To the field

Fascinating as Kathmandu is, I don’t do what I do so I can sit in an office in a big city halfway around the world. I’m in it for the fieldwork.

Initially I hoped to go to the western highlands, where the project that IWMI is studying, the Western Uplands Poverty Alleviation Project, is being implemented. But planes can’t fly over the cloudy mountains and vehicles can’t make it on the muddy landslide-ridden roads during monsoon, so instead I’m visiting a different project, the Local Livelihoods Program, that I can actually get to this time of year. Both are funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, who has asked IWMI to do an evaluation of the institutional context of their interventions to help IFAD improve their project impact in what they call “challenging contexts.”

When there are about a zillion NGOs doing a bazillion development projects in Nepal and most of the country is still in desperate poverty, it’s pretty clear that these projects don’t always work. The bazillion dollar question is why some projects work and others don’t. Obviously not a question I’m going to answer with a five-day field trip, but I’m going to take a stab at it. The project I’m looking at is working with farmers to help them grow and sell high-value crops to raise their incomes. And they’re not just constructing irrigation canals and teaching farmers to plant asparagus; they’re forming farmers’ cooperatives and water user groups so that, ideally, farmers will continue maintaining the infrastructure and improving their production systems and adapting to market conditions after the project ends. Sounds great, but will it work?

Development is full of buzzwords: “participatory development,” “institutional capacity,” “sustainability” – all good things, we think, all things this project is trying to do, all pretty hard to define. We want to make people’s lives better (how do you even define that?) for well beyond the three years of the project, we think that if you involve farmers in the project and work with them to create the conditions to continue doing whatever it is that is making their lives better (i.e. selling asparagus), then we get something that can be sustained after the donors take off. We hope. But what does it really mean to involve the farmers in the project? And what are the conditions that will help them keep selling asparagus? It’s not just a road to the market and some pipes to bring water to the fields. That’s the easy stuff.

Maybe I’ll have some answers for you when I get back.