Negotiating the 'paradox of participation' to increase the social equity of participatory ecological monitoring in Nepal

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Inequalities in access to and control over benefits of natural resources threaten to undermine advances made in participatory development over the past 30 years. Participatory ecological monitoring is proposed as a backbone of new payments for ecosystem services projects and carbon trading schemes like REDD+, and is already integral to sustainable forest management through Nepal's community forestry programme. The Nepalese government believe that forest carbon trading could be a significant contributor to development in Nepal in the future, but acknowledges that all forestry schemes need to better promote national goals of poverty alleviation. This Fellowship responds to this urgent challenge by engaging practitioners and policy makers in Nepalese forestry to co-create approaches to participatory ecological monitoring which focus explicitly on the goal of social equity. My PhD thesis exposed the social outcomes of one such project in Nepal, finding that it served - unintentionally - to reinforce existing processes of marginalisation based on gender, caste and literacy. It sought to understand how this 'tyranny of participation' could be transformed, suggesting that this will only occur through meaningful engagement with deeper cultural, political and institutional contexts. This Fellowship will build on my thesis to reach out to those across Nepal's community forestry programme who deliver participatory monitoring projects on the ground, and who develop the policy space within which they take place. It will engage them in a dialogue around the paradox that participatory projects can in fact be disempowering, and build on that critical reflection to co-design approaches and policies which pay attention to the fundamental factors critical to delivering social equity. This Fellowship will be dedicated to engaging practitioners and policy-makers in Nepal, and beyond, in a critical dialogue aimed at promoting the social equity of participatory forest monitoring projects on the ground. Through these collaborations, I would seek to build on my PhD to: Build a global overview of the ways in which social equity and benefit sharing are currently considered in participatory ecological monitoring projects, and how they are conceptualised by academics working in this sphereBring together projects involving participatory approaches to monitoring in Nepal (either as part of sustainable forest management or carbon-related assessment) and provide them with a space for; critical reflection on the current framing and assessment of equity and benefit-sharing, for sharing experiences and expertise in this area, for co-designing procedures to promote the social equity of on-going and future projects, and for monitoring the challenges to implementation as part of an iterative design processTo take the experiences from Nepal to a global academic and non-academic audience and engage them in the lessons to be learntBuild international networks of academics, practitioners and policy-makers, through which I can create opportunities for future research in this area and secure a successful academic careerA GCRF Fellowship would have a vitally important, lasting impact on my academic career. Since completing my PhD I have proven myself able to produce high quality papers, to successfully branch out into complementary fields of study, and to initiate collaborations with colleagues in academia and beyond. A Fellowship would allow me to cement my expertise and influence as an academic in the field of community-based conservation, to build my capacity to collaborate with stakeholders to co-create impacts, and to continue doing so into the future in order to respond to on-going global challenges.