Dr Bipin Adhikari
There is nothing to disagree with Professor He Baogang’s presentation on hybrid federalism in Asia. I believe that what has worked is a system that deals with the local context, and does not just imitate what are described as the fine classical federal examples.
Baogang has quoted Hale (2004) to to explain that federal states in which component regions are invested with distinct ethnic content are more likely to collapse. He has quoted May (2007) to argue that, for the Philippines, special autonomy is better than wholesale federalization to deal with the existing problem in Mindanao because it can solve the problem without changing the whole system.
Federalism presupposes two things: the maintenance of unity and the satisfaction of the desire of minorities. It is here that Nepal stakeholders have problems.
