Abstract
While the Millennium Development Goals (and their successors,
the Sustainable Development Goals) loom large among those who take
a global-level approach, they elicit, at best, a confused shrug from the
Nepali villager. We unpack this paradox by way of the distinction between
eagle's eye science and toad's eye science, and go on to show how vital
it is that the latter is not neglected. It is, for instance, household-level
decisions that have resulted in a substantial proportion of Nepali citizens
working in the Gulf States and elsewhere, thereby quickly establishing
a remittance economy that makes a nonsense of the long-held view,
among the proponents of eagle's eye science, that it is lack of money that
is the problem. Rather, it is the constructive engagement of the three
'solidarities' – market, state and civil society – that is needed: a task (we
call it 'dharma restoration') that simply cannot be accomplished without the
bringing-in of toad's eye science.
Keywords: cultural theory, foreign aid, development, informal economy.
Ask any Nepali villager about the Millennium Development Goals
(MDGs) and you will be met with a confused shrug. Sahasrabdi Bikas
Lakshya – the goals translated into Nepali – is a mouthful that only
classical Sanskrit scholars can properly articulate and understand.
On top of that, it expresses a concern that has never figured in the
everyday lives and decisions of these citizens. This may come as a
surprise to those who focus on the MDGs (and on their successors, the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)) because Nepal is frequently
cited at international gatherings as a country that, to use the old
Soviet-era terminology, has 'over-fulfilled' its planned targets: all the
way from female child school enrolment to infant mortality reduction
and increased electricity access (NPC 2013; Alkire et al. 2015). Even
more surprisingly, this success (if that is indeed what it is) has happened
over the last decade and a half, during which time the country was
engulfed in a Maoist insurgency, followed by an ongoing political
and constitutional crisis that has seen nine prime ministers in almost
as many years. Five-Year Plans, together with the aid programmes
that are intended to prop them up, have stalled and the ratio of aid disbursement to aid commitment has reached an all-time low. And if
we look at one of those 'successes' – electricity access – we find that this
has happened even as those who are served (if you can call it that) by
the national grid continue to endure power cuts for 15 hours a day. In
consequence, the private sector – hotels, offices, shopping complexes
and apartment blocks – have given up on the national grid and resorted
to diesel generators. These generators, in total, now rival the supply
via the grid, with the country spending some 137 per cent of its export
earnings on the importation of this climate-unfriendly petroleum
product.1 So what, we should ask, is really going on?
Nepal, with its multitude of rivers cascading down the Himalaya, is
indeed blessed with a rich hydropower potential.2 However, even after
more than a half-century of development assistance, that potential has
not been realised. The official figure, according to the Nepal Electricity
Authority (NEA), for the population's access to electricity in 2003 was
just 18 per cent; in the same year the country's central bank (Nepal
Rashtra Bank) declared, on the basis of its own survey data, that access
was double that amount: 36 per cent. The NEA, it turns out, had taken
the number of meters it had installed and then (assuming that these
were almost all in households, with negligible numbers in government
offices, hospitals and so on) multiplied it by the average Nepali family
size of 5.5 persons. The Rashtra Bank, in its survey, had asked the
simple question 'Do you have access to electricity?', without going on to
enquire whether that electricity came from an off-grid community-owned
micro-hydro installation, or was stolen from the grid (by creative hooking:
'unmetered consumption' in World Bankese), or from a privately-owned
solar panel, or from a neighbour who was metered and (because you
could not afford the NEA's installation charge) had let you pull a wire
across for a couple of bulbs and charged you the going 'village rate'.
Whether an MDG/SDG is being over-fulfilled or hopelessly fallen
short of, evidently depends on which set of official figures you choose to
consider.3 With facts as malleable as that, you can have whatever you like!
1 Eagle's eye science versus toad's eye science
The NEA was using an eagle's eye approach, defining the problem from the
high perches of its Kathmandu headquarters; the Rashtra Bank, though
even more highly placed, was, it turns out, using a much more toad's eye
approach: figuring out what was actually happening down there on the
ground.4 If you are working in a UN or western development agency, or
a National Planning Commission, you will very likely gravitate towards
the eagle's eye view, since your bosses will be thinking about policy
measures at a global scale.5 If, on the other hand, you are working for
a village council you will probably see the problem not so much for its
global consequence (climate change being the current favourite) as for
how it matters for those who are suffering from it. We can mention a
few instances.
Bihari Krishna Shrestha – the doyen of Nepal's ethnographers, and who can claim much of the credit for introducing to government policy the how rice is grown at the highest altitude in the world in Jumla District: 6,000 feet above sea level, where rice normally should not be growing. A complex nexus of social and agricultural practices enables the Jumlis to make maximum use of the short summer: they first soak the seeds in gunny sacks in the river and then prepare the seedling beds, not in the open, but inside their houses and close to the hearth. They then spread branches over them, placing their bedding on top so as to allow their body heat to transfer to the seedlings. They also require all male members who have migrated out for seasonal labour to come back to the village for Chaitra 12th (around 25 March) for the transplanting of the seedlings. If they do not show up they face being declared dead, with their relatives being allowed to conduct their funeral rites. If any one of these complex and demanding practices fails, the entire system fails. None of this crucial knowledge is accessible by way of the eagle's eye approach; it is discernible only to those who take the toad's eye view.6
If a high-resolution satellite was hovering over Rajasthan it could clearly make out what it would think was a truck (see photo). It would take a toad's eye scientist, using ethnographic methods, to go down to the village level, look at the vehicle, talk to its owner and realise that it is actually an irrigation pump that has been fitted onto a makeshift chassis. With no registration plate, and no licensed driver, it is popularly known as a Jugad: literally 'make do with' (DST 2008). And there is a story behind this remarkable and now widespread innovation: India's Rural Development Bank, it transpires, gives subsidised loans to farmers to enable them to buy three-horsepower pumps. However, the farmers will even pawn their wives' jewellery so as to top up and buy a ten-horsepower pump. They know what India's central planners and economists don't: that a three-horsepower pump can only pump water for maybe 2,000 hours a year and will remain rusting in the shed for the remaining 6,740 hours, whereas a ten-horsepower pump can pump water and run as a truck, ferrying goods and earning money for the remaining part of the year. Again, these facts, crucial for development, can only be ferreted out through toad's eye science.
Much the same sort of story holds for domestic water supply in Nepal's
Middle Hills, where villagers avoid drinking water from the streams because they are often polluted with domestic and wild animal waste.
Hill hamlets rely on nearby springs for their water supply. However, no
proper study has ever been done on springs, nor has there been any
attempt by the national authorities to map them. The assumption has
been that the springs are simply there, with water supply projects being
defined as the procurement and laying of PVC pipes from the springs
to the settlements. 'Access to safe drinking water' is then seen as having
been achieved, and it is on that assumption that the astounding increase
in safe water coverage claimed by both national and international
officials has been based: from 17 per cent to 90 per cent in the United
Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) one International
Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade ending in 1990. Nepal
would thus have 'over-fulfilled' its MDG (73 per cent coverage) almost
before it had even been set! Pokhrel (2017, forthcoming) provides a
more nuanced breakdown which shows, by way of field surveys, that
the criteria – fetching time of less than 15 minutes, at least 45 litres per
person per day, supply available even in the dry season and so on – are
such that the chance of Nepal meeting this goal is vanishingly small.
And newspaper report after report tell us that most of these water
supply schemes that were built during the International Decade have
already gone dry. Villagers call them bikasey chihan: 'development tombs'.
Since then, the springs themselves, from which the PVC pipes had been
laid, have started drying up across the Middle Hills, with eagle's eye
scientists quickly jumping to the conclusion that it is climate change
that is to blame (in much the same way that, back in the 1980s, all the
region's environmental woes were blamed on 'the ignorant and fecund
peasant' cutting trees on fragile hill slopes and deforesting the Himalaya;
see Thompson and Gyawali 2007). However, a toad's eye study (Sharma
et al. 2016) has revealed that other drivers are responsible: rampant use
of PVC pipes and electric pumps (where previously women carried
water to their houses in pots and carried no more than was necessary);
changed cropping patterns (a move away from dryland maize and millet
and into water-intensive marketable vegetables); a decline in livestockkeeping
and hence in wallowing ponds for buffaloes (which contributes
to the recharge of the groundwater that fed the springs); the filling in
of such ponds (for malaria eradication or for building schools thereon),
and so on. True, climate change, when it eventually impacts, will likely
make things worse, but it is these here-and-now drivers – drivers that
are discernible only to those who take the toad's eye view – that need to
be addressed. Eagle's eye science, by itself, will foster the delusion that,
if it wasn't for climate change, all would be fine.
2 Economic growth, but not as planned
Even as many were celebrating the End of History (Fukuyama 1992)
and the global triumph of the neoliberal and market-led order, Nepal
saw its first communist prime minister (in 1994) and in successive
elections the total parliamentary strength of parties with the words
'Communist', 'Marxist' or 'Maoist' in their titles has risen to almost
two-thirds. Concurrently, almost 3 million Nepali citizens (out of a total population of around 28 million) are working in the Gulf States,
Malaysia and South Korea (up from around half a million in 2002, and
not counting almost 6 million working in India as seasonal or long-term
migrants from many, many decades back at much lower salaries).7 With
higher income remittances pouring back home, families have seen their
incomes boosted: keeping them afloat in the midst of all the political
chaos (and natural disasters: e.g. earthquakes) and enabling them to
purchase better schooling and health services, along with food and
consumer (and, in some instances, luxury) items. Remittances now make
up almost 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), but they are far
from an unmixed blessing. The haemorrhaging of the country's youth,
compounded by three million or more citizens having now migrated
to Kathmandu and other urban centres from the rural hinterlands,
has left many a village depopulated (apart from the elderly), the land
uncultivated and the livestock much diminished: social dislocation at a
scale and speed rarely experienced anywhere, outside of war. But, for all
that, people are now much richer (or, at least, much less poor) than they were (see Shrestha 2017, forthcoming).
Nepal's banking system, including those institutions that provide
microcredit to the poorest of farmers, has also expanded dramatically
with remittance inflow: from 178 such 'outfits' in 2008 to over 13,000
in 2015 (see Chaulagain 2015). While the Nepal Rashtra Bank,
understandably, is pushing for some merging and consolidation of these
evermore numerous financial institutions, the country's banking system,
unlike in so many other parts of the world, has certainly not had to be
bailed out. Even more remarkably, given the political instability and
high level of corruption, government revenues, between 2010 and 2015,
have recorded an annual growth rate of 20 per cent. This has been
largely thanks to the import and value-added taxes levied on many of
the goods that have been purchased with the increased remittances,
with internal uptake being as high as 90 per cent in 2014, with foreign
grants falling to less than 9 per cent.8 That a public call, aimed at raising
2 billion rupees for the construction of a hydropower plant, was oversubscribed
by 42 billion rupees proves the point made by toad's eye
scientists, but not their eagle's eye counterparts: that a lack of money
– the premise on which the aid industry has been built and the recipient
government's aid addiction fed – is no longer the problem.
3 Restoring the dharma, kicking the habit
Some of us have argued that the Age of Aid ended (or at least lost its
élan vital) with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 (Sharma et al.
2004). Aid, as an industry, was born at the end of the Second World
War, with the setting up of the Bretton Woods 'architecture' in 1944/5.
An underlying goal, once the Cold War had taken hold, was to ensure
that the 'Third World' did not become part of the 'Second World',
and it was that imperative that gave us aid as we know it. But, after
1989, that imperative was no longer present, and the 'First World' was
able to redefine development as something that could best be done
by the market. The state, especially in the global South, was forced into something of a 'hollowed-out' retreat, with structural adjustment
programmes and the 'Washington Consensus' tightening their grip.
A quarter-century on, there is now a growing realisation that this lurch
into institutional monism has not delivered on its promise. And even the
later correction that brought the state back in by way of PPPs – public–
private partnerships – has proved inadequate. The public, at best,
has been subsumed under the private; at worst, it has confirmed Karl
Polanyi's fear that things will evolve into a kind of fascism in which the
interest of the market overrides that of the society of which it should be
just one vital part (Polanyi 1944).
A more wholesome (and more democratic) approach, we would
argue, drawing on the theory of plural rationality,9 is to go beyond
both the monisms and the dualisms and look for a more pluralistic
framing: a triad of public, private and civic engagement. This, we
hasten to add, is not an entirely new idea. Polanyi (1944), for instance,
saw the exchange of the profit-focused market being balanced by the
redistributive interventions of the state only if both were being goaded
by the reciprocity that is fostered by civic forces. And Lukes (2005) sees
three types of power at work, each needing the others: the persuasive power of market seduction, the procedural coercive power of the state
and the ethical power exercised, through moral critique, by truly civic
movements (the 'small platoons', as Edmund Burke (1790) called them).
And Nepal's Hindu Samkhya philosophers (Gyawali 2009), reaching
back two-and-a-half millennia, distinguish between actors (patras) and
the mix of subtle characteristics (gunas) that together give rise to the
different powers (shakti). These are: rajasik (active), tamasik (brute and
inert) and satwik (leading the ethical way, as it were, between rajasik inducement and tamasik threat). Indeed, Nepal's Constituent Assembly,
elected in 2008 to frame the country's new constitution, debated the
development model in these plural rationality terms and concluded that
it would have to be led by all three of these primary forces: market, state
and cooperatives (Figure 1).
In an ideal (that is, genuinely democratic) world – represented by the
grey bordered equilateral triangle in Figure 1 – each set of actors (each
solidarity, as they are called) follows its dharma: markets are competitive
and efficient (with Adam Smith's 'hidden hand' ensuring that people do
well only when others also benefit), governments behave (as Edmund
Burke famously urged) as 'trustees' for the greater public good, and civil
society's small platoons, like watchdogs, are perpetually alert to any
signs of injustice (to both man and Mother Nature). However, in much
of the global South, Nepal included, just one voice (the overbearing
hierarchism of governments), or at best, some PPP duet, drowns out
the civic voice that calls for fair play and moral accountability: 'dharma gone wrong' (the distorted shaded triangle in Figure 1). Government
bureaucracies morph into a rent-extorting 'licence raj', markets slide
into a 'crony capitalism' in which their actors do well even when others
most certainly do not benefit, and non-governmental organisations
(NGOs), abandoning their higher cause, become conniving fronts for business and politics 'by other means'. Each solidarity thus ends up
undermining its dharma – its distinctive righteousness – and is thereby
corrupted in its essence. Development, this plural rationality framing
insists, will remain elusive for as long as the dharma is unrestored: for as
long, that is, as things are out-of-line with the grey bordered equilateral
triangle in Figure 1.
For the dharma to be restored each solidarity has to be present at the policy
table (have accessibility, that is) and also to be engaging constructively, albeit
argumentatively, with the others (responsiveness, that is). This is because,
even though they are mutually antagonistic in the way they are organised,
each seeking to disorganise the others and perceiving the risks they
face very differently, all three are essential to the body politic. Markets
innovate (especially in the technological realm), hierarchies regulate
(while also needing to innovate in order to address new challenges with
new management approaches), and civic movements too need to find
behavioural innovations if they are to identify and meet new dangers.
That is where their strengths lie: in not doing what the others should be
doing. And they would re-discover those strengths if each of them chose
to practise some toad's eye science. What, for instance, is the vast informal
economy of the global South doing? How are user groups managing
complicated technologies such as electricity distribution, as the Mothers'
Group10 in Nepali villages are now doing? And why is it that radical
ideologies, be they of a Maoist or more orthodox religious flavour, are
finding so much resonance at the local level?
And what finally, returning to our starting point, does such a reorientation
of thinking mean for the current global efforts in development? In particular, what does it mean for the SDGs: the successors to the
MDGs? Yes, those goals do matter, in so far as twenty-first century
problems such as climate change, new pollutants, new diseases and so
on are so immense and global in their scope as to be unsolvable without
common effort, and such effort requires some common goals. No, they
do not matter to the vast majority of marginal and poor farmers, who
can be counted on to do what they perceive themselves as having to do
anyway, SDGs not withstanding. And governments, as we have seen
with remittances in Nepal, will find themselves struggling to catch up
with the public mood and its often rapid swings. Maybe SDGs will also
matter if lessons are learnt, past failures are critically analysed, and
corrective measures are taken. Failure to do these vital things, however,
will mean that development will be hijacked by the smoothest operators,
with the goals being debased into platitudes and with ministries of
SDGs popping up all over the world so as to give a sense – false, of
course – of action. So, with these daunting tasks and alarming pitfalls
identified, it is a fundamental re-thinking of development that is called
for: a re-thinking that will place a sharpened, and often uncomfortable,
focus on toad's eye science.
Notes
1 Survey conducted by Professor Amrit Nakarmi of the Centre for
Renewable Energy, Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University,
Kathmandu and presented at the 41st Pani Satsang (public policy
discourse forum) on 'Carbon Neutral Pathways in Nepal with
Special Focus on Ropeways and Electric Transport' by the Nepal
Water Conservation Foundation, Nepal Academy of Science and
Technology, LUCSUS/Lund University and Toni Hagen Foundation
on 23 November 2014. See also www.ktm2day.com/2012/05/07/diesel-provides-531-mw-of-electricity/.
2 Nepal's national grid, with a capacity of about 800+MW, is mostly
hydro (some 700MW) that took over 100 years to develop since
1911 when electricity was first generated in Nepal. Since 2008, with
increasing power cuts plaguing the national grid, private enterprises
have resorted to installing diesel generators that now total almost
700MW (and growing). Hydro development programmes supported
by foreign aid agencies, as well as by the Nepal government and
private developers are mired in conflicts, cost and time over-runs,
political extortion and interference, and a host of other ills.
3 One of us (DG) was Minister of Water Resources then and ex-officio chair of the NEA board where the first reaction to this new figure
from the Rashtra Bank was: 'Look at how many people are stealing
our electricity!'
4 The term 'toad's eye' is borrowed from Rudyard Kipling (1919: 53):
The toad beneath the harrow knows where every separate tooth-point goes. The
next line describes our 'eagle's eye': The butterfly upon the road preaches
contentment to that toad.
5 In the case of Rashtra Bank's fortuitous use of toad's eye science, the
wider policy implications are immense regarding the decentralisation
and democratisation of the electricity grid. However, they were not the Bank's concern (they still are not, as they still are not of
the energy ministry or the international development agencies
supporting the government) but they are among reformers, who use
them to point out the anomalies in the centralised system.
6 Recounted by Bihari Krishna Shrestha (at a Fulbright/ICIMOD/
NWCF meeting on the water–energy–food nexus) based on his
earlier ethnographic work in Jumla (see Vasily et al. 2015).
7 See DoFE (2014) as well as the Centre for the Study of Labour and
Mobility website (www.ceslam.org).
8 See MoF (2015). In that year, recovery of irregularities and defaults
also jumped up to one and a half per cent of the total government
revenue.
9 This integrative social science theory, originally developed by Mary
Douglas, goes by various names, including cultural theory and
neo-Durkheimian institutionalism (Douglas 1986; Thompson, Ellis
and Wildavsky 1990; Verweij and Thompson 2006; Thompson 2008;
Thompson and Beck 2015).
10 Mothers' Group (in Nepali Aama Samuha) is a civic self-help users'
group movement in rural Nepal that organises women to manage
their pressing needs, from childcare and cooperative shops to
electricity distribution (see Gyawali 2014).
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