Fields in Motion, Fields of Friction: Tales of Betrayal and Promise from Kangra District, India

Over a period of five decades, Kangra District, located in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, has been continually si(gh)ted within different development imaginaries that have evolved at particular configurations of scale and time and been given shape within a succession of international bilateral projects. These development flows into the region have in turn fostered a plethora of competing institutions and practices, contributing their own sometimes divergent flows within an inherently mobile and “developmentalizing” terrain. While this dynamic and multi-textured terrain offers rich opportunities for partnerships forged across disparate sites, there is, I argue, a need to revisit “collaboration” as a key feminist tool for facilitating social justice and change. Widely lauded for its empowering, equalizing and transformative potential by feminist scholars, collaboration is also viewed prescriptively in terms of “success” and “failure.” Consequently, “strategies and solutions” are sought to negotiate its minefields and to resolve, often futilely, the friction that repeatedly erupts within them. In this paper, I suggest a re-viewing of friction as a valuable methodological frame within feminist collaborative research and praxis. In place of the prevalent emphasis on containing and resolving friction generated at border crossings, I contend that feminist-oriented “location work” that engages with friction and follows its routes through the fluid and fertile space of a “developmentalizing terrain” can provide promising avenues and detours for empowerment and social justice. Drawing on Tsing’s (2005) discussion of the creative role of friction across global connections, I reflect on some of the ways in which it played out as a creative source of production, interruption and mutation within two of my collaborative ventures in Kangra. In doing so, I demonstrate how an attention to the sometimes unanticipated and diversionary routes that are generated by friction within collaborative efforts, and the vistas of “betrayal” and promise that they reveal, offer valuable insights for encounters at the interface of feminist praxis, anthropology and development practice

Simulating farm income under the current soil management regime in the mid-hills of Nepal

Farmers in the mid-hills of Nepal follow diverse farming systems. The peri-urban area of this region, where population density is higher, faces several problems in farming. While hills suffer from erosion because they are erodible, the peri-urban areas face the problem of decline in factor productivity, particularly in intensively cultivated farmlands. The present study is concerned with simulating farm income on a regional scale based on soil management practices. Spatial explicit simulation shows that the loss of farm income due to degradation is substantially higher in hills while it is lower in valley bottoms. Strategy formulation and testing in the spatial environment indicates that Geographic Information System is an appropriate methodological tool for simulating the consequences of particular interventions

Beyond Contradiction: Sacred-Profane Waters and the Dialectics of Everyday Religion

Studies of the relationship between religion and ecology are either highly enthusiastic about the ways that religious belief can motivate sound resource management or skeptical of the connection. Using an everyday religion approach, this text takes a middle ground to show that resources are variously interpreted in daily life and that religious orientations, while potentially supportive of environmentally sound action, are but one source of influence. Drawing from fieldwork, the discussion employs practice theory to look at how water resources in a Himalayan township are understood and the ways that notions of responsibility for sacred and profane waters are changing. The text aims to show that resource degradation is not necessarily indicative of contradictions in belief. This assertion pushes us to think more critically about the importance of everyday terrains of discourse and action, including how resource perceptions and management activities are influenced by structural constraints

Improving the Physical Processes and Model Integration Functionality of an Energy Balance Model for Snow and Glacier Melt

The Hindu-Kush Himalayan region possesses a large resource of snow and ice, which acts as a freshwater reservoir for irrigation, domestic water consumption or hydroelectric power for billions of people in South Asia. Monitoring hydrologic resources in this region is challenging because of the difficulty of installing and maintaining a climate and hydrologic monitoring network, limited transportation and communication infrastructure and difficult access to glaciers. As a result of the high, rugged topographic relief, ground observations in the region are extremely sparse. Reanalysis data offer the potential to compensate for the data scarcity, which is a barrier in hydrological modeling and analysis for improving water resources management. Reanalysis weather data products integrate observations with atmospheric model physics to produce a spatially and temporally complete weather record in the post-satellite era. This dissertation creates an integrated hydrologic modeling system that tests whether streamflow prediction can be improved by taking advantage of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remote sensing and reanalysis weather data products in physically based energy balance snow melt and hydrologic models. This study also enhances the energy balance snowmelt model by adding capability to quantify glacier melt. The novelty of this integrated modeling tool resides in allowing the user to isolate various components of surface water inputs (rainfall, snow and glacier ice melt) in a cost-free, open source graphical-user interface-based system that can be used for government and institutional decision-making. Direct, physically based validation of this system is challenging due to the data scarcity in this region, but, to the extent possible, the model was validated through comparison to observed streamflow and to point measurements at locations in the United States having available dat

Reconfiguration of ecohydrology as a sustainability tool for Himalayan waterways

Twenty first century faces unprecedented challenges for the management of global waterways. The Himalayan waterways in Asia are exposed to unpredictable climatic warming together with anthropogenic perturbations caused by population growth, land use change and socio-economic development. Given the increased public concerns on the Himalayan Mountain development programmes including the hydropower and tourism, there has been a growing need of the use of interdisciplinary scientific approaches to address water resources challenges that the Himalayan region has faced during the 21st century. Ecohydrology is an emerging scientific tool that explores key hydrological processes regulating structure and function of ecosystems, as well as assessing the impact of biological processes on water cycle variables under rapidly changing environment. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Hydrological Programme hosted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization have adopted ecohydrology as a sustainable development tool by linking water resources and poverty eradication and ecosystem restoration, irrigation, energy and sanitation. However, ecohydrology tool needs to be reconfigured for sustainable development of rapidly changing Himalayan waterways. Here we propose the advancement of ecohydrology by developing various integrated frameworks of ecology, hydrology, hydraulics and sociology for resilient waterways in the Asian Himalayas

Gender and Climate Change in the Indian Himalayas: Global Threats, Local Vulnerabilities, and Livelihood Diversification at the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve

Global climate change has numerous implications for members of mountain communities who feel the impacts in both physical and social dimensions. In the western Himalayas of India, a majority of residents maintain a livelihood strategy that includes a combination of subsistence or small-scale agriculture, livestock rearing, seasonal or long-term migration, and localized natural resource extraction. While warming temperatures, irregular patterns of precipitation and snowmelt, and changing biological systems present challenges to the viability of these traditional livelihood portfolios in general, we find that climate change is also undermining local communities’ livelihood assets in gender-specific ways. In this paper, we present a case study from the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (Uttarakhand, India) that both outlines the implications of climate change for women farmers in the area and highlights the potential for ecotourism (as a form of livelihood diversification) to strengthen both key livelihood assets of women and local communities’ adaptive capacity more broadly. The paper intentionally employs a categorical focus on women but also addresses issues of inter-group and gender diversity. With this special issue in mind, suggestions for related research are proposed for consideration by climate scientists and social systems and/or policy modelers seeking to support gender justice through socially transformative perspectives and frameworks

Addressing India’s water challenge 2050: the virtual water trade option

The Government of India, on directions from the Supreme Court in 2002 and advice from the National Water Development Agency (NWDA), proposed an estimated US$120 billion National River Linking Project (NRLP) which envisages linking 37 Himalayan and Peninsular rivers (Figure 1; NCIWRD 1999). Doing this will form a gigantic South Asian water grid which will annually handle 178×109 m3/yr of interbasin water transfer; build 12,500 km of canals; generate 34 gigawatts of hydropower; add 35 million hectares (Mha) to India’s irrigated areas; and generate inland navigation benefits (IWMI 2003; NWDA 2006; Gupta and van der Zaag 2007)

Going against the flow: A critical analysis of virtual water trade in the context of India's National River Linking Programme

Virtual water trade has been promoted as a tool to address national and regional water scarcity. In the context of international (food) trade, this concept has been applied with a view to optimize the flow of commodities considering the water endowments of nations. The concept states that water-rich countries should produce and export water intensive commodities (which indirectly carry embedded water needed for producing them) to water-scarce countries, thereby enabling the water-scarce countries to divert their precious water resources to alternative, higher productivity uses.\ud While progress has been made on quantifying virtual water flows between countries, there exists little information on virtual water trade within large countries like India. This report quantifies and critically analyzes inter-state virtual water flows in India in the context of a large inter-basin transfer plan of the Government of India.\ud Our analysis shows that the existing pattern of inter-state virtual water trade is exacerbating scarcities in already water scarce states and that rather than being dictated by water endowments, virtual water flows are influenced by other factors such as "per capita gross cropped area" and "access to secured markets". We therefore argue that in order to have a comprehensive understanding of virtual water trade, non-water factors of production need to be taken into consideration

Impacts of \u3ci\u3eYartsa Gunbu\u3c/i\u3e Harvesting on Alpine Ecosystems in the Barun Valley, Makalu-Barun National Park, Nepal

Around 2003, the highly valuable medicinal fungi Ophiocordyceps sinensis (Nepali: yartsa gunbu) began to be commercially harvested in the remote Barun valley of the Makalu-Barun National Park and Buffer Zone, eastern Nepal. Since then, an estimated 3,000 collectors per year have visited the valley each harvesting season, placing new pressures upon its subalpine and alpine landscapes. A review of the yartsa gunbu literature suggested that its harvesting throughout highland India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China has brought important economic benefits, but that it has often been accompanied by a corresponding increase in negative environmental impacts such as alpine shrub destruction, wildlife poaching, and improper garbage disposal. Adverse social impacts reported have included an increase in violence, occasional murder, and the erosion of traditional values. In an attempt to determine if similar phenomena were occurring within the Barun valley, east Nepal, we conducted a month-long study of yartsa gunbu harvesting practices between May and June of 2016. Unlike other regions of the Himalaya, we found that violence and social unrest due to harvesting competition were unheard of in the Barun, which we link to the (a) lower market value of yartsa gunbu harvested there when compared to other regions, and (b) the recognized role of yartsa gunbu as a supplemental and livelihood diversifying income generation opportunity instead of a sole source of new income. Since its collection and sale were legalized by the Government of Nepal in 2001, the concurrent development of locally responsive yartsa gunbu harvesting policies and practices can also be linked to the general absence of environmental disturbance that we found