my humla reading list, and a couple extrapolations based thereon...

i'll be getting a post-trip update on my research and my experiences up over the weekend/early next week, but i thought i'd throw in a couple of additions to the bibliography for those of you who are into those things (you know who you are...all two of you).

far and away the two most important books i've read for this project are Barry Bishop's Karnali Under Stress: Livelihood Strategies and Seasonal Rhythms in a Changing Nepal Himalaya,  and Jagannath Adhikari's Food Crisis in Karnali: A Historical and Politico-economic Perspective. 

Bishop was a geographer who spent 1969/1970 doing GOD's work (ethnographically speaking), collecting some incredibly detailed data on the land and people of the karnali region. specifically, he looks at people's livelihood strategies, or how they make their living, and the way that had changed over time up to 1970. basically he did what i was/am intending to do (more on this later) in an inevitably more superficial way. it's daunting as hell looking at what he did (seriously, i lack words for the quality of the appendices), but it's also GREAT because it basically gives me baseline data for a pre-civil war, pre-major aid intervention period. one of the things that's unbelievably striking is how little has changed, at least superficially. with the addition of massive deforestation and cell phones, pictures bishop took 40 years ago look almost exactly like the ones i took two weeks ago.  i'll try to scan a page in and do a side-by-side example.

Adhikari does a much broader sweep of an update through 2006 (the conclusion of the civil conflict, and basically where i sort of pick my research up), including a chapter on the effects of government and foreign aid. unfortunately, he doesn't go to humla, where i'm working, but at least i don't feel geographically redundant. his thesis is that "much of the problems in Karnali relates to the hegemonic and exploitative relationship imposed by Kathmandu (the power center) over Karnali (a peripheral region treated as colony) since its unification in Nepal", and i'd say that's pretty accurate. it's not the whole story, and especially in combination with the Bishop, you can see how much is attributed to other factors as well....

aw hell, i was going to wait to put up a more complete research update, but i'll start with this one set of thoughts and how it's sort of refined my thinking...

basically, i finished the Bishop while i was in humla, it struck me (literally, at the top of a mountain), that you could conceptualize pretty much all of the observable, substantive livelihood changes that have happened there since 1970 as a function of one of these variables:

1) population growth
2) climate change and environmental degredation (not unrelated to 1)
3) externally driven political/economic developments (most importantly: the closure/restrictions on the northern border with tibet, and the penetration of roads, and access to india, from the south and west)
4) political upheaval, most recently, the maoist conflict
5) direct aid intervention by the government and NGOs (with most of it being from NGOs)

please don't be TOO harsh with this, those of you more knowledgeable than i (although kind, critical feedback more than welcome). since it's just sort of a rough rubric to consolidate my thoughts and refine my future research. ideally, now, what i'm doing is trying to understand the changes that have been wrought by factor 5, bearing in mind that it's probably impossible to fully isolate these causes from each other, as they're all part of a complicated system. going forward, i'm trying to understand those changes both, to some degree, etic-ly (that is, through the collection of "hard data" on livelihood adaptations from the field and secondary sources), and, in my mind more importantly, emic-ly (that is, locally situated understandings of those changes as informed by participants' narratives), and to try and start to get at the way those changes have affected people's understandings of themselves and their relationships to larger institutions, specifically, the government and (vs) non-governmental organizations.

well. if you're still reading, you'll probably find the following list interesting. it's what i'm sort of continuing to pick my way through as background reading. these are the books anyway, and pretty much just the tip of the iceberg of the canon. at some point maybe i'll do a list of the articles as well, although it's a LOT of sort of dry, methodological stuff....

Ferguson, James The Anti-politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
Fisher, Julie Nongovernments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World
Scott, James Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

i've also started reading a LOT of development blogs, thanks to my google reader, so i think i'm going to start trying to link to some of those and comment on the debates, insofar as i can follow them.

out to the wild west

so, i think the one of the last substantive posts i did was just a lazy copying and pasting of my research proposal for this year. what that post managed to conceal, of course, is that it is the fruit of years and years of secondary-source research practice, strong analytical and verbal skills...and a tremendous ability to bullshit my way into situations in which i feel ultimately out of my depth. i certainly never concealed the fact that i have virtually nothing (ok, just nothing) in the way of field research experience. but, given my blithe confidence (and, to be fair to myself, legitimate excitement at the possibility of new data sets...god, how do i have friends), it didn't, y'know, really come up.

and now, my friends it is time to pay the piper. i leave tomorrow for humla (which, if you look back at the original proposal, is a change of plan), which is, arguably the most remote district in nepal...one of the last truly roadless places in the world....'cause that sounds like just the sort of thing i do for fun, right? i am going to be using methodologies (rapid assessment/participatory rural appraisal), with which i have only a desk-chair familiarity in a place where the language barrier will be significant, working with a translator whose english skills are about at the level of my nepali skills (if that).

basically, there is no part of this little adventure that doesn't turn me into a quivering, gelatinous pile of anxiety.

i am a jello mold of neuroses.

with that said, i had a long chat with a friend who's just spent about eight months out in humla. i don't know whether it was the sage advice or the multiple beers, but it really helped. he helped me recalibrate my expectations of myself and this trip significantly, reminding me that field work is always unpredictable, no matter how prepared you are, and that this will be a valuable experience, no matter what kind of data i get on this particular jaunt. and he said, and i believed, if only for a second, the magic words: "and that's ok".

we'll see if i still feel that way when i haven't showered or eaten anything but buckwheat pancakes for two weeks, and am trying to hitch a ride out of the district on a WFP rice 'copter before i get snowed in...but i guess we'll have the answer to that when i get back in a few weeks.

let's dance.

what i'll be doing this year...

...aside from stocking up on candles and immodium, like always.
so at the risk of cursing this whole situation (because things can always go wrong in truly unexpected ways in nepal...adds spice to life), it looks like i've got a visa AND a project i'm really excited about coming up. as the only native english speaker in the office aside from my boss, the director, it's sort of inevitable that i write a lot of grants and edit a lot of reports. this is fine. it's necessary, i'm pretty decent at it, and it's even enjoyable...but it's not really super productive in terms of career path for me. so imagine my glee now that it looks like i'll be doing research for TMI (where i've been for the last year) and the UN World Food Programme for whom TMI implements food aid delivery in karnali. hopefully i'll be producing a more theoretically informed, academic piece, as well as a more slimmed-down publication for an NGO audience. ANYWAY... i figured i would just post my proposal below for people who are interested. feedback and reading recommendations totally welcome.

The NGO-ization of Service Delivery: Food Security and Community Response in Jumla District, Nepal

In countries where governments have little capacity to address basic social service delivery, the responsibility for service delivery across multiple sectors often shifts to non-governmental and/or non-profit organizations, funded (in the case of developing countries) largely by foreign donors. Focusing on food insecurity in Jumla district, in the remote Karnali region of Nepal, I aim to describe the division of labor (and changes in that division over time) between government and non-governmental organizations as a function of social, historical, and political processes. Then, I aim to analyze the effect of this division of labor on the strategies and understandings of local communities, specifically, how systems and methods of delivery affect local food security and livelihood adaptation strategies (for instance, crop choices or labor migration patterns).

I intend to conduct my research in partnership with the UN World Food Programme and The Mountain Institute (TMI). TMI, as the implementing partner for the WFP’s Food for Work (FFW) project (part of its Protracted Relief and Recovery Operations in the country) has a working presence in eight of the most vulnerable VDCs in Jumla district, in which research will be conducted. Jumla was selected based on its overall Human Development Index (HDI), which ranks 69th out of Nepal’s 75 districts, with 74.1 percent of children under five classified as chronically malnourished. Since 2008 TMI has distributed over 1,170.15 metric tons of rice and built strong relationships and trust with the some of the most vulnerable members of the district. These eight VDCs, identified as the most vulnerable clusters in the district, based on the WFP’s mapping for food sufficiency, include 4,591 households with a total population of 26,928 people.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

There is significant debate in the literature concerning the pros and cons of the “NGO-ization” of service delivery (as well as capacity building, good governance promotion, and other functions); the legitimacy of INGOs; and their effects on state sovereignty, capacity, and governance structures. This debate is extensive and largely beyond the scope of a brief research proposal, although it will be considered in more detail as background in the final report resulting from this research. It does, however, inform the framework of inquiry. This research is aimed at contributing to the broader debates outlined above, as well as those on the efficacy of food aid paradigms, but seeks to do so through a necessarily limited case study.

The first component of this research, describing the division of responsibilities between governmental and non-governmental agencies in the delivery of food security services in Jumla district, seeks to identify the structural and historical causes of the current status of service delivery. Currently, government capacity to deliver basic services is at such a nadir in the region that most service delivery is performed by non-governmental organizations. This project seeks to identify more accurately and specifically the extent to which “NGO-ization” of service delivery has taken place in the region, and the factors that have influenced this outcome (ie levels of centralized and local corruption, lack of government presence, political instability, etc) both in current moment and historically. Furthermore it seeks to address questions of future service delivery: who is best placed to provide social protection? To what extent can NGO and donors work through local government and what needs to happen to shift the balance so that major development partners can begin to work through local governments? This research also aims to be a sort of organizational ethnography, describing the understandings of actors within organizations as well as the organizational cultures that influence the formulation of policy. 

The second component of the research takes as a premise that food aid does not merely serve as a supplement to local livelihoods. Instead, communities will adapt their existing livelihood practices (for instance crop choice, patterns of labor migration, and/or production of marketable goods), in order to effectively leverage the new inputs while managing risk and conserving energies. By focusing first on how current food aid systems affect local livelihood practices, the research hopes to offer insight on how to create more sustainable and effective delivery mechanisms, both governmental and non-governmental, and how to transition successfully from short-term aid delivery to a long-term sustainable development model.

METHODS

In addition to a literature review and development of a theoretical framework, my research will be based on qualitative data collection, primarily through a semi-structured interview format. Since the project concerns both the formation of service delivery policy and strategy, as well as community responses to that strategy, interviews will include those with the staffs of NGOs concerned with food security service delivery in Jumla, specifically the World Food Programme, The Mountain Institute, TMI’s local NGO partner (Integrated Community Development-Jumla), and concerned government entities, such as the Ministries of Local Development and Health and Population.

Although research staff will be based in Kathmandu, extended field trips to Jumla district, of three to five weeks each, are planned for both the Fall and Spring, when travel remains easier. This timing also coincides with major planting and harvesting phases, which will allow research staff to simultaneously observe and discuss subsistence and livelihood choices with residents. The trusted nature of the relationship that exists between TMI and their local NGO partner staff and local communities will allow research staff to reduce the amount of time normally required to build relationships necessary for deeper qualitative research and to access local knowledge. As research staff will be working closely with NGO staff implementing programming in the area, there will also be a component of participation observation to the research.

Interviews will be conducted in English and Nepali, as necessary, with a translator present if the situation demands, although all members of the research team will possess at least basic Nepali language skills.

TIMELINE

Literature review and the development of a theoretical framework will be done in the summer months before the fall field trip. Winter months will be utilized to build relationships and conduct the majority of NGO-based research in Kathmandu and Nepalgunj, as well as to analyze findings from the first half of the research period. The spring field trip to Jumla will be used to deepen the understanding of the issues initially researched in the fall, and explore issues uncovered during the Kathmandu phase of the research. After returning from spring fieldwork, research will be compiled into several formats: a policy briefing appropriate for NGO and government reference, as well as a more extended and theoretically informed piece suitable for distribution in academic contexts. Information sharing will also be facilitated by two workshops, one for each component of the project, a) the “NGO-ization” of food security service delivery policy as a function of historical, economic, and political processes and b) community response to delivery policy in terms of livelihood strategy adaptation.

originally, i had planned a third "component" to the research, which i've posted below. unfortunately, it's a pretty big project already, and it's not really in WFP or TMI's wheelhouse. i still think it's pretty cool though, so i'm going to try to answer the question anyway, and maybe write something separately.

This research is also concerned with local communities’ understandings of and aspirations for governance, particularly at this critical political juncture in the country. Although food aid (governmental and non-governmental) fashions itself as deliberately apolitical, this research takes as a starting point that the delivery by non-state actors of any basic service that is commonly understood as the province of the state will fundamentally affect people’s understandings of what a government should be, as well as their rights and responsibilities, and those of non-governmental actors. This component of the research seeks to reveal the unintended consequences of even “non-political” service delivery on communities’ political understandings and participation.