SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This thesis explores the effects of post-war state restructuring in Nepal on the dynamics of political voice and resource distribution. Drawing on a political economy analysis and adopting a political settlements framework, the research assesses why the new federal system took the form it did and how the underlying configurations of power in national, provincial and local spheres influenced the implementation of the federal reform. There is growing interest in questions around post-war decentralisation; however, the significance of political settlements in shaping decentralisation trajectories has been neglected in most contemporary literature on decentralisation. The analysis is based on evidence from 17 months of fieldwork conducted in Kathmandu, in the provincial assemblies and two municipalities in each of Koshi and Madhesh provinces. This approach allows to account for the spatial dimension of power and to explore how the outcomes of state restructuring result from interactions between political settlements at the centre and in the periphery of the country. It also makes it possible to observe the effects of state restructuring at local level and how they vary between and within provinces. I argue that a political settlement dominated by traditional forces has resulted in the implementation of the federal system as a form of one-sided state consolidation. This has led to a limited exercise of political voice in the newly created institutions and to sub-national political representatives being more loyal and accountable to the central leadership than to the local people. Moreover, the patronage politics that characterised the unitary state has extended to the sub-national levels, muting the exercise of political voice and channelling state resources through extensive patronage networks, while still leading to a less concentrated distribution of resources.