Smart Villages.

Remoteness and states of being

off-grid in Nepal

Ben Campbell

Durham Anthropology

Durham Energy Institute

Low Carbon Energy for Development Network

Remoteness as double edged

Resilience, Adaptability and Solidarity

Vs

Isolation and neglect

Capacity for take-up of technology and development can be

affected by socio-economic and cultural remoteness

alongside geography

Politics of exclusion from development benefits, and histories

of unequal citizenship

Local institutions for natural

resource management

Community forestry success story in many parts of Nepal

But in protected areas in Nepal like the national parks, community livelihoods have come up against heightened concerns for forest protection, and restriction on fuelwood use.

In Langtang National Park many villages rely on income from selling milk at seasonal, off-grid diary units for yak cheese making

Annual cheese production

From Chandanbari15,156.5 kg

(approx $150,000 value)

Biogas for yak cheese in Nepal• “From an anthropology of development

perspective, the challenge of bringing low-carbon energy to the poor involves understanding the dynamics and characteristics of poverty in historical structures of inequality. In a country such as Nepal, there are factors of ethnic– cultural difference and community-adapted knowledge and skill sets that make Euro-American notions of poverty as lack of modern technological inputs too simplistic” (Campbell and Sallis 2013:4)

Hybrid solutions

• The success of biogas energy in the warmer

lowlands of Nepal have struggled to work

their way uphill in colder climes

• The remoteness of advice and support systems

is more than geographical

• Nepal has struggled through a decade of civil

war over the center’s neglect of

underdeveloped districts

• the trial unit will use solar thermal water heat

BSP so far only looking at (domestic) cooking scale

Cheese

factory on this

day processed

165 litres milk

– required 4

loads of wood

(35-40 kg)

including

heating of

water for

morning after

30,000 rs per

year (£250)

paid to LNP

for wood, in

addition to

reforestation

project

“some kinds of transition technologies require

wholesale behaviour change, whereas others could

have more affinity with materials and principles of

self-reliance linked to science of place in niches that

enable pro-poor and pro-biodiversity examples of

metabolic cycles” (Campbell and Sallis 2013:2)

• Conclusion• Old power relations that have kept the Tamang communities poor

in the mountains, are now dampening the chances for sustainable

livelihood innovation and for consensual biodiversity conservation.

Poverty is an effect of unequal relations in society almost more than

intrinsic productivity potential of the resource base.

• “The key challenges …for social science seem clear. These lie in moves

away from defining Sustainability in general – and Sustainable energy in

particular – exclusively in terms of outcomes. Social research is as much

about the processes and directions of change through which

understandings and developments do or don’t unfold, as about any goals

and end-points in themselves. Crucial here is a key neglected theme in

Brundtland’s original characterisation of Sustainability – emphasising

needs for “effective citizen participation” and “greater democracy”

Stirling p2014:89. Energy Research & Social Science 1 (2014) 83–95