Part II: Conference Planning

Our group left Kathmandu that afternoon and drove south to Rampur where we temporarily moved into the lovely home owned by Prakash's parents. In the early stages of planning their was agreement the conference goal was to explore a short list of sustainble strategies for Nepal's immedate future. The context, or mission, was to give momentum to national strategy for "transitioning" Nepal towards a "sustainable" future and to define, in concrete terms, what that sustainable really meant. The larger strategy called for more local resilience and less national dependence on the growing global economy (globalization in general). From a purely academic perspective the conference was an exercise in integrating "ecological principles, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable economic development into a national political policy."

It's worth noting that we used the words "sustainable" and "sustainability" as organizing principles. We used them in phrases like "more sustainable", or "less-sustainable", and the terms and their meaning could have been replaced with "eco-friendly" or "environmentally sound" that are also loosely knit variables and not science based. For that matter they are subjective value judgments. In the planning phase of the conference we wanted to define sustainability with more accuracy and less subjectivity by way of scientifically derived data from the fields of anthropology, ecology, biology, biochemistry, geology, sociology, chemistry, and physics, that inform the growing usage of the term.

I was originally asked to help design and facilitate the conference based on skills I have in Future Search Conference management, in farming and specifically sustainable agriculture, plus a teaching background in ecology. I was excited about the conference because the country is at an important transition point in it’s development and because it is vulnerably situated between two rapidly emerging superpowers, India and China. It could easily be devoured by market forces beyond it’s control. I wanted to see if a small group of people could temper and reshape development strategies and actually integrate sustainable thinking into the national policy planning of a deeply impoverished third world country. The issue for me was whether we could get a national consensus to alter development forces, change the nominal procedures and outcomes, and find a “sustainable” solution?

The planning sessions went on well out of the fiercely hot sun in this shaded arbor for a few hours each morning and again in the cooler periods of late afternoon.

As the planning progressed a centralizing theme emerged which was nothing like what we had discussed earlier and it represented my worst fears. The more politically ambitious men wanted a terse philosophical argument pitting the "evils" of “Globalization”, meaning the expanding global economy, against the multi-faceted concept of “Sustainability”. These men wanted the conference to be a political statement. They wanted to use the term "Sustainability" as a hammer to bludgeon the nominal economic development strategies of their political opponents. In their zeal to polarize the two concepts they created a false dichotomy in which they portrayed globalization as “the belly of the beast”, as one of them put it, as all ”bad”, and portray sustainability as it's polar opposite as all “good”. There was inaccuarcy and confusion within these definitions. For example, at one point they were saying “organic” was synonymous with “sustainable”.

When I agreed to come to Nepal and work on the conference I didn't know that members of the organizing committee had political ambitions and that the conference would be used as a political platform to promote secular political interests. In other words they were using the conference to build credibility that, in turn, would give their ideas legitimacy. In that context the centralizing idea and attendant themes of the conference were compromised by the expediency of those ambitions. It became apparent these men had a proclivity to polarize "hot" issues to give them a dramatic flair. The conference was no longer an exploration of the complex issues and variables atttendant to both globalization and sustainability and had become an overly simplfied argument striving to make the issues black and white. It seemed risky to me to go in this direction. I preferred the original idea of looking for a shared vision of a transition process for Nepal, that was in itself sustainable, and that would be supported by the government.

To be fair to the conference planners, the politically ambitious included, they could only see Nepal as a small, landlocked, vulnerable country sandwiched between India and China and they were feeling how vulnerable Nepal was to exploitation by these political entities as well as the expanding global economy which they saw, realistically, as a house of cards. It was a delicate position to be in.

The social structure of Nepali society is complex. There is a complicated caste system that involves social and professional groupings of people, men and women. It doubles as a class system. Women have almost no status and own next to nothing. In the caste system Brahmins are at the top of the social order. The ‘untouchables” are at the bottom. In between there is a warrior caste and a merchant caste. Brahmins are not necessarily the wealthiest group. Brahmins are often the poorest people in the room. However, they’re the intellectuals, scholars, teachers, and politicians. Nepali men, most of their lives, live quite apart from women. They interact with women very little as they grow up and the two genders are very separate. For the first two decades of their lives, until they are married, the men hang out with men. Women hang out with women and do most of the manual work.

In addition, the level of poverty in Nepal is staggering. It has a profound impact on the country. Women and men, particularly in rural areas, have extremely difficult lives. Living is strenuous for both genders, but the burden falls on the women. They've only had a voice in the government since the 1990 constitutional reform. Nepal’s is a patriarchal culture practicing patrilineage in which kinship and property is passed down by the father; on the male side of the family, to the son. There’s also a dowry system. When a woman marries she (her parents) must pay her husband’s family for taking her in and she also lives with the husband’s family and helps them. Her parents have had to pay for her to leave and are left without the extra helper. For those living in dire poverty this is an enormous burden. On top of that Nepal has a history of polygamy so that a woman may have to compete with a second or third wife for position and rank.

In the planning stage it became more and more obvious that these issues would not be discussed. They would be implicit and yet it is impossible to talk about the sustainability of any system or any form of government in which all people are not essentially equal and where the health and well being of women and children (and men) are not the highest priority. Sustainability can’t be achieved where there are deep schisms in the perceptions of justice and where basic human needs are not met.

In the last days before the conference was to begin we had agreed on various governing principals for the conference. This included the modes of facilitation and discussion, the hands-on exercises, a work shop and several field trips that would be congruent with the themes of the conference. A community development organization (CDO) in Naryanghar, a small city in south central Nepal on the Naryani River, was going to host the conference. This all sounded good but as the planning wrapped up and we got on the road to Naryanghar I was nervous about how loose everything felt. So much time had been spent on the political themes the agenda and time line were still vague. We were going to "wing" it. I decided to step back and trust my experience of conferences and the "group process" in general. I have seen lots of magical things happen with groups and it fortuitously was the case in Naryanghar.