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Paper short abstract

Adaptation relies on the commons in Nepal, raising challenges for participation and distributive justice. How do placed-based commoners gain access to decision making at other scales? How do top-down actors shape who and how people get access to compensation funds?

Paper long abstract

Adaptation is now well established as a political, contested process, but how common people engage in adaptation governance is less well understood. More of the conversation is about which authorities, at which levels should be making what kind of decisions. Yet in places like Nepal, compensation funds have been earmarked for people at the grassroots. In November, 2025, Nepal was paid USD 9.4 million from the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) for documented sequestration of carbon dioxide in forests. A forest department official assured me these funds were only to be paid out to the communities that had done the hard work of both conserving forests and monitoring them. While this is laudable, the same official threw up his hands and said, “that has to be worked out, we are developing criteria” when I asked how they were going to assure the money was not simply captured by elites. In this paper, I use the example of Nepal to revisit questions of participation and distributive justice within the commons. How do people at the grassroots gain access to decision making at other scales when user-groups are conceived as place-based? What are the consequences of top-down actors shaping who and how people get access to compensation funds? These questions become more contentious as development aid is unceremoniously eliminated overnight by major donors—donors who were deeply involved in implementing carbon sequestration schemes and promoting participatory resource governance at the grassroots, contributing to uncertainty in the commons.