9411168 SHRESTHA This study will analyze land encroachment as an ecopolitical struggle over land access and control in agrarian Nepal using a political ecology framework. Nepal, like many developing countries, has arrived at a juncture where mounting peasant impoverishment has come face to face with growing ecological degradation. This interface reveals that poverty is not just a socioeconomic issue; it is also an ecological issue with wide- ranging ramifications. As in many other agrarian societies, there is a struggle between peasants' day-to-day survival, which includes land access, on one side and the state's dominant interests and environmental sustainability, which leads to land/resource control, on the other. Two basic questions emerge from this growing ecopolitical struggle: why does the struggle occur and how does it affect the sustainability of what can be termed "peasant ecology" in which peasants are engaged in direct production relationships with nature. Their socioeconomic viability therefore is intrinsically intertwined with the ecological sustainability of their environment. Land encroachment is thus seen as a form of peasant (social) movement and/or a form of everyday resistance against the state and its land control policy. Guided by this general conceptualization, this study will investigate three interrelated issues: (1) the evolution of human-environment relations in agrarian Nepal, focusing on the social and political configuration of peasant ecology, (2) the political ecology of land encroachment, i.e. the social and ecopolitical conflicts over land in te Tarai, and (3) the implications of these conflicts for peasants' socioeconomic viability and environmental sustainability. The study will involve extensive research in Nepal relying on both the collection of formal materials relating to land use policy and actual land use and on interviews with peasants and officials in the region. This research will contribute to adva ncing a coherent theoretical political ecology framework, one that can be used to investigate similar struggles unfolding in various local and regional contexts throughout the third world. As such it will also add new insights relevant to the formation of policies for dealing with the growing tension between the protection of critical environments and the social and economic survival of local populations who are dependent on those environments.
