Living with floods and land management strategies in Nepal

Abstract

Land management is often addressed as a secondary matter in flood prevention, but should be given more attention. Land is a crucial factor in how societies and communities cope with changing flood risk, so policies must begin with land management to improve flood prevention and flood resilience. This is key issue for flood risk prevention as well in third countries. In our paper we are focusing on the research in Nepal and the question, how are the communities in Nepal living with floods and using nature-based flood mitigation measures on private and public land. We considered the flood like the basic unit of the analysis, in which three principal actors directly participate: 1) communities/villages affected by/living with flood; 2) pertinent institutions of regional/local administration, being in charge of “risk management” and “land management”, and 3) NGOs, local to international, active in this field expertise and region. The main objective of this survey is to reveal behaviour of the three actors in particular phases of the situation (flood) and their attitudes to the flood. The research is aimed to achieve in-depth understanding on the situation as well as on factors supposed to influence /define it, particularly in the link to land management. As the basic method of the research, semi-structured interview were suggested for empirical data collection from the field, with the sample of respondents derived from the population by use of combination of purposeful and random sampling. Qualitative empirical data are processed by use of thematic analysis, the method used for identification of relevant themes and links among them. The field survey is realised in two model areas, in Kathmandu valley (representing urban environment) and in Tulsipur Sub-Metropolitan area (representing rural environment). Our research builds on the presumption that the process of adaptation/social learning is not universal, but place specific. Therefore, the hypothesis suggests, that thanks to the apparent differences existing between the model areas, adaptation strategies applied in Tulsipur are supposed to differ from that in Kathmandu.