1.
Smart Villages.
Remoteness and states of being
off-grid in Nepal
Ben Campbell
Durham Anthropology
Durham Energy Institute
Low Carbon Energy for Development Network

2.
Remoteness as double edged
Resilience, Adaptability and Solidarity
Vs
Isolation and neglect
Capacity for take-up of technology and development can be
affected by socio-economic and cultural remoteness
alongside geography
Politics of exclusion from development benefits, and histories
of unequal citizenship

3.
Local institutions for natural
resource management
Community forestry success story in many parts
of Nepal
But in protected areas in Nepal like the national
parks, community livelihoods have come up
against heightened concerns for forest
protection, and restriction on fuelwood use.
In Langtang National Park many villages rely
on income from selling milk at seasonal, off-
grid diary units for yak cheese making

4.
Annual cheese production
From Chandanbari15,156.5 kg
(approx $150,000 value)

5.
Biogas for yak cheese in Nepal
• “From an anthropology of development
perspective, the challenge of bringing low-carbon
energy to the poor involves understanding the
dynamics and characteristics of poverty in
historical structures of inequality. In a country
such as Nepal, there are factors of ethnic– cultural
difference and community-adapted knowledge and
skill sets that make Euro-American notions of
poverty as lack of modern technological inputs too
simplistic” (Campbell and Sallis 2013:4)

6.
Hybrid solutions
• The success of biogas energy in the warmer
lowlands of Nepal have struggled to work
their way uphill in colder climes
• The remoteness of advice and support systems
is more than geographical
• Nepal has struggled through a decade of civil
war over the center’s neglect of
underdeveloped districts
• the trial unit will use solar thermal water heat

7.
BSP so far only looking at (domestic) cooking scale

8.
Cheese
factory on this
day processed
165 litres milk
– required 4
loads of wood
(35-40 kg)
including
heating of
water for
morning after
30,000 rs per
year (£250)
paid to LNP
for wood, in
addition to
reforestation
project

9.
“some kinds of transition technologies require
wholesale behaviour change, whereas others could
have more affinity with materials and principles of
self-reliance linked to science of place in niches that
enable pro-poor and pro-biodiversity examples of
metabolic cycles” (Campbell and Sallis 2013:2)

10.
• Conclusion
• Old power relations that have kept the Tamang communities poor
in the mountains, are now dampening the chances for sustainable
livelihood innovation and for consensual biodiversity conservation.
Poverty is an effect of unequal relations in society almost more than
intrinsic productivity potential of the resource base.
• “The key challenges …for social science seem clear. These lie in moves
away from defining Sustainability in general – and Sustainable energy in
particular – exclusively in terms of outcomes. Social research is as much
about the processes and directions of change through which
understandings and developments do or don’t unfold, as about any goals
and end-points in themselves. Crucial here is a key neglected theme in
Brundtland’s original characterisation of Sustainability – emphasising
needs for “effective citizen participation” and “greater democracy”
Stirling p2014:89. Energy Research & Social Science 1 (2014) 83–95