Browsing by Author "Paudel, Dinesh"

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    The double life of development: peasants, agrarian livelihoods, and the prehistory of Nepal's Maoist revolution
    (2012-10) Paudel, Dinesh
    This dissertation explores the relationship between the long history of development and peasant rebellions in Nepal by drawing on ethnographic inquiries of a pre-history of Nepal's Maoist revolution of the 1990s. Specifically, it interrogates the transformations generated by the Rapti Integrated Development Project in peasants' moral economy, ecological processes, appropriation of the commons and peasants' consciousness, and their role in creating the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the Maoist revolution. Various developmental schemes successfully enrolled rural villages into development projects, ostensibly to contain an upsurge in rebellious sentiments. Ironically, these same subjects of development later became the backbone of the Maoist rebellion and were instrumental in spreading the armed revolt against the state throughout Nepal. The Rapti region was hailed as a model of success for agrarian development in one era and the locus of the peasant-led Maoist revolution in another. The main question asked in this research was why the Maoist revolution emerged from Rapti area of Nepal despite the long history of development in the region. My main argument in this dissertation is that development involves simultaneous processes of enrollment and othering of subaltern subjects, which I call development's "double life". This is central to how we understand the relationship between development and rebellion in the global South. Developmental conditions are reproduced through hegemonic ideas and practices, and it normalizes certain kinds of knowledge and subject positions, aside from producing economic domination, vulnerability and scarcity. At the same time, development carries the potential to incite political awareness among marginalized groups that can result in a willingness to rebel at the individual level and to engage in collective defiance or revolt. Conceptual and empirical contradictions inherent to development generate such possibilities in particular times and spaces. In peasant society, the enrollment and othering of subaltern subjects are manifested in everyday livelihood practices, in historically evolved metabolic interactions with nature, and in the transformation of individual and collective subjectivities and consciousness. This dissertation demonstrates that the organic intellectuals can articulate these processes of enrollment and othering, reproduced in development, to generate a new commonsense, instigating rebellious consciousness and transformative possibilities.
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    Economic and Environmental Costs and Benefits of Living Snow Fences: Safety, Mobility, and Transportation Authority Benefits, Farmer Costs, and Carbon Impacts
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2012-02) Wyatt, Gary; Zamora, Diomy; Smith, David; Schroeder, Sierra; Paudel, Dinesh; Knight, Joe; Kilberg, Don; Current, Dean; Gullickson, Dan; Taff, Steve
    Blowing and drifting snow on Minnesota's roadways is a transportation efficiency and safety concern. Establishing standing corn rows and living snow fences improves driver visibility, road surface conditions, and has the potential to lower costs of road maintenance as well as accidents attributed to blowing and drifting snow. It also has the potential to sequester carbon and avoid the carbon emissions of snow removal operations. In recent years the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) has paid farmers to leave standing corn rows to protect identified snow problem roadways. They have paid farmers $1.50 per bushel above market price. With increasing demand for corn to fuel the ethanol industry, paying $1.50 per bushel above market price may not be sufficient incentive for leaving standing corn rows. Also, with MnDOT’s memorandum of understanding with USDA to plant living snow fences through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), now is an opportune time to review MnDOT’s annual payment structure to farmers and prepare a new one. This project has: 1) developed a calculator to estimate payments for farmers that includes consideration of safety and snow removal cost savings; 2) estimated potential income from carbon payments; 3) worked closely with MnDOT engineers and plow operators, estimated the safety and snow removal costs and carbon emissions avoided by MnDOT through establishing living snow fences; and 4) evaluated farmers’ willingness to establish living snow fences and identified farmers/landowners’ constraints to adoption. Data is provided to MnDOT to assist staff in its decision making related to their Living Snow Fence Program.