14 February 2026
In this note, I argue that rural road building in Nepal furnishes an ideal ground for thinking through the concept of infrastructure justice. This concept has had some traction in the North American context where existing infrastructure is ageing out and being massively challenged by climate change, creating an opportunity to build equity and justice into infrastructure repair. Ten years of research on road building in rural Nepal suggests some terrains of infrastructural justice that do not typically figure into infrastructure planning in North American contexts, but which in my view have universal significance. These include procedural justice, social protections, sustainable mechanization, community control, mitigation of harm and transportation justice.
Infrastructure surfaced as a central research concern for me while engaged in exploratory research on the meaning and practices of ‘democracy’ in rural areas following the decade-long Maoist conflict. Roads were continuously articulated as key sites of protest, claims-making, profit and territorial control. These colliding claims manifested in a frenzy of rural road building; the issue—sometimes dubbed a form of ‘dozer terrorism’—was widely reported in the media, increasingly attracting the interest of academics. In the aftermath of the conflict, we witnessed the craze of rough tracks being cut all over the mountainsides. At that time, Nepal had some of the lowest road densities in the world, with a quarter of the population living more than four hours’ walk from the nearest road head.
As we all know, outcomes have been disappointing—badly engineered roads, perilously unsafe, functional only part of the year or abandoned completely, which not only fail to provide promised mobility, but also make travel dangerous, decimate agricultural and forest land, and create new environmental hazards, including floods and landslides. A dystopic outcome to a utopian aspiration, you could say. At the same time, road budgets create the extraordinary circumstance of there being money to spend and a widening base of publics, practitioners and politicians with a stake and a voice in their allocation. In collaboration with colleagues, I designed a research project that would take the road as a political field that builds local polities from the ground up, which we called ‘Infrastructures of Democracy’.
Himalaya in infrastructure studies
At the same time (in the early 2000s), the literature on infrastructure in the social sciences was virtually exploding, and it is worth noting that the Himalayan region has been a particularly fertile site for ethnographic accounts of road development in particular. (I use this term ‘Himalaya’ capaciously, to denote a multi-state region encompassing not only mountain systems but also their river drainages.) If there is any one consistent finding from here, it is the imperative to investigate how the actual implementation and lived outcomes of infrastructure development remain locally determined.
In turn, tracking infrastructure development from local vantages furnishes a window on multi-scalar processes, including state building, geopolitics and how people relate to politics and government. Nepal’s history can be told in these terms. Today, in the context of building the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, road development manifests a range of commitments at the intersection of ‘Naya Nepal’ and neoliberalism; a state-led push for universal mobility, market opportunity, trade and geopolitical agency. It also expresses popular demands for state accountability, responsibility and opportunities for local self-governance emboldened through decades of social and political movements for democracy. When people make claims on infrastructure—donate their land, refuse to volunteer their labour, attend a public meeting to challenge construction delay—they create publics that become visible as ‘demanding subjects of state care’. Thiskind of activity seemed to be happening all around us in the Nepal Himalaya—the building of polities and political consciousness in relation to the building of roads.
Vexing issues
Before turning specifically to infrastructural justice, I want to raise two vexing issues in road development that perhaps uniquely find expression in rural Nepal: corruption and environmental degradation. It is, of course, widely understood, as elaborated in many books by political scientist Michael Johnston, that the large capital outlays associated with infrastructure development make it prone to various forms of corruption and I certainly do not wish to single Nepal out in this regard. What is perhaps more distinctive about rural Nepal is how openly practices of collusion, bribery and embezzlement transpire; everyone knows about them because they are so visible. What is less visible are the local frameworks for ethical judgment against which such practices are evaluated in particular settings.
Take, for example, how people in some rural communities in our research areas judge the practice of milemato, by which leading local contractors with known political party affiliations arrange bids to rotate amongst themselves according to a logic of taking turns. Milemato also involves participation by smaller-scale contractors who are mostly in it for the kickbacks they get from submitting false bids. These dynamics can play out quite openly, like on the grounds of district development offices, and yet they commonly do not provoke explicit moral condemnation. A narrative of local autonomy is evident, that goes something like, milemato is ok because it keeps away contractors from outside the district—as well as their notorious gunda—through coordinated low-bidding. And yet some forms of collusion and bribery do contravene local moral frameworks. A key threshold for intolerance centres around dukha, hardship. When citizens are subject to material hardships—dangerous roads, persistent dust, unreliable transportation—then roads as a commonly understood means for future progress cease to hold the public trust. These local bases of ethical judgment can surely serve as a key resource for planning, and for forging an ethos of infrastructural justice.
Another thorny issue that comes uniquely into view in the Himalaya is environmental degradation, or more broadly nature-society relationships. The Himalaya proved over the late 1990s and early 2000s a key site for innovating the concept of ‘green roads’ that are ‘labour-based, environmentally-friendly, and participatory’ (with the acronym LEP circulating widely among donors and government agencies). In response to critiques of Malthusian theories of Himalayan degradation in the 1980s, green roads, engaging local labour and local materials, were developed to achieve not only environmental but also social sustainability, and became something of an orthodoxy for rural roads built by local users’ committees. In practice, the model has been subverted at the local scale, where users’ groups commonly ‘arrange the paperwork’ to document deployment of manual labour and hand-held tools, while committing their budgets to hiring local contractors to cut tracks into unsettled terrain, creating ever greater risks of floods and landslides as climate change accelerates. In this bid to hasten the pace, and get out of the prescribed manual labour, political patronage plays a key role in the allocation of influential roles, and ensures uneven development. Infrastructural justice, that is, must squarely confront mechanization.
Infrastructure justice
Implicit in these approaches are some thoughts about how to make road development more equitable and just. We can think of this challenge in terms of broaching the pesky ‘What is to be done?’ question, which bedevils local residents as much as planners. The vexing issues outlined above point to the imperative to encompass procedural considerations within a vision for infrastructure justice, starting with treating local perspectives on development as expert knowledge. Locally informed critical analyses convey important insights about relations of power, socio-spatial difference, and of how things work in practice. Similarly, local logics of ethical judgment—moral frameworks of what is good and bad, right and wrong—offer a corrective against narratives of corruption that justify reforms oriented to ‘correcting’ the behaviour of local populations. They offer a finer grain of analysis that can serve instead as a resource for collaborative planning and alternative conceptions of the public good. Where local moral frameworks do not align with rules governing official planning processes—we all know that people break the rules—they suggest an imperative to subject those regulatory frameworks to public deliberation. Where they do align, considerable scope exists for cooperation in advancing a model, enforcing rules and challenging illicit practices. When local ethical frameworks are expressed as protest, they reveal an explicit demand for change.
A second principle of procedural justice concerns the distinction between participation and community control. The iconic community forest users’ groups manage a valuable resource relevant to local livelihoods, from which benefits can be distributed; they are not tied to the timeline of a particular development project. Planners could consider extending their ethos of community control to resources engaged in road building, such as sand, mined most extensively in the Tarai. Road users’ committees, by contrast, operate on a short timeframe with respect to a (not-so-public) good, over which members exercise no direct long-term control. The logic is participation, not community control. And yet, innovative proposals may arise when under-represented and marginalized constituencies as well as those engaged in critical activism, are given jurisdiction to inform planning for road development—such as the suggestion we heard from some petty contractors to introduce a mentorship system into the local contract tendering system. Various social-economy models can also be considered that build in genuine community control, such as promoting social enterprises—business explicitly focused on improving well-being of community members and not just on private profit—to undertake various aspects of road development.
More substantively several principles related to the material conditions of road development also come into view. Established practices of fulfilling mandates for local participation ‘on paper only’ point to the imperative of social protections; if donors or governments want people to participate in building green roads, adequate supports (wages, tools, trainings, credit facilities) must be provided to manage livelihood challenges. It is not just users’ groups who prefer mechanized techniques; even the donors who formerly advanced green roads now advocate mechanization combined with well-managed markets in contracting. The emerging consensus points toward considerations of sustainable mechanization, which have been articulated persuasively by the UNFAO in relation to agriculture, ensuring that mechanized technology is not only be ‘environmentally friendly’ but also reduces the drudgery of manual labour, relieves the burden of labour shortages commonly associated with out-migration, and creates new local employment opportunities. Transportation on rural roads also lends itself well to conceptualizing infrastructure justice.
The concept of transportation justice flourishes in North America, Europe and Australasia, but has generally been focused on urban settings—for example to promote electric vehicles and bicycle infrastructure. Roads research in rural areas indicates an imperative to exercise a principle of ‘cause no harm’ and ‘passenger rights’ in situations where we have transportation syndicates carrying on competitive practices that pose direct danger to passengers. People should get fair treatment when they travel. Again, we can think about policies supporting social enterprises and cooperatives, not just for the buses themselves, but also for ancillary services such as mechanics or even the restaurants and hotels in market centres cropping up along the road.
Conclusion
The title of the book I am co-editing based on this research, Infrastructures of Democracy, points ultimately to thinking about how infrastructure development might deepen processes of democratization. An overarching principle is that such inquiries must be grounded in local expertise and ethical frameworks. The book grapples with vexing challenges like corruption, elite capture and environmental degradation, but resists pathologizing discourses and challenges punitive frameworks that cannot be enforced. Instead, the call is for a conception of infrastructure justice oriented to creating conditions for economic democracy and community control, insights that could inform important global debates with significant stakes for the practice of planning and development.
