 Thank you, Steve. This paper was published recently in Journal of Forest Policy and Economics. The title is, Can Authorities Change Through Deliverative Politics. Seven authors, all having over one decade of experience in the forest sector of Nepal. Most of them, at that time, were doing PhD in Australia. So we went together and discussed about this topic of bringing about how we can look at change of policy process, policy in Nepal's so-called participatory forest reforms. We came up with the idea of having the historical analysis of that pathway by bringing about how different actors mobilize the discourses and other resources available to them in a political setting where the negotiation of their values, interests, and other resources are there. So in the process, they try to come for the consensus of certain policy outcomes. So we use the dialectics of authority and deliberative politics. Authority here means the relationship of legitimate power. And the deliberative politics involves both the reasoned debate and also the political contestation among different actors. But while doing so, we also think of bringing together the international environmental development discourses and other resources, including the agencies and funding, and also the local political context where certain political regimes allows certain space for deliberation among different actors. So bringing that dialectics of authority and deliberative politics, we saw different waves of policy changes. We call them policy waves. And we identified at least six policy waves during 1970s until 2013. That is because in Nepal, we saw the development of participatory forestry since 1970s, mid-1970s. So we thought of bringing, starting our analysis from that. So the first policy wave, we call it MLN crisis, started in mid-1970s with the publication of the theory of MLN degradation. They call it theory of MLN degradation. Eric Ekholm, he published a book that highlighted that and anticipated that Nepal would go to desertation by 2000 if the same speed of deforestation, and then destabilization continues. So because of that, and also other international conferences on mountain in 1974, that also highlighted the same issue. Government reports also had the same thing. So attention of donors at that time was so intense that the Department of Forest and the donors joined together to have the massive deforestation projects. But what they missed at that time was involving local people in the process of making decisions. And when they started planting trees that were even exotic trees not suitable for local livelihoods and something like that, people started resisting it and challenging the authority of the techno bureaucrats and also the development agencies coming from outside. So that dialectics, that confrontation and crisis, the confrontation and resistance on local people was a crisis for the, we call it the positive science, forest science that people cultivated to address the very complicated environmental problem we had during that time. So what happened was, because most of those plantations were failed because local people did not comply with the rules, they imposed upon them. And also they started grazing in the forest plantation areas and also in some places reported that they were uprooting the planted trees. So mostly it was considered that the wave was almost failed. So realizing that they started involving local people. Initially through the local political, elected political bodies, but people still didn't comply with that and that's how the next political wave, we call it participatory wave, arose. So where the role and rights of local people was more granted more and people were involved in making certain operational decisions for managing forest resources. And they could use the forest and also manage the forest, make the decision and sell that and also use that money for local development activities. So that pulled this from 1980s, we have that participatory wave until now. But it faced a series of crisis because of the motivation and intention of techno-bureaucratic authority to retain the power again back to them. And also because of the political crisis we had since mid 1990s, we had bloody Maoist insurgency and also the takeover of the democratic government by the king in early 2000. So that political crisis created a new wave, we call it political crisis wave. During that time, many of the rights given earlier granted to local people were taken back by the government and feudal authority of the king and techno-bureaucratic authority had the nexus to actually undermine most of the rights given to local people. Subsequently, after the overthrow of the king in 2000, after the popular movement also because of the Maoist insurgency and also because of international discourses and climate change, after Bali conference we have seen now the carbon wave in Nepal. So carbon, now forests are seen as the carbon sinks and the goods that can be traded, carbon that can be traded to the market and often compromising the local livelihood concerns of local people. Even in this wave, people are allowed to debate and raise their concerns because the international donors and civil society actors are more permanently active in this wave and they are opening up the space for local people to debate and raise the concern. Despite that, those local livelihood needs are often compromised in the name of the carbon. So that is one scenario. There are two other waves that also exist now. They are to include the conservation wave. During 1970s, when we were going for participatory forestry, during that time also we had another development discourse coming up from the West was the conservation, preserving the wilderness. That's how the then king and the feudal authority formed the coalition with the international NGOs and techno bureaucratic authority to establish series of protected areas. Those initial were the very exclusionary, employed military to protect the protected areas. Local people were denied the access to resources. They were dependent. That created a very significant conflict between park authorities and local people. And they didn't support and coaching was undergoing during that phase. So that challenge and contestation for local people and also the more discourses for participatory development coming from outside helped to create the deliberative space in the conservation area as well. So we have now more participation of local people in buffer zone area. We also have some of the participatory conservation areas where local people form the committees and they take the most of the responsibilities of conservation. So these, they are in a way challenging the traditional techno bureaucratic authority, but still the overall power remains with the techno bureaucratic authority since long. Some people even argue that they are more powerful than before, but in different covert way. So that is the case. But since 1990s, when we had democracy, we also have the very strong inclusion way, where gender and social inclusion within the forest sector is very strong. And it evolved from more tokenistic participation to now more on leadership and capacity development for women in different forest governance processes. So in summary, I would say, using the approach of unfolding dialectical relationship between authority and deliberative politics, we analyze how pre-existing forms of authority face challenges in and through unfolding deliberative politics in the changing context. And how specific configuration of such politics reproduce, re-entrenched, or transform along the way. We use this more historical and part dependent approach for analyzing this policies and their path. OK, thank you. Thank you, Mani. OK, thank you. And so colleagues have a chance to ask questions, offer comments. Erin, please stand up and give your name in asking your question. Thanks. Hi, I'm Erin Russell. Thank you for your interesting presentation. I'm interested in the phase of recentralization when you mentioned that the king and the techno bureaucratic required a certain amount of the decision-making. And I'm curious about what shape that took. And in terms of local forest management, where there had been participatory forest management, how did the local authorities change in shape? Or was it a question of funding to them or funding allocations? And what was the objective stated by the central authorities in recentralizing the approaches? OK, thank you. There are many, many things happened actually within that very short period of time. It was takeover was about one year only from the king. But he started the process a couple of years ago, from since 2002. He started the process, but King took over in 2005. And it remained until 2006. So during that time, what they did was they suspended many of the rights of local communities where they could make the decision to capture the community forest for the purpose of settling in this army, deployment of army. That was one case. Second was they also made one decision, though it was not complied by local communities. They wanted at least 40% of their income to go to government from the community forestry. In Nepal, in community forestry, all the income from forest products goes to the local community themselves, community fund. But if they sell outside, they need to pay certain tax to the government. So but during that time, they also made that decision. Other decision was also, it was because of Mamish insurgency also, they obstructed the export of timber from one community to other communities or one district to another district. So limiting in many places, because most of the communities also were dependent on the fund coming from, revenue coming from forest. Many were funding the salary for teachers, and many were also covering the other costs of community development. So they had to compromise that cost because of that ban. They couldn't sell outside. Also, they were not allowed to gather and organize assemblies. Very restricted. They had to get the permission from different security agencies and also from the maus during that time. So that democratic process was also very compromised at local level. So many, so many things. And also the civil society actors were also not allowed to organize protests or something like that against any move of the king during that time. Christopher. Hi, I'm Christopher Matius. I'm working CFO on Forest and Climate Change. So my question is, you mentioned also, what you described is a series of discourses that shape the policy processes in Nepal. And some apparently were driven by process in the country and some were driven by processes outside or on an international base, like maybe the participation or the conservation debate, I don't know. But some of these are obviously driven by force outside the country. And in the global comparative study on red, which we are not taking, we see that similar processes. In some countries, the red debate, red plus debate is being brought into the country and strongly carried by foreign forces, like foreign NGOs and so on, international NGOs and in other countries, it's driven by national ownership. And we see that only when national ownership is there, actually the process moves forward. Did you see anything similar in this regard? Yeah, in Nepal, both have. In terms of expanding deliberative space for different actors, red has certainly done very good job. But in terms of setting priorities and gaining the ownership of local people and other actors, it's hard to say because they are mostly top down. If they came from outside through international donor support and also knowledge coming from outside about verification, monitoring, more technical expertise, requiring technical expertise in moving it forward. So somehow the people, we feel that people are left behind and more the experts and techno bureaucrats and the international communities are taking the driving seat in all processes. So locally, if you see, because it has given more authority to techno bureaucratic system because government system, government is in the central stage in all those processes. And also the support comes through that. So it is hard to say. In some way, it is more opening up spaces. In other ways, it's compromising some local values, wisdom, and needs. So that is, yeah. Lou? Yeah, Lou Varshio. Just picking up on that, the international community is it's put in place. The red mechanism has requiring countries to actually put in place some safeguards to make sure that local rights are protected. Is some of this actually percolating into that system? And do you think that that's going to help improve the situation, that this international requirement for financial support puts in place these safeguards? And is Nepal going to be responsive to that? Yes, I think that's why the civil society actors are also more leaning towards it because there are spaces where they can raise their voice, clear the safeguards against any potential threats of local livelihoods or local right curtailing. So, but I'm not really exactly sure how it is operationalizing now. But during that time, it was at national level, most of the processes were at national level and penetrating to the sub-national level, not reaching ultimately to the community level because the processes was still in early stages. By now, I don't know exactly about that. I can't say anything about that. But when we were reviewing for this paper, there were national processes, RPP was in place, the red cell was established within the Ministry of Forestry. Different actors were involved in seeking funds to do some of the awareness-raising activities or something like that, doing some research around that aspect. But not penetrating until the community level. Some multi-stakeholder processes at district level, I think we could see at that time. And reflection on that was that people feel a little bit hard. That's why they could raise the issues and those issues are brought into the processes at national level. But exactly, not sure how communities responded about that. Christine. Thank you. Again, as Steve said, Christine Paddock. As Steve said, the Nepal case is always or the history of these changes in Nepal is so well known but I swear I'm completely ignorant. So let me ask you a question about the participatory phase, which in your history sounds like the best one, especially for local people. But there's been a lot of criticism of what participation actually, what forms it really took in communities and how again it was often sort of framed in ways that were really quite outside the particular communities and participation was to be done in very standardized sort of ways. Could you just comment on that of what it looked like in Nepal? It says, if I say Indonesia or other countries, it is very much advanced. I agree with that. But because certain things are historically influenced, socially structures, general relationships. Those aspects require a multitude of pressures and forces operating together to make sense happen in one setting. In terms of forest policy and the governance, that has been taken as an elation from, I can say from here, three dimensions, three phases of this inclusion with her. Initially because women were not even involved in the decision-making forums. Then at that time, the main interest and main enthusiasm of donors and other actors was to bringing in to the committees and those spheres of decision-making. Our attention was to have the numbers in the committees. One third, at least one third women should be there in the committees, something like that. But even if that was the case, we later found that women were not attending the meetings. What is the meaning of keeping them in the list? Just took on this thing. So then the focus shifted to us how we can make them attend the meetings. What are the barriers to attend the meetings? That discourse created that monitoring and evaluation of those community forestry system should also involve how many people and who attended the meetings, not only how many in the committees. So that shifted from only representation to attending the meetings. Later we found that even if they were sitting in the meeting, even if out of 10, out of 11, only all the 10 women were there and only single men were there, men influenced all the decisions. So then the focus shifted on how we can actually bring in the voice of those communities and how women's leadership and influence can be ensured. That is how the discourse is shaping and now our this gender and social inclusion strategy within Ministry of Forestry and community forestry guidelines, recent guidelines, also has emphasized that leadership and influence of women and other marginalized groups in community forestry governance. So the shift is there and we can see if you compare from 1990s and now, you see the tremendous change happening in terms of women's agency in forest governance. But it's still not equitable. Or not equitable, it's not equitable. But progress has been made significantly. But there are, you can criticize, that is still not sufficient. Christina, follow up question? Yeah. The comment, yeah. You've talked about gender. Any other measures of inclusion, not gender based? I mean, gender sometimes maybe emphasized. Yeah, there is two others we can think of. One is the ethnic, because our society is ethnically very diverse and also this caste system we have. Normally, we see that in most of the public spheres are captured by high caste or some ethnic groups and marginalized excluded or others. And also the class. Poor people can't afford to come because most of the community forest systems and meetings and all leadership positions, they're all voluntary. So you need to be ready to provide your voluntary time for collective action. So poor people can't afford that. That's why they are not participating. And debate is there how we can ensure to compensate their time if they attend those meetings. That is also part of that. And many community forest groups have started to develop some policies of involving them, how could they come. So this ethnic and class dimension is also there. Recently, because this distant users, concept of distant user is also there, the community forestry in Nepal so far has been focused to the people living around or in the forest. But many people sometimes are dependent on forest products, for certain forest products. Some come for timber only, from maybe five, six, 10 kilometers away. Some come for certain NTFs. But by community forestry, delineating the boundary of users and boundary of the forest, we often overlooked those distant users. And the people who really need fuel, they are not nearby forest, but they depend on fuel. They are using cow dung as energy source. The debate is how we can, community forestry system can help those people living very far from the forest, but still they need some fuel or timber for their sufficient need. So that debate surfaced into another form of participatory, so-called participatory system. They call it collaborative forestry where they involve potential users from north and south, maybe some even 20 kilometers far from the forest. They can't come to the forest for management, but they see that they are legitimate users because they don't have other sources. So there are some modalities going on to experiment how we can accommodate those excluded people in the system. Great, good, thank you, Manny. Well, this has been very interesting and you've, I think, very convincingly demonstrated just how complicated and long-term processes of forest governance change will be or if they're going to make progress. It's not simply a matter, as is often the case of having new policies, new laws, empowering communities, actually creating the context, the capabilities within which communities can effectively exercise those rights in fair and equitable ways is another question altogether. And that really is so the long road to forest reform that you've described here. So we're very grateful to you for that. Thank you, Manny. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.