Natural resources are increasingly contested for their material and symbolic values, and therefore understanding their governance and the resulting equity outcomes remains a key challenge for all concerned. Since resources such as forests are claimed by a range of agents across space (local, regional and global) and time (present and future generations), who are differentiated in diverse axes of power, it is far from clear how these can arrive at a mutual understanding about their equitable sustainable governance.The problem in representing such a complex reality and providing critical feedback to the groups of social agents engaged in forest governance is further compounded by a variety of historically-entrenched institutions and personal dispositions which range from indigenous practices to colonial legacies. In a country like Nepal, where society is starkly differentiated by caste, gender and ethnicity, and where the political system represents an unstable and fragile playing field of feudal conservatives, the bourgeoisie and leftist radicals, forest governance is a complex field to represent epistemologically and organise practically, particularly in the context of potentially high-value timberyielding forest on the accessible plains of the Terai which borders India.

This thesis seeks to redress the gap in the body of knowledge on deliberative processes in forest governance. Much of the scholarship on governance has moved between structural determinism (as reflected in objectivist, scientistic analysis of forestry and institutions) and voluntarism (as reflected in subjective, phenomenological studies such as those on ethnicity and resource use), paying only limited attention to the intersubjective processes of communication, deliberation and transaction. The central question addressed here is how deliberation, as a transactional communicative practice, is enacted, contested, suppressed and distorted, and how non-deliberative postures of tyranny, coercion, deception and violence continue to suppress more egalitarian social relations in the management and use of forest resources.