Between Eating and Being Fed: Competing Ethics of Community-Based Road Building in Nepal

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper explores locally-situated logics of ethical judgment underpinning practices of road building in Nepal, and how those logics are attuned to the challenges of navigating complex socio-political dynamics, socio-natural environments, and regional political economies. In so doing it challenges homogenizing discourses of corruption that commonly surround infrastructure development. Building on ethnographic research on rural road construction in two agrarian districts, we argue that different understandings of who is responsible for contributing to infrastructure development, and what forms of private gain from public road budgets are justifiable, do not always conform to official understandings of the public good. Such discrepancies arise, we suggest, from the practical role that certain forms of rule breaking play in getting roads built, as well as from the contested legitimacy of the rules themselves. The politics of participatory development bring to light the ambivalent morality of certain forms of public/private transgressions, and tensions between competing imaginaries of the "public" nature of "local" rural roads—which constitute important, and largely overlooked, dynamics in infrastructure development. Attention to such dynamics is needed to better understand the challenge of building high-quality rural roads and, we contend, to inform just and sustainable approaches to infrastructure development.