulation, community forestry generates possibilities for both commercial and subsistence modes of production, reproducing the conditions for accumulation without dispossession.

Keywords:

• community
• subsistence
• accumulation without dispossession
• the commons
• Nepal

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Vinay Gidwani, Eric Sheppard, Abdi Samatar, Joel Wainwright, George Henderson, Jennifer Fluri, Paul Jackson, Brian Burke, the editors of JPS and the two anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹Observation of commercial harvesting in Dang district, Nepal.

²Some argue that Marx knew well from his studies of societies where capitalism was rending pre-capitalist social relations – especially Ireland, India, Poland and Russia – that primitive accumulation was an uneven historical process and that the British experience was unusual in many respects (see e.g. Anderson 2010). However, in order to explain capital's internal contradictions in Capital Vol. I, he did not elaborate on these complexities, but instead posited a theoretically simplified capitalist society. In this imagined social space there were only two classes: capital and labor. Based on his later writings (i.e. after 1857–1858), Marx never expected such an ideal capitalist society to come into existence. As Luxemburg 2003 [1913] points out, Marx's theoretical formulation was an effect of the stringent assumptions with which he organized his project in Capital Vol. I.

³Several conditions generated this possibility: (1) donors' ideas of market-led development; (2) the emergence of concepts of participation; (3) growing concerns over environmental conservation in light of the theory of Himalayan environmental degradation; and (4) indigenous systems of resource allocation (Eckholm 1976; Gilmour and Fisher 1991; Metz 1991; Malla 2001).

⁴According to this idea, the lack of available forest products was the explanation for poverty, so subsistence farmers were asked to plant trees on their private land, as well as in common forests (Metz 1991).

⁵Federation of Community Forestry User Groups was established in the early 1990s for coordinated implementation of community forestry. Development projects also involve them in advancing market reach in rural areas.

⁶In 2009, CFUGs invested $5.71 million in such activities, with the highest priority on infrastructure facilities to ease the transportation of forest products (Paudel, Khatri, and Paudel 2010).

⁷New institutional economists (NIE) have argued that the commons is governable under market mechanisms, but it requires reinventing community institutions to ensure exclusive entitlements over the resources with the rights of limiting the number of appropriators (see Ostrom 1990; Agrawal 1996; Hobley 1996).

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Dinesh Paudel

Dinesh Paudel is an assistant professor in the Department of Sustainable Development at Appalachian State University, North Carolina, USA. His ethnographic research explores the relationship between development interventions, environmental changes and political transformations in Nepal and the Himalayas.