Efficacy of Local Government in Delivering Local Judicial Service to Stakeholders in Nepal: A Scoping Review

Abstract The Constitution of Nepal 2015, Article 217 has mandated the state's selected judicial function to the 753 local governments through a three-member Judicial Committee in every municipality and rural municipality. Nearly a decade later, the evidence shows that these committees resolve a large share of the disputes they receive, mostly through mediation, at low cost and close to home. Yet their efficiency is uneven and fragile. This scoping review maps the published and grey literature from 2015 to 2026 on how efficiently local governments deliver judicial services to stakeholders, including disputants, women, marginalized groups, local officials, lawyers and the formal courts. Evidence was drawn from Nepal Journals Online, the Tribhuvan University Central Library repository, reports of the International Commission of Jurists, and national newspapers. The literature is organized into six themes: legal design and jurisdiction, institutional and human capacity, procedural efficiency and outputs, enforcement and executive coordination, inclusion and gender, and political economy and legitimacy. The available studies show to high settlement rates facilitated by the Judicial Committee of the local government. However, the same studies report weak legal expertise, missing procedural rules, poor enforcement, political chnical gaps and more about how authority, partisanship, fiscal dependence and professional interests shape the committees. The review finds that the evidence base is thin, dominated by singlinterference and low public awareness. From the political economy lens, these problems are less about tee-site case studies and opinion pieces, and lacks comparative, cost-based and longitudinal measures of efficiency. It closes with a research agenda and policy options for strengthening local justice in federal Nepal.