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do they yet systematically deliver “public” goods to local
populations to acquire political capital.
The level of violence that Nepali criminal groups perpetrate
in support of their profit-seeking activities is also fairly
limited, when compared with criminal organizations in
other parts of the world, such as Colombia or Mexico. One
reason for the limited level of this type of criminal violence
may well be that corruption in Nepal is easy, and even
limited coercive threats achieve their desired corruption
and impunity effects, especially as Nepali criminal
groups have been able to cultivate networks of political
support at the highest levels of both law enforcement
institutions and political parties. Paradoxically, an increase
in law enforcement and prosecution effectiveness against
criminal groups may initially provide an impetus for
criminal groups to increase their resort to violence.
This rather primitive stage of organized crime formation
and the limited sophistication of illicit economies present
important opportunities for policy initiatives. However,
in the absence of careful design many anti-crime policies
can be counterproductive. Intensified interdiction without
careful planning can merely weed out less sophisticated
criminal enterprises while the toughest and leanest
criminal groups survive law enforcement actions and
acquire a greater market share and political and economic
power. Law enforcement actions can thus inadvertently
encourage the vertical integration of organized crime
groups and undermine the constraints preventing criminal
groups from resorting to violence.
Countering such inadvertent negative outcomes requires
a very sophisticated interdiction strategy that privileges
targeting the most violent groups or those with the
greatest capacity to corrupt first. The effectiveness of such
a strategy in turn depends on the intelligence capacity
of law enforcement institutions and their ability to resist
corrupting political pressures. Both are likely to remain
elusive in Nepal for a long time.
Across the range of illicit economies, including extortion,
tax evasion, drug smuggling, illegal logging, illegal trade
in wildlife, and human trafficking, law enforcement
efforts are sporadic, inadequate, and often selective.
The selectivity, however, is not the result of careful and
systematic evaluations of which illicit economies pose
most severe threats, but rather of corruption within law
enforcement institutions and their lack of resources.
The police and justice sectors are badly in need of reform.
Both remain inaccessible and exclusionary. Police and
prosecutors lack investigative capacities. The police also
lack intelligence and an understanding of local criminal
patterns, in part because they remain profoundly
unconnected to the local communities in which they are
deployed. However, existing and continuing politicization
of formal institutions and the endemic corruption make the
design and implementation of effective and meaningful
policy reform interventions extremely difficult.
Nepal’s many illicit economies present multiple threats
to the state and society. However, many also provide
employment for some of the most marginalized segments
of Nepal’s population. Often inadequate in both scope and
design, alternative livelihoods efforts across the range of
illicit economies in Nepal have by and large not been very
effective.
Compared with actions against the illicit drug trade,
smuggling in legal goods, extortion, and human trafficking,
policy interventions against environmental crime promise
perhaps the greatest payoffs. They need to include both
the reinforcement of existing law-enforcement efforts
against wildlife poaching as well as better-designed
alternative livelihood programs for forest-dwelling and
forest-surrounding communities. Neither illegal logging
nor wildlife poaching in Nepal has yet reached crisis
levels of intensity, but international market pressures
and the local conditions of widespread poverty, porous
borders, corruption linked to highest political levels, and
meager existing enforcement capacities all push toward a
potentially significant increase in environmental crime in
Nepal.
In contrast, actions against the drug trade in Nepal offer
comparatively lower payoffs. Alternative livelihoods
policies will for a long time be held hostage to broader rural
under-development and a lack of access to value-added
chains. Unless these structural conditions are addressed,
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Responding to the Impact of Organized Crime on Developing Countries
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