Demography, Caste/Ethnicity, Federalism, and Socioeconomic Conditions in Relation to Contemporary Environment

Bhattarai, Keshav; Conway, Dennis

Nepal is a melting pot of multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multilingual groups. All the information available on Nepal’s demography for this study pertains to the old governance, such as the country’s five development regions. Nepal has recently been federated into 7 provinces, 77 districts, and 753 local level units on the basis of demography and geography. This chapter first analyzes demographic information based on the erstwhile development regions; then, towards the end of the chapter, it integrates the contemporary demographic information with the new federal structure in order to incorporate the chapter’s contemporary internal, regional “structuration.” This chapter elucidates the complexities and contextual specificities of demographic dynamics and population-environment relationships in a number of societal domains including caste/ethnicity, federalism, language, religion, migration/brain drain, and remittances. This chapter explores the ways in which demographers and other social scientists have sought to understand the relationships that occur in a full range of population dynamic changes and environmental changes that now characterize contemporary Nepal. In addition, it also explains how ecosystem services have been deteriorating in Nepal with many working-age people out-migrating each day to acquire jobs that provide them and their families back home with remittances. Also explained are the ways in which this trend of emigration distorting the traditional families’ social cohesion and how various government policies and programs have been ineffective to address the resultant population-environmental dilemmas. This chapter serves as the preliminary foundation for the remaining chapters that follow in order to link various demographic issues with the location-specific socioeconomic conditions and environment.