ACADEMIC
Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal
Please cite as: Rankin, Katharine and Edward Simpson. (in press). “Roads and the politics of thought: Climate in India, democracy in Nepal.” In Galen Murton and Luke Heslop (Eds.) Highways and hierarchies: Ethnographies of mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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Stuck on the side of the road: Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal
Please cite as: Sigdel, T. and Murton, G. (in press). “Stuck on the side of the road: Mobility, marginality, and neoliberal governmentality in Nepal.” In Galen Murton and Luke Heslop (Eds.) Highways and hierarchies: Ethnographies of mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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Labor and the humanitarian present: Thinking through the 2015 Nepal earthquakes
Selection: In this chapter, we build on and contribute to insights from critical humanitarianism studies and critiques of disaster capitalism through a focus on construction labour … This focus reveals key points of intersection between the rationalities of bureaucratic humanitarian governance and the political economy of reconstruction. As we demonstrate in the following sections, labour markets are deeply instituted and spatially variegated … They are shaped by the internal bureaucratic logics and inertia of state and donor apparatuses, and by firms and individual labourers competing to exploit new vulnerabilities and opportunities in emerging post-disaster geographies.
Please cite as: Kunwar, Shyam, Elsie Lewison and Katharine Rankin. (2021). “Labor and the humanitarian present: Thinking through the 2015 Nepal earthquakes.” In Michael Hutt, Mark Liechty and Stefanie Lotter (Eds.), Epicentre to aftermath: Rebuilding and remembering in the wake of Nepal’s earthquakes, 87-109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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भूईँ तहमा नागरिक समाज : सडक निर्माण उपभोक्ता समिति र नागरिक सहभागिताको प्रश (Civil society at the grassroots: Road users’ committees and the question of peoples’ participation)
Selection: विकास, नागरिक र राज्य बीच सम्बन्धको प्रतिबिम्ब हो । विकासका अभ्यासमा सुशासन कायम गर्न राज्य र नागरिक दुविअको भूमिका महत्वपूर्ण हुन्छा । बिकास अभ्यासमा सुशासन कीन चाहिन्छा ? सडक पूर्विधार संग नागरिक समाज कसरि जोडिन्छान? यो कुरा भुइँ तहमा सडक निर्माणको अभ्यास कसरी भइरहेको छ भन्ने विषयले प्रस्ट पार्छ। … यस लेखमा दोलखाको सडक निर्माणको एतिहासिक सन्दर्भ , सडक निर्माणका अभ्यास , एउटा सडक निर्माणको क्रममा भएका विवाद र अनियमितताबारे उठेका प्रश्नहरूको चर्चा गरिने छ।
Please cite as: Kunwar, Shyam. (2020). भूईँ तहमा नागरिक समाज : सडक निर्माण उपभोक्ता समिति र नागरिक सहभागिताको प्रश [Civil society in the grassroots: Road building users’ committees and the question of peoples’ participation]. In Harshaman Maharjan, Devraj Humagian, Pratyush Onta, Lokranjan Parajuli, Devendra Uprety, eds. लोकतन्त्रमा नागरिक समाज: २५ बर्षको समीक्षा [Civil society under democracy: A review of 25 years], 361-388. Kathmandu: Martin Chautari.
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दोलखामा सडक निर्माण : अभ्यास र जटिलता पृष्ठ (Road construction in Dolakha: Practice and complexity)
Selection: नेपाली सन्दर्भमा आर्थिक विकास, सहज पहुँचको बिस्तार र जनताको जीवनस्तर वृद्धिसँग सडक गाँसिएर आउँछ । यस लेखमा दोलखा जिल्लामा सडक निर्माणको अभ्यासका विभिन्न आयामलाई केलाइएको छ। यस जिल्लामा किन लामो समयसम्म पनि स्थानीय स्तरमा सडक निर्माण सम्पन्न हुन सकिरहेका छैनन् ? अधुरा सडकका कारण के कस्ता चुनौती र जटिलता आएका छन् ? साथै ती सडक निर्माण संगै आउके आनियमितता र मिलेमतोको आरोपमा के कति सत्यता छ ? यी प्रश्नको जवाफ खोतल्ने प्रयास यस लेखमा गरिएको छ।
Please cite as: Kunwar, Shyam and Santa Thapa. (2020). दोलखामा सडक निर्माण : अभ्यास र जटिलता पृष्ठ [Road construction in Dolakha: Practice and complexity]. Samaj Adhyayan, 15, 59-84.
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Corruption as a diagnostic of power: Navigating the blurred boundaries of the relational state
Abstract: In this article, we bring ethnographic insights from the contemporary moment of social and political transformation in Nepal to bear on troubling established understandings of corruption. We argue that corruption furnishes a productive site from which to interpret the relational space of state practice and to probe the ‘blurred boundaries’ of states, polities and markets in everyday lives. Reading corruption as a ‘diagnostic of power’, moreover, can help reveal intersecting and competing structures of power at work in ongoing processes of state construction and contestation. The argument is developed through an examination of three related and overlapping illustrations of public-private transgression, which we characterize as ‘impossible publics’, ‘consensus collusion’, and ‘patronage democracy’. Taken together, they speak to the diversity of practices commonly glossed as corruption, and their embeddedness in powerful mobilizations of affective communion and intimate relations of mutual obligation. We suggest in conclusion that engaging corruption as a diagnostic of power offers critical insights about the nature of, and possibilities for, distribution, political agency and planning. Overall, we make a case for the importance of disaggregating diverse practices of corruption in specific, socially embedded contexts, in order to reveal possibilities for the meaningful redistribution of political power and opportunity.
Please cite as: Rankin, Katharine, Pushpa Hamal, Elsie Lewison and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel. (2019). Corruption as a diagnostic of power: Navigating the blurred boundaries of the relational state. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42(5), 920-936.
Political economies and political rationalities of road building in Nepal
Selection: “Drawing on some key conceptual contributions from the international scholarly literature, this paper aims to render visible the sociopolitical infrastructures underlying road building in Nepal. It takes as its starting point the construction of the first motorable roads during the Rana regime (1846–1951), to trace how road building articulates state building, geopolitical dynamics, and place-based social relations. As a theoretical starting point, we find it particularly productive to engage geographer Fiona Wilson’s (2004) concept of “regimes of territorialization” developed through research on mountain roads in Peru, to regard roads as “stretched out spaces of social”
Please cite as: Rankin, Katharine, Tulasi Sharan Sigdel, Lagan Rai, Shyam Kunwar and Pushpa Hamal. (2017). Political economies and political rationalities of road building in Nepal. Studies in Nepali History and Society, 22(1), 43-84.
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Corruption in theory and practice: Insights from ethnographic encounters in Nepal
In this chapter we engage road building in Nepal—in the context of an ambitious decentralisation and municipalisation agenda—as a site for critically assessing corruption in relation to the theory-practice nexus in planning and development, as well as for forging a critical dialogue between theory and practice through research. We first consider recent developments in donor approaches to combating corruption in the development of rural roads in Nepal, and read these against the backdrop of our ethnographic encounter with contract tendering in a mountainous western district. We then engage planning theory to explore how the issue of corruption might pose critical insights about the theory-practice divide. We conclude by bringing the normative orientation of planning theory to bear on the critical analysis of corruption, highlighting the ambiguities of doing scholarly work in this field and the challenge of responses in practice.
Please cite as: Rankin, Katharine and Elsie Lewison. (2018). Corruption in theory and practice: Insights from ethnographic encounters in Nepal. In Monika Grubbauer and Kate Shaw (Eds.), Across Theory and Practice: Thinking Through Urban Research. Berlin: Jovis.
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“Roads of change: Political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts”
Abstract: This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.
Please cite as: Rankin, Katharine, Andrea Nightingale, Pushpa Hamal and Tulasi Sharan Sigdel. (2018). Roads of change: Political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts. Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(2), 280-299.
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MEDIA
“बिकासमा बददैछा दुरुपयोग” (Increasing misuse in development) by Samjhana Nepali
This article, published in Rara Sandesh, a local newspaper in Mugu, Nepal, speaks to how roads and politics have intersected in Mugu district in the past year. Roads served as a tool for political elites and leaders to raise hopes and dreams for development in Mugu in order to win seats in the recent elections. However, after being elected the leaders are failing to fulfill their promises and instead are misusing the resources allocated for the road development.
Find a full version of the article here: बिकासमा बददैछा दुरुपयोग
“The road in Karnali: Political-economic relations and development” by Tulasi Sharan Sigdel
कर्णालीमा सडक, अर्थ-राजनीतिक सम्बन्ध र विकास (The Road in Karnali: Political-Economic Relations and Development) This article, published at http://npbaahrakhari.com/, analyzes how historical structural inequalities are entrenched in Nepal’s democratic political regime. It argues that some political leaders, construction companies and monitoring agencies are developing mutually beneficial, informal relationships for personal and political gain and that formal democratic processes have been heavily criticized by local people. It also claims that the cause of underdevelopment of the Karnali is not only its rugged terrain (as is commonly argued) but more importantly its low representation in central government and weak bargaining power resulting from political and personal divisions among political representatives. In this context, the development of the Karnali depends on how it exploits the opportunities opened up by road connectivity and the new federal state structure.
Find a full version of the article here: The Road in Karnali
“Does a road network develop the Karnali by default?” by Tulasi Sharan Sigdel
‘सडक पुग्दैमा कर्णालीको विकास हुन्छ?’ (Does a Road Network Develop the Karnali by Default?) is an op-ed piece published on an online media ‘http://baahrakhari.com/np/’. This piece briefly introduces the research objective of ‘infrastructure of democracy project’. It analyzes the changing political-economic relations and development dynamics of Karnali’ and the class inequality that may entrench in Karnali. It takes empirical data from field visit Jumla and Mugu during June, 2016. This article argues that development of Karnali depends on how the state and local people exploit the development opportunities opened up due to road network. This also alerts readers to the possibility of neoliberal capitalists taking advantage of easy access and connectivity of road network in Karnali.
Find the PDF version of the full article here: Development by Default?
