Springer Briefs in Environmental Science. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017. xv, 166 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$54.95, paper. ISBN 978-3-319-55755-7.
Himalayan Mobilities is a timely book. Co-authored by Robert Beazley and James Lassoie, it explores the construction of Himalayan roads and the profound transformation they continue to trigger throughout rural Nepal.
The two authors, a PhD candidate and a professor in the Department of Natural Resources at Cornell University, lead us through the jungle of government offices and programmes involved in road construction in Nepal, agregate a considerable amount of data, and offer case studies focussing on the Annapurna region. For anybody working on infrastructure in Asia or in similarly mountainous terrain elsewhere, the book is a very helpful source of information.
It is clear that over the past decade, rural Nepal has witnessed a veritable road construction frenzy which has been an extremely dynamic and often quite illegible affair, involving state planners and international development agencies as well as quarrelling political parties and local politicians, private actors, and business people—all of them with their particular priorities, hopes, and agendas. As a result, there is often a tremendous gap between planning documents, statistics, and realities on the ground.
It certainly lies beyond the scope of a Springer Brief in Environmental Science to unpack these social, political, and economic complexities systematically and in detail. What a short book like this one can do, and what this book does well, is raise the question what kinds of impact roads have in Nepal. The core of the book, consisting of chapters 3, 4, and 5, deals with environmental, socioeconomic, and sociocultural impacts of road construction, respectively. Each chapter comes with its own bibliography and is structured in a simple and clear way, starting with the global scale and then proceeding to the national setting and finally the local context of the case studies in the Annapurna region (Mustang, Manang). At times, I wished that the discussion of the global scale had been be a bit shorter and left more room for the national and local scales, especially since it is not always clear how the topics raised in general really matter on the ground. The authors argue, for example, that one sociocultural impact of roads is an increase in sex trade, HIV, and and other sexually transmitted infections (106); upon reading the case studies, however, there is no follow-up for such topics.
The empirical core of chapters 3, 4, and 5 is preceeded by a global review of road development and an outline of the theoretical framework the authors adopt. This framework seeks to marry a coupled human and ecological systems approach with insights from mobility studies in social sciences and humanities. Condensed for the sake of brevity required by a Springer Brief, this chapter covers a lot of ground in just a few pages. It takes us from John Urry to Deleuze/Guattari and Liisa Malkki, with a sprinkle of James Scott in between, then turns to the gender dimension of mobility and ends with a short section on Himalayan mobilities past and present. While promising and ambitious, the chapter’s sprawling scope comes at a price; it hardly engages with the intellectual projects of the authors cited and therefore also never really gains traction in the subsequent chapters of the book. What Malkki identifies as sedentarist metaphysics, for example, is at the core of the very development discourse shaping infrastructural debates in Nepal. Or, regarding coupled human and ecological systems: the rise of apple orchards in Mustang as an immediate result of road and market access, would have offered the near-perfect turf to explain and explore such couplings—from irrigation to investment and labour relations and climate change—on the very terrain the case studies are concerned with. In the examples the authors focus on, however, the links between theoretical frame and empirical findings are much less direct and obvious.
The last chapter of the book raises the question of the future of Himalayan mobilities. It describes the closure of the Arniko Highway connecting Kathmandu with Lhasa, traces the post-earthquake dynamics in Nepal that triggered a partial reorientation towards China, and blames much of what is going wrong on corruption. Interestingly, there is a noticable shift in tone in this chapter away from the language of conservation, green roads, eco-tourism, and gender sensitivities toward the grandiose rhetoric of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—a shift that mirrors a similar trend in the current public debates in Kathmandu. Dealing directly with some of the most crucial topics discussed in Nepal today, this final chapter reads almost like the introduction to a follow-up book, one less constrained by the brevitiy of the Springer Series and, perhaps, better suited to accommodate the authors’ broad expertise.
Martin Saxer
LMU, Munich, Germany