In the name of girls’ education, various plans, policies and programs have been formulated and implemented by the Government of Nepal. Yet, girls’ education in rural Madhesh is full of various challenges. Most of the efforts have not achieved the desired result because of political, socio-cultural and financial barriers. In this regard, this paper attempts to explore the perspective of parents on girl education in rural Madhesh.

Shiva Hari Adhikari | Nepal Administrative Staff College | shiva.adhikari@nasc.org.np

Narayan Prasad Ghimire | Texas International College | nntghmr02@gmail.com

Raghu Raj Kaphle | | raghukaphle123@gmail.com

Anil Kumar Gupta | Nepal Administrative Staff College | anil.gupta@nasc.org.np

Existing literature provides ample evidence on how people understand accountability in different contexts. However, little attention has been paid on the integration of various theoretical perspectives about understanding accountability for education service delivery. Discussing theoretical premises against the empirical evidence from the community schools of Nepal, this article explores common ground of various theoretical perspectives about understanding school actors' accountability.

Government accountability is intrinsic to democracies, as citizens can choose public officials through their popular vote and accordingly exercise some control and oversight over the officials. But elections held in periodic intervals do not allow the scrutiny of the decisions and activities that are conducted on a daily basis. This article examines how to confront this challenge of holding the governments to account, by looking into local governance in Nepal, where citizens have limited knowledge of the government decisions, activities, procedures followed, and their outcomes.

The Government of Nepal has adopted various policies, plans and programs to curb corruption over the years. However, Transparency International (2015) showed that there is a high level of corruption in Nepal. Bearing such aspect in the mind, the study aims to analyse level, pattern and trend of corruption in Nepal by analysing the cases published by Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority in its annual reports from 2005 to 2015.

Numerous inter-related social and institutional factors are causing concern as to effective responses to the increasing number and severity of forest and wildfires in Nepal, due in similar measure to socio-cultural, politico-bureaucratic as well as global climatic issues.

This paper examines the contribution of fiscal decentralization on reducing human poverty in the districts of Nepal. Development landscape of twenty-first century has changed with more focus on human-centric development under the umbrella of human development. Accordingly, the broader goal of development is not only to increase the economic growth but also to enlarge the choices of people. The key finding of this paper is that the ongoing efforts on fiscal decentralization are supportive to reduce the human poverty in the districts.