Binod's Blog

Introduction Narratives are often characterized as stories or arguments that tell about scenarios and revolves around the chain of events (Roe, 1991) . Events in the narrative start with the normal situation in which local people are living without problems having a good relationship with the environment. Then problems or changes arise in the existing situations and the effects of such problems are assessed focusing on causal explanation. In addition, narratives are normative than ideology and explicitly programmatic (ibid:288) . These are also encoded by many researchers as “received wisdom” (Leach and Mearns, 1996:443) which enables policymakers and other donor agencies. Often their intervention action gets a heroic position in the local communities (Hoben et al., 1996) although, their truth-value is in question. On the basis of this theoretical justification, this essay presents the narrative of Himalayan environmental degradation and argument about it. Himalayan Environme