In 2006, Nepal emerged from a decade-long Maoist insurgency and a centuries-old Hindu monarchy to form a federal democratic republic. In this post-conflict context a critically conscious rural population is engaging with an expanding public sphere and joining ongoing donor efforts to enact ‘good governance’ and ‘civil society.’ At the same time, there are multiple paradigms for development at work, often with competing visions of how to bring about social and economic democracy through a state framework. Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts explores how people enact and participate in ‘democracy’ in contexts of governmental change or transition. We are interested in how everyday practices at the sub-national scale constitute state building, and enable transformative social change.
Dominant approaches to understanding ‘post-conflict’ transition and state building tend to focus on national-scale reorganizations. In contrast, this project foregrounds local scale governance, and understands local institutions as key sites of on-going struggle over democratic futures. An important aim of the research is thus to develop an approach to studying political transition as everyday practice. The research also aims to provide policy-relevant analysis of rapidly changing social and political interactions at the local level. A better understanding of local institutional dynamics is particularly important for informing post-conflict public/private sector investment in rural development. Officials and entrepreneurs negotiate deals for large projects, but they do so with limited knowledge of politically fraught, local institutional contexts. By offering grounded insights that take into account social histories and cultural politics the research has the potential to provide critical contributions to ongoing development practice.
Our focus on infrastructure emerged out of our previous research on local state practice, in which we identified infrastructure development—and road development in particular—as a key sector in which the form and content of ‘democracy’ is being contested and shaped. Road building is a priority in both national and local budgets and planning. It is also major focus of donor programming and regional geopolitics, and a significant concern for most people across the country. At the same time, roads take shape through the convergence of multi-scalar governmental projects. While, the specific local practices through which roads are constructed and managed vary across time and place, the wider-scale policy and political contexts change over time and also have material effects at the local scale. As such, road building is a useful lens for understanding the everyday practices of state restructuring and local governance.
The research methodology adopts a comparative case study across three agrarian districts in Nepal—Dolakha, Mugu and Morang. We adopt a comparative approach for two reasons: to attempt to ‘capture’ a wide range of geopolitical contexts in which road development takes place and to probe the conditions under which roads might be built and managed in a socially just manner. Employing ethnographic methods, the research is structured around three conceptual areas of inquiry: [a] the political economy of infrastructure development, [b] the competing governmental rationalities and claims to authority that have emerged in district-scale planning practices, and [c] the reproduction and transformation of place-based cultural politics and political subjectivities through people’s engagements with the local state.
Research objectives:
- To develop a conceptual approach to studying political transition as everyday practice through a focus on infrastructure development
- To highlight the significance of the local scale in state restructuring and governance
- To strengthen Canada-Nepal collaborations among academics and development practitioners
- To inform policy, train future leaders and support public engagement
