Governance on provision of ecosystem and its services in Nepal: Lessons from appraisal of policy, legislation, and institution

Abstract

Ecosystem degradation and the loss of ecosystem services stem from multiple causes, requiring coordinated and diverse policies, legislation, and institutional responses to effectively address them. An understanding of the policies, legislation, and institutions governing ecosystem services can enhance the sustained management and provision of ecosystem services. Therefore, this work appraises the policies, legislation and institutional provisions made by the government of Nepal. In addition, this study analyzes policy implications and identifies gaps and barriers that hinder future improvements in the management of ecosystem services. Altogether, 63 documents comprising 45 policies and 18 legislations promulgated by the government of Nepal have been assessed for content analysis. Twenty Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) have also been conducted to obtain expert insights about the gaps in policy formulation and implementation. The results indicate that though several sectoral policies and legislations have made provision on management of ecosystem and its services implicitly or explicitly, still there is lacking of overarching framework to deal with ecosystem services. Overlapping roles and responsibilities outlined in the constitution, policies, and legislation, coupled with weak enforcement and lack of multisectoral coordination mechanism, are significant obstacles to effective policy implementation. Therefore, there is a need to develop an overarching national framework backed up by legislation with a strong multisectoral coordination mechanism that will adopt a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to the sustained management and provision of the ecosystem and its services.

Keywords

Ecosystem services / Governance / Policies / Legislation / Nepal

Ethical statement

This research involved the human subjects (interviews) as the Key Informant Interview (KII), thus, the authors declared and informed that the consent was obtained from all the KII participants for this study and paper.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Pashupati Nepal: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Basanta Paudel: Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Yili Zhang: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Resources, Methodology, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Narendra Raj Khanal: Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Linshan Liu: Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Mohan Kumar Rai: Writing – review & editing. Nirdesh Nepal: Writing – review & editing, Methodology.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to all the KII respondents for their valuable input. We express our gratitude for the support of the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (Grant No. 2019QZKK0603), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant No. 42250410329), the President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) for Visiting Scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grants No. 2021VCA0005 and 2023VCC0005). Further, the authors are thankful to the editors and reviewers for their valuable time.

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100263.

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