The Politics of Care in Coping Well with Change: Conceptualising and Questioning Care to Move beyond ‘Resilience’ in Rural Nepal.

Abstract

Care has been described as ‘everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990). This paper centres the role and politics of care in understanding efforts to promote ‘resilient’ forests and meaningful livelihoods in Nepal. It considers some of the major socio-ecological changes occurring in Nepal, and how the promotion of ‘resilience’ approaches in the face of these changes has been critiqued as overly techno-managerial and apolitical. As an alternative, the paper draws on Tronto’s (2013) care framework to offer a series of questions that help us understand not only how villagers cope with but cope well with change, and to question where responsibilities for caring and resisting certain changes might lie. It is the hope that this paper will enable researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the role of care in their own efforts to promote ‘resilient’ forests and meaningful livelihoods in Nepal, and beyond.