During the 1990s, a range of factors related to unprecedented urban growth precipitated the rapid deterioration of Kathmandu's environment. The Bagmati and Bishnumati Rivers, which converge in the heart of the capital city, were among the urban features characterized in official and popular discourses as increasingly degraded. Worsening river conditions motivated a variety of state- and internationally-sponsored restoration initiatives that, in turn, drew steady criticism. Some critics charged that official restoration activities were consistently insensitive to, or abusive of, the rivers' cultural significance. Others pointed to the ways that river restoration projects threatened the security of tens of thousands of landless migrants (sukumbasi ) settled on exposed riverbed lands in the riparian zone. This dissertation examines Bagmati-Bishnumati restoration debates as a case of 'culturing' urban ecology. It explores both the official interventions through which urban environmental order was administered in Kathmandu, and the ways that urban nature, the object of these interventions, was itself constructed through contested histories and ideologies of belonging. The study focuses on three informant groups: actors positioned in state and development agencies, cultural heritage activists, and advocates for the housing security of the landless poor. The research spans a volatile period in Nepal, characterized by a contentious democratization process, a civil war fought primarily in the countryside, and the eventual reinstatement of autocratic rule. In this context of extreme flux, efforts to ensure, create, or imagine ecological stability intersected with aspirations for political stability, such that to culture urban ecology was also to engage in the reproduction or contestation of the cultural idea of the state. The dissertation therefore combines a study of the cultural strategies employed by individuals and groups engaged in ecology-as-practice, and the ways that modern ecology provided powerful discursive and practical terrain for the cultural reproduction of the state in a time of contingency.
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