Gender, caste and ethnicity-based social exclusion is deeply embedded in Nepalese society. This draft paper, presented at the World Bank Conference on New Frontiers in Social Policy, examines the joint policy reform initiative of the World Bank and DFID to address the persistent legacy of caste, ethnic and gender-based exclusion in Nepal. In order to move from policy-level analysis to active implementation, policy reform should not be viewed as a technocratic act, but rather as part of a wider process of social, cultural and institutional change.
The Nepal Gender and Social Exclusion Assessment (GSEA) is a collaborative policy research initiative of the World Bank and DFID, and is part of an on-going effort to influence formal policy-making in Nepal. The GSEA primarily focuses on overcoming the legacy of interconnected caste, ethnic and gender-based exclusion in Nepal.
If policy reform or social change is to take hold, it must be part of a deeper process of social and institutional change. The GESA has developed a framework for thinking about social change, which takes its starting point from the relationships between people and the institutions and organisations that shape their life opportunities. The interrelated processes of empowerment and social inclusion are viewed as a means of shifting these relationships towards greater equity. This conceptual framework is based on the following elements:
- Empowerment: which occurs at the individual and group level and relates to changes in the internal self-perception of those who have been in some way negatively defined and marginalised by the dominant society.
- Social inclusion: which seeks to bring about system-level institutional reform and policy change to remove inequities in the external environment. Social inclusion requires an institutional environment in which the political system supports equal agency for all groups and individuals.
- Institutions as culture: institutions are critical to equity and prosperity because they establish the distributional ‘rules of the game’; they structure access to the assets, capabilities and opportunities that allow people to meet their needs, manage risks and make progress towards achieving their aspirations.
- Institutions and identity: individuals and groups are defined, and define themselves, in terms of the multiple layers of institutions that surround them. Formal institutions consist of written rules encoded in law and ultimately backed by the state while informal institutions include behaviour, values and norms that are deeply embedded in Nepal’s social and historical context.
In moving from analysis to action, the policy reform process must address the fact that social change in Nepal is often hampered not only by a lack of government capacity, but also by failure to specifiy concrete implementation mechansims and put in place the incentive and disincentive systems and accountability structures to reinforce policy statements. When these ‘nuts and bolts’ are not in place the gap is filled by patterns of behaviour based on traditional hiearchies and the result on the ground is business as usual. This ‘implementation gap’ can be seen as a form of elite resistance or elite capture. To address this implementation gap, the reform process must take account of the following issues:
- Progressive reform policies formulated by high-level officials who are committed to genuine change, are implemented by those in lower levels of the bureaucracy who do not necessarily share the same technocratic, reform oriented mind set. During the implementation process, formal policy directives interact with a dense network of informal systems of behaviour and values that are based on relations of kinship, party affiliation, business interests, caste, ethnicity and gender. Unless attention is paid to all the links in the implementation process, what happens on the ground level often bears little relation to reform intentions.
- Elite resistence to change can be especially strong when the reform effort seeks to address social policy issues such as the legacy of caste, ethnic or gender based social discrimination because the informal institutions that have perpetuated these exclusions consist of systems of meaning and value through which eliteindividuals and groups have defined their identity and maintained privledged access.
- State-sponsored social policy reforms, such as the proposed affirmative action policies in Nepal, must be cast in a long-term framework. This framework should encourage a broad spectrum of government and civil society groups to engage in a series of debates about why and how social change should be realised.
- A long-term and multi-dimensional approach is needed to find ways to achieve the goal of social inclusion. This approach should not only aim to change formal rules, but more importantly, to engage with deep-seated values and norms that guide the way that people practice these rules.
