Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal

About this book

Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal is an accessible contemporary political economic analysis of social change in Nepal. It considers whether and how Nepal's political economy might have been transformed since the 1950s while situating these changes in Nepal's modern history and its location in the global economic system. It assembles and builds on the scholarship on Nepal from a multidisciplinary and synoptic perspective. Focusing on local discourses, experiences and expectations of transformations, it draws our attention to how powerful historical processes are experienced and negotiated in Nepal and assess how these may, at the same time, produce ideas of equality, human rights and citizenship while also generating new forms of precarity. Review Based on over 15 years of research, and drawing on all of the key studies of Nepali society and economy published over a similar period, Jeevan Sharma's book is a deeply insightful analysis of Nepal's complex transformation which transcends disciplinary boundaries. He describes a country which is now deeply penetrated by the ideas and material aspects of development, market and modernity, where all of the basic indicators of sustainable development have taken a sharp upward trend, but whose people face the 'stubborn continuities' of socioeconomic inequity and poor governance, obliging many of them to seek financial relief as migrant labourers on terms of unfreedom and precarity. Sharma offers us the most integrative, synoptic and interdisciplinary account of these changes and paradoxes published to date, and his book will, therefore, be an essential reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary Nepal. Its critical use of Karl Polanyi's model of The Great Transformation will also be of great interest to readers concerned with the extent to which theoretical models developed in a Euro-American context are helpful for understanding social, political and economic transformations in the contemporary global South. -- Michael Hutt Jeevan Sharma has produced a stimulating and provocative 'monograph', as he calls it, on the political economy of social change and development in Nepal. Drawing on original field research and the ideas of Karl Polanyi on The Great Transformation as well as the secondary literature, Jeevan Sharma has produced an analysis that effectively challenges much of the conventional wisdom on, and provides a wholistic overview of, the political economy of development in Nepal over recent decades. It constitutes not only a synthesis of his own original research but also an ambitious attempt to provide an overall integrated theoretical framework for the broader analysis of political, social and economic change in Nepal over the recent decades. His theoretical framework explicitly draws on Karl Polanyi's notion of 'great transformation', which he sees as involving both the emergence of a market economy and society and a countermovement of social protection in response to the negative effects of the capitalism-what Sharma refers to as 'a double movement'. But he also refers to more recent theorists, like Goodwin (2018) and Fraser (2013), and argues that what is needed is a framework that recognises the potential of a third 'countermovement', to fight inequality, hierarchy and domination-a movement of what Fraser calls 'emancipation'. The framework espoused by Sharma is one that identifies a complex interaction between what might be termed economic, social and political movements or forces, which act in both complementary and contradictory ways to shape the 'great transformation' in any given part of the world. Even more than in the case of the initial 'great transformation' of Western Europe, the analysis of 'social change and development' in Africa, Asia and Latin America in the 20th and 21st century must also integrate the effects of the external forces of capitalism on a global scale. Sharma seems to believe that, despite the momentous (step change) transformation of Nepal's economy, society and politics in recent decades, 'Nepal has not seen a countermovement from below', leaving the 'emancipation' of the Nepali people yet to be achieved. This seems to effectively consign the 10-year long Maoist insurgency or 'People's War' to the rubbish bin of history. For some, however, this will vindicate skepticism regarding the potential in the 21st century of armed struggle to achieve the kind of 'emancipation' to which Fraser refers. Readers may wish, in this regard, to revisit Eric Wolf's great work, also based on a Polanyian perspective, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, first published exactly 50 years ago. He included in his six case studies only those revolutions that were successful. -- David Seddon The causes and consequences of the mammoth changes that have roiled Nepali polity and society in the recent years has been a story waiting to be told, and that is what Political Economy of Social Change and Development in Nepal has managed to do. Unlike other impressionistic accounts, Jeevan Sharma marshals empirical facts he himself had gathered over the years in support of his argument. The result is this highly readable account of 'the great transformation', as he calls it, that has yet to come full circle but the outcome of which is there for all to see and understand through the eyes of a scholar grounded firmly in the reality of his home country. -- Deepak Thapa