Aid, Technology and Development

The Lessons from Nepal

Dipak Gyawali, Michael Thompson, Marco Verweij

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317220534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Over the last 50 years, Nepal has been considered an experiential model in determining the effectiveness and success of global human development strategies, both in theory and in practice. As such, it provides a rich array of in-depth case studies in both development success and failure. This edited collection examines these in order to propose a novel perspective on how human development occurs and how it can be aided and sustained.

Aid, Technology and Development: The lessons from Nepal champions plural rationality from both a theoretical and practical perspective in order to challenge and critique the status quo in human development understanding, while simultaneously presenting a concrete framework with which to aid citizen and governmental organisations in the galvanization of human development.

Including contributions by leading international social scientists and development practitioners throughout Nepal, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners working in the field of foreign aid and development studies.

Part 1
The dharma of development

A conceptual framework

1 The dharma of development

Michael Thompson, Dipak Gyawali and Marco Verweij

In 1957 (six years after the overthrow of the ‘feudal’ Rana regime, the Nepalese historical equivalent of the Japanese shoguns) Nepal’s forests were nationalised, a reform that resulted in massive deforestation and degradation. This outcome was then blamed on the victim: the ‘ignorant and fecund peasant’, and justified in terms of what is now called THED: the Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation.¹ This theory held that it was the mushrooming population that was forcing the farmers to fell more and more trees on steeper and steeper hillsides so as to create more terraced fields on which to grow the crops to feed all the extra mouths, while at the same time requiring them to extract more and more fuelwood from that ever-diminishing forest. The reduced cover, so the theory went, then increased erosion by the monsoon rains, while the ever-steeper new terraces increased the incidence of landslides, thereby propelling more and more precious topsoil into the mountain torrents, increasing the flooding down in the plains of India and Bangladesh, clogging the turbines in the downstream hydroelectric power stations and rapidly filling their dams with silt. And so it went, population increase leading to vicious circle piled upon vicious circle, a diagnosis that led, in the 1980s, to the General Assembly of the United Nations identifying the Himalayan region as one of the world’s ‘environmental hot-spots’. It was only at (and in the lead-up to) the Mohonk Mountain Conference in 1986 that THED was shown to be invalid and that the true cause – nationalisation – was identified (Thompson and Warburton 1985; Ives and Messerli 1989; Ives 2004; Thompson and Gyawali 2007).

Around a decade later, the development orthodoxy having swung to the other extreme, there was a major effort – the Finnish-funded Bara Forest Management Plan – to privatise the forest. The idea was that a Finnish private company, in partnership with some Nepalese business houses, would be given responsibility for the regeneration of the entire (47,000-hectare) forest, together with near-monopoly rights to its commercial exploitation. The aim, in line with the then-ascendant ‘Washington Consensus’,² was to introduce radical change in a sector that had not hitherto been oriented to market-led approaches. However, unbeknown to the aid providers – it was an ‘unknown known’ in Rumsfeld-speak³ – the Bara Forest was already a complex mosaic of property rights: private, public and common-pool (often rather informally established rights, and at small social-scale levels, but rights nevertheless; see Sharma et al. 2004).⁴ Unsurprisingly, this ambitious project eventually turned into a disaster so unmitigated, and so universally acknowledged, that the Finns swore never again to get involved in forestry in Nepal.

In the gap between these two abysmal initiatives there came what is now acknowledged to be Nepal’s great development success story: the communitisation of the forests (see Ives 2004, especially Chapter 3). In this initiative (which grew, in large part, out of the Nepal–Australia Forestry Project in the late 1980s together with some Nepalese ethnographers ‘in the right place’,⁵ and which is in many ways a re-discovery of the ‘traditional’ commons-managing arrangements that had been widespread in Nepal in the years before nationalisation) ownership of the forests was devolved to ‘forest user groups’, typically village-based though sometimes encompassing two or more smaller villages. To be precise, ultimate title remains with the state, with the new Forest Act of 1993 which enshrined the user rights as the inalienable property of the villagers (the old Forest Act of 1962, by contrast, had authorised Department of Forestry officials, under certain circumstances, even to shoot those villagers suspected of encroaching upon state property). There are now (as is explained in Chapter 11) in excess of 19,000 of these community forests – they take in a third of all the country’s officially forested land and have visibly improved the crown cover of the Nepalese landscape – and this has been accompanied by the emergence of the discipline of social forestry; indeed, many university departments of forestry around the world are now headed by social scientists. One consequence of this process of ‘social learning’ is that this institutional arrangement has now been exported to other developing countries and, more remarkably, to some developed countries, most prominently Canada, where community forests are rapidly catching on (Gilmour and Fisher 1991; Gyawali and Koponen 2004; Ives 2004). Indeed, the 37th Session of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) Council of Ministers in March 2016 has proposed (albeit, at the time of writing, tentatively) community forestry as a worthwhile regional co-operation programme for all of South Asia.

There are, we suggest, some lessons that can be learnt from Nepal’s half century of experience of being on the receiving end of development assistance. If we are right, then everything comes down to the question: what are those lessons? A clue can be found in the post-mortem on the Bara fiasco, which, to their credit, was commissioned by the aid-providing country’s science academy and carried out by a team composed of Nepalis and Finns. They arrived at the following conclusion (Sharma et al. 2004: 241–2):

As a villager in Nepal is apt to say, it is the dharma of the bureaucracy to regulate, of the markets to innovate and of activist groups to advise caution. The case of Bara was one in which dharma had gone wrong – a situation characterised by the bureaucracy assuming the role of the market and vice versa. It further showed that the hierarchical order that has broken down is no instrument for the implementation of radical reforms, without first mending that order and restoring its legitimacy, or as the villager might say, restoring the dharma.

Dharma, especially in the West, is often equated with fate or mis-translated as ‘religion’, but it is much more than that. Dharma, from the Sanskrit root that means ‘to uphold’, is ‘the correct way of life’ or, more properly, ‘the righteousness that underlies the law’. Hence the emphasis on legitimacy, and the accompanying consequence – breakdown – when, as in the case of Bara, that legitimacy is eroded. Legitimacy, moreover, cannot spring from the interaction of just markets and hierarchies: the only sort of interaction that was entertained by the Washington Consensus and several earlier development paradigms, such as the Nehruvian ‘commanding heights’ argument that justified the nationalisation, back in the 1950s and 60s, of those parts of the economy – Nepal’s forests among them – that were seen as too important to be left to the mercy of the marketplace. Legitimacy requires a third institutional form – egalitarianism, as it is called by those (they have been dubbed ‘the New Durkheimians’, see 6 and Mars 2008) who venture beyond the dualisms that have long pervaded social science – and it is manifested here in Bara as the ‘activist groups’ whose dharma it is to advice caution.

If, however, dharma goes wrong, fatalism emerges, in the sense that more and more people will find themselves labouring under what has been called ‘the double burden’: increasingly impoverished and increasingly subject to social exclusion (Gurung et al. 2014).

Development has long been seen as very much an economic process. The interactions of the various actors – state, market, civil society and so on – have been put into a ‘black box’, into which aid is then fed in some way and the result – development if you are lucky – read off in terms of per capita gross national product. Increasingly, however, it has become evident that it is economic only in its consequences; it is something else – entitlements, democratisation, social capital – that makes development possible (Dasgupta 1993; Putnam 1993; Sen 1999). A new paradigm is therefore called for, one that goes inside the black box. And that, we will now show, is precisely what this conclusion from the Bara post-mortem enables us to do.

This deceptively simple diagnosis – in terms of ‘dharma gone wrong’ and ‘dharma restored’ – is the black box opened up: four ways of organising, perceiving and justifying social relations, or forms of ‘social solidarity’, to borrow from Émile Durkheim (1893) – hierarchy (e.g. state and local bureaucracy), individualism (e.g. markets, from the global to the local), egalitarianism (e.g. activist groups, home-grown and international) and fatalism (e.g. the double burden-carriers). Each of these, so the theory argues, is (or, rather, should be) in contentious (but potentially constructive) engagement with the other three: something that you are most unlikely to get if you are operating with a development paradigm that allows, at the most, for just hierarchies and markets. In other words, that twofold paradigm does not encompass the requisite variety (for the theory itself – it is called ‘cultural theory’, the ‘theory of plural rationality’ or ‘neo-Durkheimian institutionalism’ – see Thompson et al. 1990; Rayner 1992; Ney and Douglas 1998; Thompson 2008; 6 and Mars 2008; Ney 2009; Verweij and Thompson 2006; Thompson and Beck 2015).

On the rare occasions when the policy process has encompassed the requisite variety – Nepal’s community forests are the prime example, but there are others (the Bhattedanda Milkway, for instance, and the partial communitisation of the electricity sector (see Thompson 2011/12 and Chapters 5 and 11 of this volume for the former and Gyawali 2013, Yadoo and Cruickshank 2010 and Chapter 7 of this volume for the latter) – which stand in such contrast to both the Bara fiasco and the earlier nationalisation of the forests, we find that each of the three contending ‘voices’ – the hierarchical, the individualistic and the egalitarian – is (a) able to make itself heard and (b) is then responded to (rather than dismissed by) the others (fatalistic actors tend not to have a voice; if they had they would not be fatalistic). In this ‘clumsy’ or ‘polyrational’ situation – dharma restored – none of the solidarities undermines its own distinctive morality (Verweij 2011). State actors (hierarchy) behave like Edmund Burke’s (1790) ‘trustees’, focusing on the long-term general interest rather than on opportunistic and narrow claims; market actors (individualism) are guided by Adam Smith’s (1776) ‘invisible hand’ and do well only when others also benefit, and civil society actors (egalitarianism), like Edmund Burke’s (1790/1986) ‘little platoons’, are genuinely of the grass roots. But that, thanks to the over-’elegant’ and voice-silencing way in which aid has been fed in, is not how things so often are in Nepal, or, we dare say, in many other aid-addicted countries in the Global South (Figure 1.1).

In ‘dharma gone wrong’ – typified by Bara – government actors, forgetting all about Edmund Burke, direct their energies to what is euphemistically called ‘rent-seeking’; market actors, thanks to what has been dubbed ‘licence raj’ (or ‘crony capitalism’), increasingly deal in club goods that only look like private goods (in other words, they do well even when others do not benefit); and NGOs, though they may walk and quack like genuinely egalitarian actors, turn out on closer inspection to be BONGOs, GONGOs, DONGOs and PONGOs (business-organised, government-organised, donor-organised and political party-organised NGOs, respectively). Historians (e.g. Schama 1987) can show us that these distortions were largely absent in all those countries that we now label ‘developed’. In other words, the proponents of old development paradigms have created a situation in which development is hard to achieve. That is why we need to shift across to this new, and requisite variety-ensuring, one (the old development paradigms, and the required shift, are explained in Chapter 2).

This book aims to effect that paradigm shift within the ongoing aid business: a business that lost its elan vital with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and is running on nothing more than inertia. In Nepal, for instance (and as explained in Chapter 3), the aid industry was caught on the hop by the emergence of the remittance economy (based on its citizens going to work, on short-term contracts, in the Gulf States and elsewhere). These remittances, which now constitute about 30 per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), far exceed (by up to five times) the total amount of international aid that Nepal receives. And something similarly surprising has happened with electricity generation, where the combined capacity of diesel generating electric sets installed by shops, hotels and housing complexes now rivals that of the national grid’s hydroelectricity provision (long the focus of aid providers, as we will see in Chapters 7 and 8).

Figure 1.1 Dharma and its dynamics

In other words, lack of money is no longer the primary constraint on development. How could it be if the government’s revenue (from indirect taxation on consumption from the inflow of remittances) is increasing at an annual rate that is even greater than China’s much-vaunted growth? Clearly, with shops and housing complexes paying up to five times more for privately generated (diesel) electricity than official (mostly hydropower) utility rates, largely in order to avoid the regular and now long-standing fifteen-hour five-times-a-day outages, something is going on down there in the cities and villages that, while readily discernible to those who take the toad’s eye view of things, is invisible to those – the global-level scientists and the international development agencies – who have opted for the eagle’s eye view.⁶

While the cases of elegant failures (where one or more of the solidarities’ ‘voices’ are excluded) and clumsy successes (where each of those voices is both heard and responded to by the others) in the following chapters may all be from Nepal, they are really international, in two ways. First, the aid-giving agencies involved in our case studies range from Australians ‘down under’ to Europeans and Americans ‘up north’. Second, the development philosophies that guided, and are still guiding, these interventions have originated, for the most part, in the capital cities of these donor countries: in their universities, their government ministries, their think-tanks and their consultancies. And they have been applied to other countries across the Global South, though perhaps with less documentation and contestation than has been the case in Nepal.

Moreover, Nepal (as explained in Chapter 4) is unique in never having been a colony of any of the donor countries. While strongly influenced, as we will see, by development aid for much of the last half century, it has managed to retain sufficient indigeneity in its sociopolitical life to pose strong counter-approaches: the aforementioned community forestry and community electricity for instance, and also low-tech renewable-powered vehicles (Chapter 6) and biogas (Chapter 9). It has seen different development philosophies come and go – nationalisation, for instance, and then privatisation – and it has seen its own political system undergo some dramatic transitions: the king-led Panchayat system giving way in 1990 to a tumultuous multi-party democracy that was almost immediately challenged by a raging Maoist insurgency, which has now fizzled and fractured, leaving the country to muddle along in a kingless and constitutionally-challenged transition to something (but it is anyone’s guess what) that has yet to come.

Nepal’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• IIASA
• Part 1 The Dharma of Development: A Conceptual Framework
• Part 2 The Case Studies
• Part 3 Beyond the Age of AID
• References
• Index