Research Questions:
Building on the findings of a pilot study, conducted in three agrarian districts in Nepal, we have identified three conceptual areas that warranted particular attention in relation to processes of road development*: district scale political economy, governance projects, and cultural politics. These areas of inquiry inform the following research questions.
What are the political economic relations within which road building takes place?
- How are the opportunities and costs of road development distributed?
- How is road development situated in local political economies and historical patterns of regional integration and/or isolation.
- What kinds of structures of law and policy govern road development and how they operate in practice?
What competing governmental rationalities and practices are evidenced in road development processes?
- What conceptual frameworks, rationales and worldviews underlie road development processes?
- What kinds of programs, institutions, actors, tools, and material technologies are mobilized in processes of road development?
- What kinds of subjects are required and promoted by road development projects?
How are prevailing cultural politics reproduced or transformed in people’s everyday engagements with the local state?
- How do processes of road development reproduce or challenge dominant ideologies of caste, gender, ethnicity and class?
- What forms of political subjectivity are evident in road building processes?
- What new modes of critical political consciousness and public-sphere politics emerge through these processes?
* A note on terminology:
Road building refers to the technical, labour and governance practices involved in constructing, maintaining and monitoring the physical building of roads.
Road development refers to road building plus other practices that constitute the road, such as transportation management, market development, and other socio-political relations.
Methods:
The research adopts a comparative case study approach in three district-level research sites. The core qualitative methods include: archival documentation, semi-structured interviews, participant observation and focus groups.
First, archival research employs content and discourse analysis methods to study policy and program documents, newspapers, radio programming, and other popular media pertaining to road building and other infrastructure development. The intentions of this analysis are to: a. survey official governance projects active in the field sites; b. investigate the ways in which particular ideas of political subjectivity are reproduced and promoted; and c. systematically identify themes and issues for later exploration.
Second, qualitative interviews document diverse perspectives on governance processes among agents of infrastructure development and road building—including planners and policy makers; donors and government agencies; contractors, laborers and users’ group committees.
Third, in order to gain insight into the competing rationalities of governance ‘on the ground’ the team will conduct observation of official governance processes and practices of road building. These observations will enable us to assess how authority is expressed and contested in practice, and how it articulates local cultural politics.
The project is committed to the principles of community-based research, of doing research with community members with the aim of social change. Community-based, peer researchers play a key role in the project: partnering in conducting interviews and observations; co-developing local dissemination in the form of radio programming and newspaper articles and editorials; engaging focus group techniques for research purposes while also creating safe spaces for public discussions; and participating in debriefing meetings as well as local analysis workshops.
