The politics of care in coping well with change: Conceptualising and questioning care to move beyond ‘resilience’ in rural Nepal

Care has been described as ‘everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’
so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990). This paper centres
the role and politics of care in understanding efforts to promote ‘resilient’ forests and
meaningful livelihoods in Nepal. It considers some of the major socio-ecological changes
occurring in Nepal, and how the promotion of ‘resilience’ approaches in the face of these
changes has been critiqued as overly techno-managerial and apolitical. As an alternative,
the paper draws on Tronto’s (2013) care framework to offer a series of questions that help
us understand not only how villagers cope with but cope well with change, and to question
where responsibilities for caring and resisting certain changes might lie. It is the hope that
this paper will enable researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the role of care
in their own efforts to promote ‘resilient’ forests and meaningful livelihoods in Nepal, and
beyond.