







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 1 (1): 97–103, April 2018 

 
NOTES FROM THE FIELD 

 

Views from Below: The Economics and Politics of 
Water in the Darjeeling Himalayas 
 

Deepa Joshi  
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

Several years ago, when Nepal was reeling under a politically induced fuel 
crisis, a local taxi driver in Kathmandu city questioned, and wisely so, my 
need to travel across the breadth of the city for a thirty-minute meeting at 
the office of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain 
Development (ICIMOD). Struck by the elegant landscape of the office, and 
convinced that matters of utmost importance must happen there, he 
pressed me during my return to tell him about this office. On hearing my 
Nepali translation of ICIMOD’s vision of ‘enhancing livelihoods, equity, 
and social and environmental security for all mountain people[s]’, he was 
deeply perplexed. Why was he, a resident of that very city, unaware of this 
Kathmandu-based institution and its worthy intentions? I am afraid I failed, 
despite my best efforts, to assure him of how he gains from ICIMOD's 
objectives. 

In a similar vein, Gyawali and Thompson (2016) write, ‘Ask any Nepali 
villager about the Millennium [now Sustainable] Development Goals (M/ 
SDG) and you will be met with a confused shrug.’ The term ‘Millennium 
Development Goals’ makes for a ‘confusing mouthful’ when translated into 
Nepali and, as the authors note, ‘global concerns (sic) on the urgency to 
meeting these goals are poorly aligned with the everyday life challenges of 
ordinary Nepali citizens’. Both in the text (2016) and in personal 
communications (2017) Gyawali and Thompson argue that 'to put it briefly 

 
 Conventry University, Priory Street Coventry, United Kingdom CV1 5FB; 
ac3771@coventry.ac.uk 

Copyright © Joshi 2018. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 
4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.23  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v1i1.23


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [98] 

and bluntly, the architects of the SDGs have much to learn on what 
"sustainable", "development" or for that matter, what a "goal" is.' . 

‘Environment and the Himalayas’ has been a global, developmental concern 
for a generation. Yet, the everyday challenges experienced by the dispersed 
and widely heterogenous Himalayan community lie at some distance—to 
put it mildly—from the world of environmental policies, strategies, 
interventions, and research. This note speaks to this disjuncture—to the 
politics and practice of environmental policies and strategies, and how these 
policies and strategies relate (or do not relate) to ‘views from below’ 
(Maathai 1995). In this case, I focus on the Darjeeling Himalaya region and 
compare contemporary ‘productions’ of environmental challenges here to 
everyday local realities. I draw attention to three developments which—
although interconnected, and demanding more holistic framings—are 
selectively addressed (or not) as environmental challenges: 

1. scientific claims on the urgency of climate change, which facilitate, 
ill-matched climate adaptation and mitigation programmes, including 
hydropower development projects, the latter identified as climate 
mitigating, i.e. generating clean energy; 

2. researcher/ civil society critique on the re-emergence of large dams 
(for hydropower) which, although well intentioned, pays little 
attention to; 

3. the everyday challenge of water supply, which has been a persisting 
and unresolved local reality, aggravated by both climate impacts as 
well as climate interventions. 

Eckholm’s ‘Theory of Himalayan Environmental Degradation’, which 
spoke of the inevitable and alarming ecological crisis in the Himalayan 
region in the 1970s, is long considered debunked (Guthman 1997). But the 
politics of environmental crises, or what Agarwal (2005) notes as the 
political production[s] of the ‘environment’, has persisted in relation to the 
Himalayas. Across the years, different environmental issues have been 
identified, aggregated, and positioned as grave and urgent challenges—but 
nonetheless resolvable by (mostly externally predetermined) technocratic 
solutions. Such theorizing reduces the ‘environment’ to an entirely abstract 
entity. In the process, it disassociates what ‘environment’ means locally, in 
the sense of the multiple, everyday challenges faced by local communities—
the complexity of which is furthered by diverse ecological and uniquely 
local sociopolitical and economic contexts. Nonetheless, a selective imagery 
of the Himalayas in science, policy, and research is skillfully positioned in 
development as stories from below. Writing about the scalar politics of 
climate change in rural Nepal, Yates (2012) points to how narratives of 



[99] Deepa Joshi 

climate change that will fit with predetermined developmental solutions are 
first constructed, and then reproduced, as ‘local’ manifestations of climate 
change. It is inevitable that such ‘normative frameworks of development 
[prescribing to] “desirable states” of socio-ecological systems’ are deeply 
contingent on ‘unstated assumptions and belief systems’ (Yates 2012, 537). 

The ‘consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of 
climate change’ (Swyngedouw 2012, 213), thrown in with the 
disproportionate power that statistics and numbers generate in 
environmental science, has helped make an overwhelming cause of climate 
alarm in the Himalayan context. Climate science is particularly symptomatic 
of aggregate assumptions and selective imagery. Pomeranz (2009) notes that 
‘glaciers, which almost never used to make the news, are now generating 
plenty of worrisome headlines’. Thus, a climate crisis in the Himalayas is 
highlighted even though data on climate-induced changes in the vast and 
scattered realms of what makes for the Himalayas is acknowledged to be 
sparse, uneven, and mostly unknown. What follows as disparate climate 
interventions speak of the age-old practice of a politico-environmental 
construction of local Himalayan landscapes. 

This is not to say that the Himalayas are not a specific geophysical 
landscape or, for that matter, are not—as popularly described—a ‘climate 
hotspot’.  Indeed, as Pomeranz (2009, 5) notes, ‘For almost half the world’s 
population, water-related dreams and fears intersect in the Himalayas and 
on the Tibetan plateau.’ The ‘Himalayan Water Towers’ is indeed real; what 
such imagery of water abundance masks is the reality that local 
communities scattered across the mountain region rely not so much on the 
region’s perennial rivers but on groundwater that becomes available 
through natural springs (Tambe et al. 2012). For multiple reasons, and in 
many areas, the water in these natural springs has been drying up, but this 
reality has received comparatively little attention; and how diverse local 
communities cope with declining water sources has been even less 
researched. 

In relation to recent climate interventions, I raise attention here to the 
paradox in policy prescriptions. The Himalayas are considered highly 
vulnerable to climate change and, therefore, are the focus of numerous 
climate adaptation plans. They are, ironically, also the target of ambitious 
hydropower development plans, positioned globally as a climate mitigation 
(clean energy) strategy. To that extent, there has been little consideration of 
how global climate strategies intersect with the local effects of climate. It is 
worth noting here that in national plans and policies, hydropower 
development is not pursued essentially to mitigate climate change but rather 
to meet objectives of sustained economic growth and energy demand. This 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [100] 

anomaly is evident in the deregulation of India’s environment and energy 
policies and in interventions to speed up hydropower development. It is 
evident also in the conscious, careful delinking of national and state 
policies, strategies, and interventions on climate, water, and energy even 
though, fundamentally, climate change and climate mitigation—especially in 
the Himalayan region— requires making these intersections visible and 
deliberate, rather than ignoring them. It is another matter that while 
hydropower might be comparatively green—although this is a contested 
discourse—the environmental and social implications of large dams in the 
high-altitude, high seismic-activity regions of the Eastern Himalayas leave 
much to worry about (Ahlers et al. 2015). 

The current development of hydropower in the region has, thus, been far 
from consensual, and the process has sparked critique, conflicts, and 
contestations. These developments have drawn the attention of diverse 
groups of civil society actors, including researchers, who question the dam 
construction activities in the climate-vulnerable Eastern Himalayan 
waterscape and their skewed human-environment implications, and the 
procedural and distributional injustices in the dam development process. 
This speaks to the second issue of focus—whether and how these 
metaphors (languages) and ontologies (discourses) of environmental 
injustices represent local realities. Here, I relate to Forsyth’s (2014, 230) 
analysis that ‘environmental politics does not consider deeply enough how 
or with whose concerns’ discourses are framed and applied. 

In the Darjeeling region, the well-intentioned researcher and civil societyled 
critique of large dams is as distanced from complex ground realities of 
latent old water injustice as climate policies and interventions are from 
ground realities. Specifically, the focus on dams—and not on the unique 
ways in which water flows and is available or not to local populations—
completely overlooks the uneven economics of investments in large dams. 
This is especially true in comparison to severe under-investments in 
meeting the supply requirement of domestic and irrigation water supply 
(Joshi 2015) even though for the locals ‘the water supply crisis is 
synonymous with the image of [the region’s] town[s]’ (Rai 2016, 48). 

Although data is unreliable and anecdotal, it is said that in towns like 
Darjeeling less than 50 per cent of urban households are connected to the 
municipal water supply (Chettri and Tamang 2013). A lucrative private 
water market operates here, and permeates community and official 
interventions in water management. These hybrid arrangements of water 
delivery nested in entrenched political, social, economic injustices and are 
symptomatic of a democracy deficit evident in the wider political, social, 



[101] Deepa Joshi 

and economic setting (Joshi 2015). Local politicians point to the enduring 
urban water supply crisis as a key marker of the politico-spatial injustice: 

… in terms of infrastructure, … nothing has been added (by the current West 
Bengal Government) to … the water supply … [to] whatever the British had 
planned [then] for 3,000 people in Darjeeling town, [even though the 
population] is over 3 lakhs [300,000] (Wenner 2013, 209). 

However, it is another reality that the everyday water supply injustice is 
obscured by other, competing political priorities and interests, including 
those of local actors. This persisting injustice relating to ‘everyday water’ 
has been disproportionately ignored by researchers. Many researchers, 
including me, are driven in no small degree by current flows of climate 
funding to write and speak about dams, which present a far more attractive, 
contemporary issue in relation to environmental [in] justice. My ongoing 
research around the politics of hydropower projects in the region often 
provokes ridicule and anger among friends and family who live here, who 
have often asked: 

What is the problem with large dams? Isn’t that for development, for the 
economic upliftment of our backwardness? What about looking into the ‘real 
water [supply] problems’ we face here? Or is that not a good-enough topic for 
researchers like you? (Joshi 2015). 

And yet, as the locals know very well, the problem is not just about water 
supply or dams. A participant at a workshop organised in Kalimpong in 
2012 noted, ‘The problem is not water—water is only one manifest of 
everything else that is wrong here. Solutions need to emerge here locally 
and they need to go beyond water.’ 

If we are to ‘critically interrogate the universalizing and globalizing 
tendencies in asserting and invocating environment and related injustices’ 
(Sikor and Newell 2014, 155), we must look beyond narrow development 
conceptualizations of the ‘environment’ guided mostly by funding and 
policy instruments. Such a practice often legitimizes the construction of 
‘local problems’—in this case, of climate change—so that they can be 
apolitically slotted into predetermined categories of environmental 
interventions. Among other things, such processes also tend to lump 
diverse groups of ‘mountain people’ ‘as an already constituted and coherent 
group’ (Tamang 2002, 317). Such rhetoric completely disregards the 
complex, historical, as well as evolving weave of social relations that 
determines how diverse groups of ‘mountain people’ in spatially unique 
contexts interact with what constitutes their ‘environment’. This is the 
unfortunate divide between ‘eagle’s eye science and toad’s eye science’ (Gyawali 
and Thompson 2016), but what the authors argue for—a fundamental 
rethinking of development, so that it is aligned with the everyday realities of 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [102] 

local communities—is easier said than done. This is especially so given the 
politics of scientific scholarship—although it is claimed to be highly 
objective, it is hardly ‘neutral, [rather it] is unavoidably partial, unavoidably 
political, and has unavoidably ethical consequences’ (Smith 2004; 504). 
Thus, locals, like the taxi driver in Kathmandu, remain excluded from 
discussions of “their” environment unless, of course, they are subjects of 
“scientific” research. Toadeye or citizen science has long been cast aside as 
not-good-enough science, and remains fundamentally disassociated from 
the high horse nexus of the eagle-eye science of environmental policy, 
research, and academia. This is testament in the unfortunate disjuncture of 
the economics and politics of water - in science, policy and research, and in 
everyday lives of the locals in the ecologically and socio-politically diverse 
Himalayas. 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

The findings presented in this paper are drawn from the author's field work 
in the Darjeeling region that has been facilitated by the following grants: i) 
an individual researcher grant cofunded by the Netherlands Organisation 
for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Indian Council of Social Science 
Research ICSSR) (2011-12); and ii) the NWO Conflict and Cooperation in 
the Management of Climate Change (CCMCC) initiative, for research on 
the topic, ‘Hydropower development in the context of climate change: 
Exploring conflicts and fostering cooperation across scales and boundaries 
in the Eastern Himalayas’ (2014-2018). 

 

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