About the Book: Reframing Governance: Understanding Deliberative Politics in
Nepal's Terai Forestry
The book develops a fresh approach to understanding governance using key
concepts of Pierre Bourdieu (symbolic violence, doxa, field and habitus) and
Jurgen Habermas (deliberative politics). Taking a case study of forest
governance in Nepal Terai, the book analyses Habermas's ideal of Bourdieu's
theory of practice. The case study shows that despite growing rhetoric of
participatory and decentralized governance of forestry in Nepal, the actual
practices of forest governance in Nepal Terai are controlled by dominant actors
(mainly techno-bureaucratic and feudal political agents), with limited
deliberative spaces actually available to, or proactively claimed by, the
disadvantaged