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Many policies on disaster governance and community resilience aim at enhancing justice outcomes at the local community level. In so doing, they tend to focus on equal distribution of a set of rights and goods among the communities. However, these rights and goods are defined by an underlying value structure, and such structures tend to mirror the interests of the powerful groups in the community. The fundamental problem is that the equality of the rights and redistribution of the goods cannot remedy disaster injustices. Taking a case study from Nepal's earthquake 2015, this paper aims to link key works on disasters with justice theories - an attempt, which could help strengthen the conceptual foundations of policy responses to disaster recovery. We use the Nepal case of earthquake recovery to demonstrate the relevance of disaster justice lens which emphasizes the role of disaster justice champions, critical politics of knowledge, accountability, representation and disaster justice convictions. We demonstrate that the platform of critical knowledge politics is important where civic science and traditional science is deliberated, interrogated, negotiated and integrated. We argue that only when disaster justice champions with convictions of priority to the disadvantaged effectively utilizes the platform of critical knowledge politics, it is possible to influence political deliberations and decision making that can potentially enhance disaster justice in practice. Finally, and in a more theoretical sense, we argue that in order to enhance disaster justice, responses need to be informed by the understanding of 'justice as redistribution' as well as 'justice as recognition'.

Summary Gender is seminal to agrobiodiversity management, and inequities are likely to be exacerbated under a changing climate. Using in-depth interviews with farmers and officials from government and non-government organizations in Nepal, we explore how gender relations are influenced by wider socio-economic changes, and how alterations in gender relations shape responses to climate change. Combining feminist political ecology and critical social-ecological systems thinking, we analyze how gender and adaptation interact as households abandon certain crops, adopt high-yielding varieties and shift to cash crops. We argue that the prevailing development paradigm reinforces inequitable gender structures in agrobiodiversity management, undermining adaptation to the changing climate.

Based on the review of relevant literature, this paper investigates howforest authority is produced or reproduced in the course of forest policy change, by drawing on the past four decades of participatory forest policy reform in Nepal. We analyze various waves of deliberative politics that emerged in different contexts related to the Himalayan crisis, the flow of international aid for conservation and development projects, civil conflict and democratic transition, and most recently the policy responses to climate change. The analysis shows how such deliberative politics contributed to the change or continuity of conventional authorities around forest policy and practice. It shows that despite notable participatory policy reform, the conventional authority has become further re-entrenched. Based on this analysis, we argue that efforts to understand forest policy change can be moremeaningful if attention is paid towhether and howdeliberative politicsemerge to challenge the hegemonic claims to power and knowledge about resource governance practices. Such approach to policy analysis can open newpossibilities for understanding democratic policy reformby explicating the nuances of deliberation and policy politics occurring at multiple scales.