Friday, February 19th, 2016 Planning, Development and the politics of the Everyday State in South Asia

Description

The event is open graduate students and faculty only.

This panel is part of the Centre for South Asian Studies PhD Seminar Series, involving core CSAS faculty as discussants and chairs.
The aim is to workshop the papers through discussion with colleagues.

Elsie Lewison, “Reframing Agricultural Biopolitics through a Postcolonial Lens: Contested organic value chains in Jumla, Nepal”

Signs and stories of the failures of the state are both potent and pervasive in Nepal, particularly in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes and the highly contested passing of a constitution. However, the all too easy critique of the state and its compounding failures presents something of a dilemma as well, particularly as efforts to bypass dysfunctional states are often framed in terms of a “neoliberal turn.” In this paper, I draw on post-colonial critiques and calls for a “dis-aggregated” approach to the state in an effort to explore some of the everyday ways in which actors work across institutional boundaries and in the interstices of the Nepali state in pursuit of biopolitical aims. I focus in on development interventions to promote organic value chains in a “remote” corner of Nepal, highlighting how state and non-state actors, at the district scale, have mobilized technologies and institutions of value chain development in ways that deviate significantly from the agendas of donor agencies and Kathmandu-based officers. Through this investigation, I suggest that a post-colonial perspective can be useful in identifying potential openings for pursuing alternative agrarian futures.

Sujata Thapa, “Infrastructure Violence: Daily mobility of women in public transportation in Kathmandu City”

Many South Asian cities are adopting a technocratic approach to urban development to attract global capital. These cities are dramatically changing their built environment with modern infrastructure such as the metro rail, multi-lane motorways, shopping malls, high rises, and luxury hotels. The growth in manufacturing, construction and service sector jobs in these cities has attracted poor people from villages and small towns, leading to rapid increase in the urban population as well as urbanization in the peri-urban areas of the city. It is in this context that infrastructure development of Kathmandu Metropolitan city has taken place during the post-conflict reconstruction phase since 2008.

In this review paper, I critically examine the transportation infrastructure projects that have been implemented in Kathmandu to explore the linkage between infrastructure and the broader process of marginalization. The malfunctioning or the lack of infrastructure inflicts harm or violence. Lack of adequate and thoughtful planning has also given rise to a transportation system dominated by motorized private vehicles. Drawing on the concept of ‘infrastructural violence,’ I aim to show the current transportation infrastructure often marginalizes poor people in general and women in particular. For example, both the inadequacy of transportation infrastructure and the predominance of private motorized vehicles disadvantage these groups disproportionately. I make this argument through the analyses of infrastructure policies of municipal government, donor agencies, multi-national companies and national and international government. The paper concludes with a set of normative ideas to imagine and build urban infrastructure differently for greater equality and collective benefit.