| Hill Agricultural Research Project (HARP) Nepal - Lessons for
the Policy, Institutions and Processes Dimensions of the Sustainable
Livelihoods Approach: Karim Hussein (ODI) and Sarah Montagu
(DFID) |
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3. Political Setting |
Nepal has
a long history of autocratic rule, with most of the political power
concentrated in the centre and with the monarchy. After restoration
of democracy in 1990, strengthening of local self-government became
a basic policy for decentralisation. The current legal framework
for decentralisation (1997 Act and 1999 Local - Self governance
Act) potentially gives more voice to the poor in local decisions
and emphasises the participation of local people with the preparation
and implementation of district development plans.
Decentralisation
To
some extent it can be said that decentralisation, in the sense of
sharing "public power" vertically through "interventions" from outside
the state apparatus, has occurred. The Local Self-governance Act,
1999, provides local institutions with executive, legislative and
judicial powers in order to establish them as local governments
and make them accountable to local people. The role of central government
is limited to policy formulation. All responsibilities for planning,
resource mobilisation, allocation, monitoring and evaluation have
been handed over to the local institutions and to newly created
representative village and district level organisations: Village
Development Committees (VDCs) and District Development Committees
DDCs).
However, devolution in Nepal has rarely been understood as a mechanism
of sharing political power among the central and local levels of
governance. Elected local bodies are often put together with the
field offices of the line agencies, both taken simply as an arm
of central authorities designed to execute their decisions. Elected
bodies therefore tend draw their legitimacy from, and are accountable
to, the centre rather than local electorates. This undermines the
potential to make demands on the centre, and for the centre to respond
more appropriately to local livelihood needs.
However, the experiences of many developing countries show that
without the democratisation and decentralisation of state institutions,
it is not possible to build self-reliant and self-determining local
entities capable of responding to the increasing demands of diverse
groups in a polity. This is highly relevant in a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual
and multi-religious society such as Nepal. Hence, while there are
problems, decentralisation is has still been important in empowering
many sections of the population of Nepal.
Public Sector Institutions
External factors limiting the performance of public sector institutions
in Nepal include:
- an absence
of effective systems for relating expenditure programmes to outputs,
such as targets in the development plan;
- management
systems that emphasise management controls on the distribution
and use of resources;
- organisational
culture that rewards obedience (to rules and to superiors).
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