This paper analyzes the effect of different types of cookstoves on firewood demand at the household level. Using nationally representative household survey data from Nepal, we find that stove type significantly affects the firewood demand for household uses. Traditional mud-stove user households seem to use less firewood than the open-fire stove users. Surprisingly, households with the so-called ‘improved’ stoves seem to use more firewood than the households with mud stoves. Thus, converting traditional open-fire stoves to mud stoves may be a better conservation strategy in the short term rather than installing improved stoves, unless the technology improves. However, in the long run, making cleaner fuel more accessible to rural households is desirable to reduce indoor air pollution.

Cities in South Asia are experiencing storm water drainage problems due to a combination of urban sprawl, structural, hydrological, socioeconomic and climatic factors. The frequency of short duration, high-intensity rainfall is expected to increase in the future due to climate change. Given the limited capacity of drainage systems in South Asian cities, urban flooding and waterlogging is expected to intensify. The problem gets worse when low-lying areas are filled up for infrastructure development due to unplanned urban growth, reducing permeable areas. Additionally, solid waste, when dumped in canals and open spaces, blocks urban drainage systems and worsens urban flooding and waterlogging. Using hydraulic models for two South Asian cities, Sylhet (in Bangladesh) and Bharatpur (in Nepal), we find that 22.3% of the land area in Sylhet and 12.7% in Bharatpur is under flooding risk, under the current scenario. The flood risk area can be reduced to 3.6% in Sylhet and 5.5% in Bharatpur with structural interventions in the drainage system. However, the area under flood risk could increase to 18.5% in Sylhet and 7.6% in Bharatpur in five years if the cities' solid waste is not managed properly, suggesting that the structural solution alone, without proper solid waste management, is almost ineffective in reducing the long-term flooding risk in these cities.

With more than 12,000 deaths in nine years, a homegrown Maoist insurgency, reinforced by ethnic and socioeconomic cleavages, has resulted in high levels of political violence and human rights violations in Nepal. With fresh district-level data and drawing on theoretical insights from both the conflict and human rights literatures, research that has relied primarily on cross-national comparisons, the authors develop and test hypotheses using a subnational research design. They find an exchange of violence between government and opposition forces that depends on the political and geographical opportunities for violence. Their findings contribute new evidence for the importance of geography but also suggest that democracy and social capital influence the selection of violence by both government and opposition.

Municipal solid waste management is one of the major challenges that cities in developing countries are facing. Although waste collection services are critical to build a smart city, the focus of both scholarship and action/activism has been more on the utilization of waste than on collection. We devised a choice experiment to elicit the preferences of municipal residents with regard to the various attributes of solid waste collection services in the Bharatpur Metropolitan City of Nepal. The study showed that households identify waste collection frequency, timing of door-to-door waste collection services, and cleanliness of the streets as the critical elements of municipal waste collection that affect their welfare and willingness to pay. While almost all households (95%) were participating in the waste collection service in the study area, more than half (53%) expressed dissatisfaction with the existing service. Women were the main actors engaged in waste collection and disposal at household level. The results of the choice analysis suggest that households prefer a designated waste collection time with waste collection bins placed at regular intervals on the streets for use by pedestrians who often throw garbage on the streets in the absence of bins. For these improvements, households were willing to pay an additional service fee of 10–28% on top of what they were already paying. The study also finds that municipal waste collection can be improved through the involvement of Tole Lane Committees in designing the timing and frequency of the service and by introducing a system of progressive tariffs based on the number of storeys per house.

The extensive use of plastic bags in Nepal has led to growing concern in recent years. We investigate the impact of a municipal plastic bags ban on bags use behavior, based on a field survey carried out among consumers and retailers across selected municipalities. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of the ban critically depends on its enforcement and sanctioning system. In particular, our results suggest that the perceived sanction is a critical determinant of plastic bags use, as a doubling of the perceived sanction could reduce plastic bags use by two-thirds for retailers and by one-half for consumers. While the nominal amount of the fine does not seem to play a role, the probability of being detected appears to play a key role in the perceived sanction. This implies that effective monitoring of the ban by the municipal authorities is critical for the success of the policy.