This book explores why Nepal's hydropower sector is one of its few development success stories. Unlike most other 'developing' countries, in Nepal local firms design and build hydropower facilities using Nepali engineers, builders and labor. Nepal has largely avoided the trap whereby most poor countries are forced to accept energy infrastructure projects that are foreign designed, funded and built – typically resulting in debt, dependency and unsustainability. It traces the struggle between two competing development paradigms: one that emphasizes gradual national human capacity building – at the expense of speed and efficiency – and another that emphasizes rapid, large-scale infrastructure building – at the risk of unsustainability and dependency. At stake is whether what passes for 'development' benefits the countries in which it occurs, or the banks and investors that finance capital-intensive projects. What Went Right brings a vision for sustainable development into vigorous convers
Far Out charts the history of Western countercultural longing for Nepal that made the country, and Kathmandu in particular, a premier tourist destination in the twentieth century. Anthropologist and h
Westerners have long imagined the Himalayas as the world’s last untouched place and repository of redemptive power and wisdom. Beatniks, hippie seekers, spiritual tourists, mountain climbers—diverse g
Suitably Modern traces the growth of a new middle class in Kathmandu as urban Nepalis harness the modern cultural resources of mass media and consumer goods to build modern identities and pioneer a ne
This collection of ten ethnographic studies of "middle classness" around the world, presented by Heiman (social sciences, The New School for Public Engagement), Freeman (anthropology and gender studie