News from the Collective

My chapter in Information and Empire is something that I never really expected to write. It came about because of a simple question from Katia Bowers about what I might have to contribute to the conference where the volume began. … Continue reading →

Micro-hydropower technologies—systems that harness the energy in flowing water to produce between 5 and 100 kilowatts of electricity—have proven to be a particularly attractive kind of “little development device” in Nepal. While Nepal is a country with abundant water resources, the same fractal topography that provides Himalayan “hydraulic head” also limits the reach and feasibility of large-scale energy infrastructures. In recent decades, as plans for large-scale hydropower projects requiring big dams have waxed and waned, micro-hydropower projects that function at the community scale have provided electricity to hundreds of thousands of people living beyond the national grid.

More than 3,000 micro-hydropower projects capable of generating an estimated 48 megawatts have been built to date, constituting roughly 5 percent of Nepal’s total electricity generation (AEPC 2016). Considered against a backdrop of protracted political volatility and recursive patterns of developmental promise and failure, the proliferation of micro-hydropower in Nepal emerges as a tentative success story. A recent report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (2017), for example, suggests that 81.7 percent of Nepal’s rural population now has reliable access to electricity.

On April 25, 2015, the 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal prompted new questions about the relationship between energy security, environmental risk, and community resilience. Amid the diverse futures and risks carried by different forms of hydropower development in Nepal, micro-hydro technologies have helped facilitate the work of post-disaster recuperation and repair. In the Langtang Valley, the contrast between local efforts to construct a community-scale micro-hydropower project and plans for the much larger, 400-megawatt, Langtang Storage Project are examples of this.

Little Turbines and Big Dams

For the Langtang community, which was devastated by a massive co-seismic avalanche during the earthquake, the micro-hydropower project has emerged as a technology of hopeful post-disaster recovery and an investment in local autonomy. For planners, policymakers, and developers in Kathmandu, the separate large-scale storage project (designed to create a strategically important high-altitude reservoir that could help generate dry-season power and potentially supply drinking water to Kathmandu) is an important step in their ongoing project of “making a hydropower nation” (Lord 2014; Lord 2016). The contrast between these two differently imagined energy futures speaks to the scalar politics of energy security and the ways that Nepal’s hydropower frontier (half real, half imagined) is shaped by diverse economies of anticipation (Cross 2015).

In Nepal, micro-hydropower typically is framed as a technology for the liminal meantime: a temporary fix that eventually will become redundant with the arrival of an infrastructural future perfect. Nepalis living in communities away from the grid commonly reference micro-hydropower as a technology for coping with disconnection, abjection, uncertainty, and absence. As Cross (2016) also has pointed out, “Off the grid, grids do not disappear into the background but become the object of heightened attention. In places that are not connected to the electricity grid, and have little prospect of future connection, large scale electricity infrastructures can become more rather than less prominent” (194).

As one woman in the Lamjung district told me in 2014, for example: “Ma marepacchi matrai pradikhaaranko bijuli aauncha (Only after I am dead will electricity from the [Nepal Electricity] Authority come).” For Nepalis who identify themselves as members of a neglected infrastructural public (cf. Collier et al. 2016), micro-hydropower technologies offer a means of securing not only energy but also dignity, agency, and relative autonomy.

Yet in the wake of a disaster like the 2015 earthquake, the question of “what kind of hydropower development and for whom” re-emerges. In places like Nepal’s Langtang Valley, ongoing debates about “the damage done and the dams to come” in seismically active hydroscapes are particularly pertinent (Rest et al. 2015; cf. Butler and Rest 2017; Lord, in press). Though all infrastructures are contingent—tentatively situated in “demanding environments” (Carse 2014) and inclusive of their own potential ruination (Howe et al. 2015)—it is increasingly obvious that, in the Himalaya and elsewhere, some infrastructures are more precarious than others.

Anticipation and Seismic Risk

When the earthquake struck Nepal, I was standing in a part of the Langtang Valley that would be flooded by the lower dam of the proposed Langtang Storage Project—a 400-megawatt, two-stage reservoir project that is imaginatively rendered in a map of “Rasuwa Tomorrow” (see fig. 2). Just a moment prior, I had been discussing the prospect of this project with a Langtangpa hotelier named Dindu.

Like many other potentially “project-affected people” living across Nepal’s hydropower frontier, Dindu viewed the coming of a large hydropower project as a kind of opportunity—an infrastructural undertaking that would bring roads, a greater flow of tourists, and increased political connectivity. As a well-educated man, he also knew that the project would include a budget for “corporate social responsibility” that could be used to fund community development projects in the affected area. He also was aware of recent industry trends focused on “sharing the benefits” of hydropower development that already had turned several hundred thousand Nepalis into “local investors”—by selling them an equity stake in hydropower companies on the Nepal Stock Exchange (Lord 2016; Lord, in press). As one of more than 30,000 satisfied local shareholders of the Chilime Hydropower Company, which had constructed a 22-megawatt project downstream more than a decade earlier, he was interested in future opportunities for investment.

Standing outside his kitchen, Dindu and I spoke of the potential social and environmental impacts of the project, but not of seismic risk.

Suddenly, the earth heaved beneath us and a series of landslides broke loose from the steep valley walls above. Dindu grabbed my hand and we ran for open ground, struggling to keep our feet as the earth shook for a whole minute. We felt a wave of cold air, and it started to rain heavily as debris poured down around us. Confusion reigned. When the air cleared, we could see that a massive mixed-debris avalanche had buried the ancestral village of Langtang (see fig. 3), just a few kilometers upslope from us, taking the lives of more than 300 people. The scale of devastation and loss was incomprehensible.

The earthquake caused significant loss of life, widespread destruction of property, and debilitating damage to a variety of critical infrastructures across Nepal. According to the official Post-Disaster Needs Assessment conducted in June 2015, seventeen grid-connected hydropower projects representing roughly 15 percent of national generation capacity were “severely damaged,” and damage to transmission and distribution infrastructures left some 600,000 households without electricity (Government of Nepal 2015). The event also troubled the making of Nepal’s promised energy future, as dozens of hydropower projects still under construction were damaged—in some of these areas, locals say that landslide occurrence was intensified by the blasting of project tunnels. In short, the event exposed a variety of threats to large-scale infrastructures.

Walking through the avalanche zone a few months after the earthquake, I encountered the remains of the Langtang community micro-hydropower project. Built in 1998 with support from a Japanese NGO, the project was presented as both an investment in community infrastructure and a technology of environmental governance—one of several initiatives designed to help the Langtangpas sustainably accommodate rising tourism in Langtang National Park, which was created around the community in 1976. As tourism and local demand for electricity continued to increase, the project was upgraded to 11 kilowatts—indexing both an improvement in the material conditions of life in the valley and changes in the ways the Langtangpa were “imagining the good life” (Lim 2008). When the avalanche came, it took the micro-hydropower project, and everything else. But, critically, the destruction of this project did not amplify the effects of the disaster or expand vulnerability/exposure.

Since the vast majority of the dams planned across Nepal had not yet been constructed when the earthquake hit, there were no dam failures. However, if the proposed Langtang Storage Project had been built prior to the earthquake, then the avalanche—a mass of 3 billion kilograms that fell more than 3,000 meters from the slopes of Langtang Lirung (7,234m) and covering a kilometer of the Langtang river in debris while releasing half the force of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (Kargel et al. 2016)—could have caused a dam failure, and perhaps thousands more deaths downstream. How to think the unthinkable?

Micro-Hydropower and Reconstruction

In the aftermath of the disaster, the entire Langtang community was displaced to Kathmandu, where they lived in a camp for internally displaced persons for several months. As the aftermath dragged on, the people of Langtang slowly returned to begin the long and painful process of rebuilding their lives—despite the extreme level of damage, a remarkable lack of support from the Government of Nepal, and the logistical challenges of rebuilding in such a remote location.

Though the earthquake had damaged more than 300 micro-hydropower projects, the majority could be retrofitted or repaired (Government of Nepal 2015). While the Langtang community had repaired the micro-hydropower facility and local transmission systems several times in the past (in response to damage inflicted by storms, rockfall, and smaller avalanches) the exceptional intensity of the 2015 avalanche and questions of safety at the project site prevented them from doing so again. They had to formulate a new energy strategy.

For more than two years, the Langtangpa relied on solar units for electricity (mostly donated by humanitarian organizations and volunteers after the disaster, with a few older units salvaged from the hotels). When the Langtang Management & Reconstruction Committee announced plans to construct a new micro-hydropower project in late 2016, it seemed like a hopeful point of inflection in the process of reconstruction and recovery.

Construction on the project, relocated to a new site further up the valley near Kyangjin Gompa, began in early 2017. The project was funded largely by a British NGO called Kadoorie (an organization focused on agricultural development and community infrastructure, now working to support post-disaster recovery) with additional contributions from the Langtang Management & Reconstruction Committee and the Local Development Office of Rasuwa District. With the permission of the Langtang National Park, the capacity of the new project was scaled up to 100 kilowatts, to provide electricity to 116 households, a variety of communal buildings, and the recently rebuilt monastery at Kyanjin Gompa. The project is also expected to support a handful of local enterprises, such as the famous yak-cheese factory that processes milk from local herders, which will now use far less fuelwood for pasteurization.

The local leaders of the Micro-Hydropower Project Committee that was created to manage the construction process often describe the project as an effort to create a secure future. For them and many other Lantangpas, it is important that the project provides more than enough power to meet current needs, that it will be able to accommodate future demand once the Langtang Valley makes a full recovery. In this sense, the micro-hydropower project has been maximized, so as to obviate the need for future upgrades or external support—to sustain Langtang society beyond the reconstruction phase as the shape of its needs continue to change.

When I visited the Langtang Valley in July 2017, the majority of people were still rebuilding their houses and the path was lined with transmission poles awaiting power lines (see fig. 7). The project site was a tangle of activity, with one team installing the turbine assembly inside the powerhouse and another busy constructing the 230-meter penstock pipe that would be used to channel water from the lake. Electricity meters and spools of wire were stacked up inside the powerhouse. After several weeks spent transporting materials to the site, all was ready.

Later that day, I met with Son Nurpu, the Secretary of the MHP Project Committee, and climbed up to the project intake at Lirung Tal (the glacial lake that supplies the new project, located roughly 150m higher than the powerhouse). Along the way, he explained more about the technicalities of construction process, the trainings that the local technicians had received, the local electricity metering system they would manage, and the work that still remained. When we reached the lake, Son Nurpu climbed onto the headworks at the outlet of the lake and posed theatrically, smiling with a contagious enthusiasm. After watching the broader Langtang community struggle for more than two years, this was a powerfully affective and hopeful moment.

Recuperation and Repair

As an off-grid infrastructure, the micro-hydropower project in Langtang functions in two registers: it facilitates systemic recovery while also creating space for and enabling the more creative and hopeful practices of recuperation. As Guyer (2017) suggests, efforts toward recovery focus on functionality and reconstitution, while practices of recuperation are more improvisational, fragmentary, and open-ended.

If micro-hydropower projects like this are successful, perhaps it is because they are adaptable and can be reconfigured to serve diverse communities and needs. In this sense, micro-hydropower is a “fluid technology” (Law and Mol 2001; Redfield 2016), which can be reconfigured to fit the exigencies of a particular landscape and create “fluid space” outside of broader networks, like the grid. Indeed, micro-hydropower has been used for centuries in a variety of cultures and conditions, in the cracks and gaps of other systems, well before it acquired its current status as a “little development device.” The resilient and fluid qualities of micro-hydro that humanitarians now acknowledge are intrinsic to its historical success.

Though the Langtang micro-hydropower project has only just been built, the site-specific and improvisational quality of the design speaks to its fluidity.

The unique location of this project, which is sited at the outlet of a glacial lake at an elevation of 4055m (reportedly the highest project site in Nepal), speaks to the ways that micro-hydropower systems can be adapted to the particularities of landscapes. For centuries, the people of Langtang have been living with and adapting to geological hazards and climatological exposures: repairing homes, trails, and other local infrastructures as needed in response to landslides, avalanches, earthquakes, and storms. They have developed their own version of what Jackson (2014) conceptualizes as “broken world thinking,” oriented around the repeated practice of “the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds” (222). As such, the new project was built in an area the locals say is naturally sheltered from future avalanches by a nearby glacial moraine—it was reconfigured and placed in the landscape.

In response to a suggestion from Sangay, one of the Langtangpa lamas (Tibetan Buddhist monks), the design of the micro-hydropower project also was modified so that the water flowing through the turbines could be diverted to turn a large prayer wheel housed within a recently built Memorial Stupa—a structure dedicated to the memory of those who lost their lives during the earthquake, constructed in part by donations from families around the world who lost loved ones in Langtang. This joining of infrastructure with local practices of prayer and memorialization is particularly important because Langtang is considered a beyul, or a sacred hidden valley meant to serve as a refuge for Tibetan Buddhist practice (Lim 2008). This particular improvisation scales up the traditional practice of building smaller prayer wheels that can be turned by a mountain stream—a design that predates the advent of electricity and is still used throughout the Himalaya. As the water flows through the prayer wheel it is understood to be sending prayers to the heavens in perpetuity, animating the scarred landscape.

In these ways, the micro-hydropower project has become meaningfully imbricated in localized processes of recuperation and repair in a way that would not have been possible with a larger and pre-configured technology. It was designed to account for both the material agencies of the environment and its own precarity, and reconfigured in ways that enabled the contingencies of local “repair work.” As Jackson (2014) explained, the work of “repair occupies and constitutes an aftermath, growing at the margins, breakpoints, and interstices … it fills in the moment of hope and fear in which bridges from old worlds to new worlds are built, and the continuity of order, value, and meaning gets woven, one tenuous thread at a time” (223). The construction of this new micro-hydropower project in Langtang, a highly situated and highly relational infrastructural technology, reflects the multivalent efforts required to weave a fractured community back together in the wake of disaster.

Instability and the ‘Hydropower Nation’

When the earth shook, it created a series of cracks in the future perfect, momentarily interrupting Nepal’s dream of becoming a “hydropower nation” and creating an opportunity to rethink the country’s energy strategy. In the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake, one of Nepal’s most prominent politicians and policymakers co-authored a piece in The New York Times calling for a more diversified energy strategy in Nepal. In no uncertain terms, the piece asked, “Can Nepal rely on its built and planned hydro infrastructure given the inevitable seismic activity in the Himalayas?” (Thapa and Shrestha 2015: 1).

Ongoing debates over the inherent risks of hydropower development in the Himalayan region point to a need for “technologies of humility” (Jasanoff 2003) that recognize the limits of knowledge and prediction. As a place where the material agency of the landscape has been made so apparent and so much is uncertain or unknown, the Langtang Valley seems an appropriate place to consider the value of humility. Indeed, with an earthquake even more powerful than that which devastated the Langtang Valley in 2015 now considered overdue in Western Nepal, and massive uncertainties about the impacts of climate change lingering over the Himalaya like a cloud, a degree of infrastructural humility would seem critical.

Yet in contrast to the humility of micro-hydropower, the large hydropower projects being planned and built across the Himalaya, which require building immense webs of concrete and tunnels throughout a seismically active zone, seem to materialize a specific kind of infrastructural hubris.

In the wake of the earthquake, the Government of Nepal has expended considerable energy to ensure that its hydropower frontier has remained open for business. Official plans for large-scale hydropower infrastructures remain intact, emboldened by the speculative logics of finance capital, geopolitically inflected narrative of energy sovereignty, and the inertia of infrastructural affect focused on a dream deferred (Lord, in press). This failure to reckon the inherent precarity of Nepal’s imagined hydropower future reflects a familiar pattern of infrastructural ambition and oversight (Huber et al. 2017; Butler and Rest 2017). Like large-scale infrastructure projects across the globe, Nepal’s big hydropower projects are imaginative undertakings enacted “through engineering hubris, false environmental assumptions, and short-sighted development policies” that elide their own vulnerabilities (Carse 2017: 905). The continued focus on achieving energy security at the national scale marginalizes alternative accounts of Nepal’s energy futures and perpetuates a “strategic ignorance” (McGoey 2012) of palpable environmental and infrastructural risks.

Between Hubris and Humility

At the time of this writing, the Langtang micro-hydropower project has just been completed, and the lights are on throughout the valley—which this struggling community is incredibly proud of. Tellingly, at the same time, the 400-megawatt Langtang Storage Project is moving ahead as planned—with the support of state officials, the Langtang National Park, the private sector, and a segment of the Langtang community. Helicopters are flying into Langtang with surveyors; contracts are being discussed. As post-disaster reconstruction continues, new uncertainties are emerging.

Across the Himalayan region and perhaps the world, infrastructures and their infrastructural publics are constantly being made and unmade, prompting a tacking back and forth between hubris and humility. When speaking about the large-scale project and the increased connectivity it might bring, many Langtangpa express a kind of ambivalence, often using a classic Nepali phrasing to highlight the double-edged nature of development, pointing to “bikas sangai binas [development with destruction]”. Some fear the changes the large-scale project could bring; others still dream of “Rasuwa Tomorrow.” When considering the entanglement of these differently imagined futures and the technologies used to enact them, the question recurs: what kind of development or destruction, and for whom?

Acknowledgments

This essay draws on field research supported by Cornell University and a U.S. Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. I would also like to thank Sudan Bhattarai, who assisted greatly with field research in the Langtang Valley, as well as Marina Welker, Ashley Carse, and the Editors of Issue Number Nine who provided valuable feedback on prior drafts.

References

Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, Ministry of Population and Environment, Government of Nepal. 2017. Website & Data. Available at link.

Butler, Christopher, and Matthäus Rest. 2017. Calculating Risk, Denying Uncertainty: Seismicity and Hydropower Development in Nepal. HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 37(2): 15-25.

Carse, Ashley. 2014. Beyond the Big Ditch: Politics, Ecology, and Infrastructure at the Panama Canal. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Carse, Ashley. 2017. “An Infrastructural Event: Making Sense of Panama’s Drought.” Water Alternatives, 10(3): 888-909.

Collier, Stephen; Chris Mizes; and Antina von Schnitzler. 2016. “Preface: Public Infrastructures / Infrastructural Publics.” Limn, 7(1). Available at link.

Cross, Jamie. 2015. “The Economy of Anticipation: Hope, Infrastructure, and Economic Zones in South India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35(3): 424-437.

Cross, Jamie. 2016. “Off the Grid: Infrastructure and Energy Beyond the Mains.” In Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. Harvey, Jensen, and Morita eds. Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 186-196.

Government of Nepal, National Planning Commission. 2015. “Post Disaster Needs Assessment, Vol. B: Sector Reports.” Kathmandu: Government of Nepal. Available at link.

Guyer, Jane. 2017. “Aftermaths and Recuperations in Anthropology.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1): 81-103.

Howe, Cymene et al. 2015. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(3): 547-565.

Huber, Amelie; Santiago Gorostiza; Panagiota Kotsila; María J. Beltrán; and Marco Armiero. 2017. “Beyond ‘Socially Constructed’ Disasters: Re-politicizing the Debate on Large Dams through a Political Ecology of Risk.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 28(3): 48-68.

Kargel, J.S. et al. 2016. “Geomorphic and Geologic Controls of Geohazards Induced by Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha Earthquake.” Science, 351(6269).

Jackson, Steven. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 221-239.

Jasanoff, Sheila. 2003. “Technologies of Humility: Citizen Participation in Governing Science.” Minerva, 41(3): 223-244.

Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 2001. “Situating Technoscience: An Inquiry into Spatialities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19(5): 609-621.

Lim, Francis Khek Gee. 2008. Imagining the Good life: Negotiating Culture and Development in Nepal Himalaya. Leiden: Brill.

Lord, Austin. 2014. “Making a ‘Hydropower Nation’: Subjectivity, Mobility, and Work in the Nepalese Hydroscape.” HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 34(2): 111-121.

Lord, Austin. 2015. Langtang. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, October 14, 2015. Available at link.

Lord, Austin. 2016. “Citizens of a Hydropower Nation: Territory and Agency at the Frontiers of Hydropower Development in Nepal.” Economic Anthropology, 3(1): 145-160.

Lord, Austin. In Press (2018). “Speculation and Seismicity: Reconfiguring the Hydropower Future in Post-Earthquake Nepal.” In Water, Technology, and the Nation-State. Menga and Swyngedouw eds. London: Routledge Earthscan.

McGoey, Linsey. 2012. “Strategic Unknowns: Towards a Sociology of Ignorance.” Economy and Society, 41(1): 1-16.

Redfield, Peter. 2016. “Fluid Technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and Microworlds of Humanitarian Design.” Social Studies of Science, 46(2): 159-183.

Rest, Matthäus; Austin Lord; and Christopher Butler. 2015. “The Damage Done and the Dams to Come.” Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website. 14 October 2015. Available at link.

Thapa, Gagan, and Kashish Das Shrestha. 2015. “Natural Disasters and Nepal’s Energy Security.” The New York Times, DotEarth Blog, May 25, 2015. Available at link.

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Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the most prestigious of a string of awards celebrating his role in creating banks for the poor. If there was a Nobel for marketing, he could have won that, too. That’s not meant as a jab but as recognition of Yunus’s rhetorical flair. Yunus not only founded a financial institution that serves the poor in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, the 2006 Nobel co-winner), he also crafted a global vision for funding entrepreneurs and tirelessly promoted it for three decades.

But today Yunus’s vision — and the assumptions it rests on — is coming apart. Microfinance has proved fairly robust as a banking idea but not as an anti-poverty intervention.

Yunus’s pitch for microfinance was designed to please donors and socially-driven entrepreneurs who might follow his lead. His pitch is simple, promises much, and asks little of donors and aid agencies. The focus is on loans that are funded mainly by borrowers’ interest payments. The microfinance loans, Yunus argues, fund small, under-capitalized businesses and thereby transform their ability to generate income. That accomplishment, he claims, can reduce poverty dramatically. In contrast to the targets of previous attempts to fix credit markets in low-income areas, the borrowers are mostly poor women, the loans are small (starting around $100), and repayments are made in manageable weekly installments over a year.

Microfinance is an unusual kind of “device.” Most important, it’s a set of financial services, not a tangible product. But the microfinance narrative is very much bound up with its “device-like” qualities: microfinance is tailored to meet a narrow, specific purpose; its presentation and delivery are standardized and easily replicable; it is sold in standard units without much customer support; and it is brought into communities without substantial adaptation to the local context. Ideally, context should matter more, but customization is costly. The device-like nature of microfinance permits lenders to expand quickly and slash costs.

Microfinance is device-like in another way. Many microfinance providers seek to earn profit and pay for their work through a fee-for-service business model. Microfinance institutions thus aim to operate independently of the state’s purse and outside its purview. Unlike public social insurance programs that redistribute income, microfinance leaves poor people to find — and fund — their own ways out of poverty. Grameen Bank’s success in Bangladesh — it now serves over 8 million customers — has been a model for similar entrepreneurial, market-friendly approaches to social problems, including private health clinics and ambulance services for the poor, private schools in slums, and a range of other interventions that graft do-good aspirations onto market models.

The pitch for microfinance hasn’t been embraced by everyone. Some argue that poor adults need quality jobs, offering employee benefits and possibilities for promotion, not self-employment in tiny, self-managed businesses (Bateman and Chang 2012). The anthropologist James Ferguson argues that the rise of publicly-provided cash transfers holds far more interest than “paradigmatically neoliberal” interventions like microfinance (Ferguson 2015: 1). Empirically-minded academics (who may have started with high hopes for microfinance) also point to evidence from independent research that fails to find clear causal impacts of microfinance on business growth or poverty reduction for most customers. Aid agencies and foundations have been left feeling confused, disappointed, and perhaps betrayed — and have started moving on (Mossman 2015).

But too quickly dismissing microfinance as a “sort of neoliberal predation” (Ferguson 2015: 2) or as a poor substitute for social insurance or alternative income-generating interventions fails to get at the root of microfinance as practiced. So does outright rejection based on econometric studies of hard-to-find causal impacts on business outcomes. The arguments against microfinance may be correct on the surface, but they fail to get at what microfinance actually is and how it really works.

Although microfinance has failed relative to its boldest claims, it has not failed unconditionally. In fact, microfinance has been a wild, improbable, impressive success in important ways. Microfinance grew fast in Bangladesh, serving women whose families live on incomes that are low, if not among the country’s very poorest, and the broader movement inspired by Yunus and his fellow pioneers now serves more than 200 million people globally. Each week, microfinance institutions bring reliable financial services to citizens who otherwise would be ignored and excluded by traditional banks.

We are then left with a puzzle. Why do so many millions of people want microfinance if it fails to deliver on its promises?

The problem is not with its device-ness but with its portrayal. The practice of microfinance is distinct from the narrative that Yunus created to promote it. Microfinance customers have re-imagined what the financial services can do and why they need them. Customers divert microfinance loans from businesses and instead use them to spend on other priorities. By doing that, borrowers provide an alternative view of their real needs (and an alternative view of microfinance’s possibilities). Researchers have tested Yunus’s narrative of entrepreneurial transformation and found it wanting, but the tests are too narrow because Yunus’s narrative is too narrow.

Washington, D.C. 1986

To unspool Yunus’s vision and explore alternatives, it is helpful to go back to the 1980s when the modern incarnation of microfinance first emerged on the global scene. Transcripts from congressional hearings about foreign assistance provide a useful record of early public conversations in the United States. In February 1986, for example, Rep. Stan Lundine of New York convened a joint meeting of the House Select Committee on Hunger together with a subcommittee of the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs. The hearing took place in a high-ceilinged, wood-paneled chamber within the maze of the Rayburn House Office Building, the block-sized office complex flanking the U.S. Capitol. The topic was “Microenterprise credit” — not yet shortened to “microcredit” — and Yunus was the featured guest. At the time, he was a little-known Bangladeshi economist who, three years before, had received a special license to create Grameen Bank. The Ford Foundation, an early backer, paid to bring Yunus to Washington.

When international development was on the agenda, the usual focus was on government-to-government foreign assistance, but Doug Bereuter, a moderate Republican from Nebraska, started the meeting by noting that this was an unusual event. “Some may find it strange,” Bereuter began, “that two congressional committees are meeting to discuss such things as news-vendor cooperatives in the Dominican Republic … or a sandal maker in Dacca [sic]. But perhaps it may not sound so esoteric when one realizes that one-half to three-quarters of the developing world’s population consists of underemployed people working in the so-called informal sector.” It was this population — systematically excluded from the banking sector and limited in their access to working capital — that Yunus sought to serve. He explained to representatives that banks “refuse to open their doors to the poor people who cannot provide collateral” and that “giving money to the poor is not their cup of tea” (U.S. House of Representatives: 4)

Yunus relayed his own story to the assembled legislators, starting with the “frustrations after frustrations” that befell Bangladesh after independence in 1971. Yunus was an economics professor at Chittagong University on Bangladesh’s southern coast when in 1974 the country experienced a deep famine. Yunus set out to create an informal economic study, taking his students to a nearby village to learn about the villagers’ lives and needs. Yunus concluded that the villagers’ business problems were fundamentally credit problems:

One of the things which struck me, was that it is very hard for people to make a living, because the circumstances and environment do not support their income-generating endeavors.

One woman I met in that village near Chittagong University was working all day to make bamboo stools. At the end of the day she made only 2 pennies. My trained mind in economics could not accept the propopsition that one could work all day to build bamboo stools and make only 2 pennies.

On closer scrutiny, I found that it is because she did not have the small amount of money to buy the bamboo to make the bamboo stool, so she borrowed the money from the trader who will buy the final product, the bamboo stool, from her. As a result, the trader dictated the price, which barely equaled the cost of the raw materials.

So, it came to my mind that I should make a list of such persons in that particular village who were borrowing from the trader just to make things and make a living for themselves and how much money they are borrowing from the trader.

I had a student of mine with me and we prepared a list of 42 such persons. The total amount they borrowed from the traders, different traders, totaled 856 taka, which is barely a total amount of $26. I felt extremely ashamed of myself being part of a society which could not provide $26 to 42 able, skilled human beings who were trying to make a living. (U.S. House of Representatives: 4)

Yunus’s impulse was humanitarian and focused on the villagers’ immediate burdens. These early observations suggested to Yunus the possibility of a kind of emancipation. The stool-maker would gain freedom from the middleman’s usurious loans. The rickshaw puller could buy his own rickshaw and avoid handing over the bulk of his earnings as rent for the vehicle.

The story holds power — but only under strong assumptions. Stripped to its essence, the story constructs a narrow view of the poor as fundamentally entrepreneurs (or would-be entrepreneurs) with pent-up productive power, held back only by the lack of capital. What is left unsaid and unexamined is the possibility that some villagers instead see themselves as would-be employees rather than would-be entrepreneurs — and they might then benefit most from the introduction of a large employer with the capacity to offer steady employment. Nor is there recognition of a failure in the goods market that might instead be met by increasing competition for monopolist middlemen. Nor is there recognition here that financial tools are necessary to facilitate spending, not just fund investment.[1]

The view of microfinance underlying Yunus’s depiction often is defended using a version of the idea (if not the language) of diminishing marginal returns to capital, an Economics 101 mainstay. The idea as applied to microfinance has the pleasure of being simultaneously intuitive and counterintuitive. The main idea (see fig. 1) is that the first increments of capital obtained by a business will generate the largest gains in profit. These are the loans that support an entrepreneur’s best, most-underfunded ideas. As a business acquires more capital, entrepreneurs move to their next-best ideas, then their next-next-best ideas, and so on. This part proceeds as
logic.

The counter-intuitive part springs from the next step: the simplified story results in starved-for-capital micro-enterprises served by Grameen Bank generating far higher profit (r₁) from a given investment (an increase from A to B in fig. 1) than by the larger, established businesses served by traditional banks. The gain in profit for entrepreneurs that are already well-funded is just r₂ when their capital increases by the same amount (i.e., an increase from C to D).

Rep. Lundine captured this notion in remarks at the hearing, as he described the dynamism of the “microentrepreneurs” served by Grameen Bank:

Microentrepreneurs very much represent the private sector in developing countries. In fact, it is this segment of the private economy in these countries which is the most dynamic and which represents the greatest potential for economic growth. Economic growth from the bottom up benefits precisely those who have the greatest need and therefore the most to gain, the poorest of the poor. (U.S. House of Representatives: 1-2).

The assumption that poor microentrepreneurs have the “greatest potential for economic growth” also means, according to the logic, that the poor can pay high interest rates and still come out ahead. In fact, they can pay far higher interest rates than larger businesses (since r₁ >> r₂). Assumptions are thus inverted: The poor can pay more because they are poor and excluded. The poor can profit more because they are poor.

In short, Yunus’s story implies that if you can find a way to reach the poor, their gains (and the bank’s gains) can be high. Yunus reported to the legislators that Grameen Bank had grown steadily, earned profit for the past two years, and recovered loans at a rate “near 99 percent.”[2] Yunus’s contribution was to find a way to reach the poor cheaply enough that revenue from interest could cover the costs. Grameen Bank did that by serving villagers at group meetings and having the villagers themselves play a role in monitoring each other and determining creditworthiness (Cull et al. 2018).

The cost-cutting part of Yunus’s depiction increasingly was relevant to its success. By the time of Yunus’s visit to Congress in 1986, the IMF and World Bank were preoccupied by the fiscal imbalances in developing economies, which ultimately pushed the IMF and World Bank to force high-debt countries to cut budgets in order to service foreign debt, often by slashing social spending. In that light, it was unsurprising that Representative Bereuter highlighted that support of microcredit was inexpensive for donors (especially relative to building bridges and railways). In almost poetic terms — “given today’s budgetary reticence” — Bereuter had noted that “the large drop in new investments in the developing world” made “small credits to viable microbusinesses seem to be an optimal way to generate new income and jobs” (U.S. House of Representatives 1986). Microcredit thus also had the advantage of seeming like a cheap way to do something for the poor. The donors only were called upon to provide startup funding and basic infrastructure.

Another poetic contrivance created an additional reason for turning to microfinance: the rathole. This metaphor was invoked most famously in the 1990s by Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to depict what he saw as a transfer of taxpayer funds overseas with seemingly little accountability and no clear metrics of impact. To Helms, foreign assistance mainly disappeared down “foreign ratholes” never to be seen again. But with microfinance the market promised to provide accountability. Surely customers wouldn’t pay Grameen Bank for loans — with 16 percent interest at the start — if the services were not making a difference. Plus, surely the loans would not be repaid “nearly 99 percent” of the time if the money was being wasted. The market, hallowed in Reagan’s 1980s, thus was positioned as both a delivery mechanism and an accountability guarantee. Evidence of sustained demand for microcredit and high repayment rates became the prime indicators of success. Other interventions, like public schools and hospitals or road projects, could not claim such easy metrics.

All else is not equal

The world, though, doesn’t necessarily look like figure 1. There are tradeoffs and complexities in practice and, like so much else in economics, the relationship captured by the simple textbook case requires that we assume ceteris paribus — “all else is held equal.” The assumption is not trivial here. People who start with vastly different amounts of capital also are likely to be different in other ways. Poor entrepreneurs are less likely to have relevant skills and connections. The bamboo-stool maker probably is hindered by more than the lack of financial access. She also may lack the trade connections or marketing skills to sustain a scale of business necessary to reap large returns. The story changes dramatically (see fig. 2) when the analysis is expanded to take into account how economies of scale can matter. Here, the poorest entrepreneurs (i.e., those in the left-most section increasing capital from A to B) generate little extra profit with a given increment of extra capital (for lack of scale and perhaps lack of other inputs beyond capital), while better-off entrepreneurs are positioned to reap the rewards of their size (as they increase capital from C to D). Here, r₁ << r₂. The poorer entrepreneurs in this second case are unable to profit much, unable to pay high interest rates, and need a lot more than capital if they are to materially move forward.

The assertion that village economies look more like figure 1 than figure 2 — i.e., that diminishing marginal returns is a more powerful effect than increasing returns to scale — set too high a bar for the expectations of microfinance impacts. A stack of statistical studies now shows that village economies are a mix and plenty of residents are in the figure 2 world, ill-prepared to gain much from petty business. For them, the notion of microcredit as a simple device, always capable of delivering impact on its own, falls away. Gone is Yunus’s case that anyone can succeed in business once given access to a bit of capital.

Microfinance as a credit card?

What then is the role for microfinance? Why do poor people stick with it? Why does it continue to grow by the year? To answer these questions, it’s helpful to start with an anomaly: In practice, microfinance activity more closely resembles the provision of consumption loans than business loans, revealing a different picture of the financial needs — and financial lives — of poor households. The rhetoric around microfinance obscures the reality that borrowers are consumers, too, and what many often seek is simply better ways to spend, not just to invest in business.

Like typical consumer loans — and like credit cards — microfinance loans allow borrowers to make big purchases and repay over time (with interest). Grameen-style microfinance loans require that loans are repaid steadily through weekly installments, a structure that looks more like a typical consumer loan than a business loan. (In contrast, a typical business loan would allow borrowers to invest the funds and only much later, once profit has been generated, repay the loan with the accumulated revenues.)

Recent village studies, especially those using the close observations of financial diaries methods, show that loans are desired and used for many purposes beyond business. Incomes are seldom steady and predictable; needs vary as well: families need to pay for schools, medicines, and food during slow periods. They might need to buy bus tickets to get to the city for a job, upgrade their homes, or simply pay down a more expensive loan. Borrowers repay the loans in small bits using whatever household income is available. Stuart Rutherford’s financial diaries from Bangladesh, included in the book Portfolios of the Poor, reveal many such examples (Collins et al. 2009). Rutherford spent time with a small group of Grameen Bank customers and found that only half of “business” loans were used for business purposes (and under half when weighted by the size of loans). I found the same in a national survey in Indonesia (Johnston and Morduch 2008), and others reveal similar patterns in India, Peru, and elsewhere.

Evidence that microfinance loans are used to fund non-business needs (even if for education or health) is sometimes used to criticize microfinance, but that misses the point. As Collins et al. (2009) argue, microfinance in practice can add critical sources of finance that can be added to other funds used to manage day-to-day cash flows, accumulate large sums for lumpy expenses (including investment), and cope with risk. In a wide variety of situations, microfinance loans can be relied on to help liquidity-constrained households put together the money they need at the moment they need it. The result may be to improve the families’ situations, even if their businesses don’t grow and incomes do not rise (even if they don’t actually have a business!). The notion that business finance is the single, main need for finance for poor households does not square with the evidence. Rather, poor families, like richer families, need broad financial tools. In fact, the poor may need them more urgently.

If we drop the illusion that microfinance loans are necessarily business loans (and the assumption is dropped that everyone is a budding entrepreneur), it is easier to see how microfinance works. It becomes easier to see how microfinance addresses the challenges posed by the illiquidity of borrowers. And it becomes easier to anticipate (and more directly address) problems such as over-indebtedness and the lack of adequate consumer protections in the sector (see Guérin et al. 2015 and Karim 2011). It also is easier to see that microfinance is a complement to — not a substitute for — social insurance and other interventions that bring public resources into poor communities.

Ultimately, Yunus’s talking points were, if anything, too easily appealing in their moment. Microfinance is instead best thought of as a device like a credit card: it can be very helpful, sometimes harmful, and seldom truly transformative. Microfinance loans differs from credit cards in important ways too; they are fixed loans, not lines of credit, and they have clear rules and structures that make it more difficult — but not impossible — to get into real trouble with debt. Only with a sharper understanding of how microfinance is actually used can providers develop better options and safeguards. This vision of microfinance may not sell as well to donors, but it may describe the device that families most need and value.

References

Armendàriz, Beatriz and Jonathan Morduch. 2010. The Economics of Microfinance, Second edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bateman, Milford and Ha-Joon Chang. 2012. “Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years.” World Economic Review 1: 13-36.

Collins, Daryl, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven. 2009. Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cull, Robert, Asli Demirgüç-Kunt, and Jonathan Morduch. 2018. “The Microfinance Business Model: Enduring Subsidy and Modest Profit.” World Bank Economic Review, forthcoming. Available at link.

Ferguson, James. 2015. Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Redistribution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Guérin, Isabelle, Labie, Marc and Servet, Jean-Michel. 2015. The Crises of Microcredit. London: Zed Books.

Johnston, Don Jr. and Jonathan Morduch. 2008. “The Unbanked: Evidence from Indonesia.” World Bank Economic Review 22 (3): 517-537.

Karim, Lamia. 2011. Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Mossman. Matt. 2015. “Moving Beyond Microcredit.” The New Yorker. November 2, 2015.

U.S. House of Representatives. 1986. “Microenterprise Credit.” Hearing of the Select Committee on Hunger and Subcommittee on International Development Institutions and Finance, Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs. February 25, 1986. Available at link.

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Notes

[1] Grameen Bank eventually created loan products to support a limited range of spending needs, especially for major housing and education costs. Their main loan product, though, has always been described as a business loan, despite evidence that it is often used in broader ways.

[2] Grameen Bank’s achievements are impressive, but claims about profits and loan recoveries are overstated when viewed from the perspective of generally-accepted accounting principles; instead, my calculations show that Grameen was reliant on subsidy from the start (Armendàriz and Morduch 2010). For an updated view of the continuing dependence on subsidy in the broad microfinance industry, see Cull et al. (2018).

[ Ed. note: This  is the first of a three part collaboration on “Excrementa Estates.”  Read parts II and III. ]

The Introduction

Combining architectural models and drawings, graphic texts, and photographs, the following section is an exercise in critical design anthropology, serving a dual purpose of documentation and provocation. Building on African solutions to African problems—namely the shortage of urban sanitary facilities—Excrementa Estates promotes innovative multi-use dwelling design. Four design models are featured: Stomach Has No Holiday, Adepa, Lady Di, and Doctor. Each combines private residential space with toilets and baths available to the wider public on a fee-for-service basis. In development parlance, these can be glossed as dwelling-based public toilets (DBPTs).

All of the designs draw from Ghana’s edge-city of Ashaiman. Located near Ghana’s port of Tema and national capital, Accra, Ashaiman is a fast-growing urban settlement largely occupied by working-class migrants and transients with access to no or low-quality dwellings. The city has no central sewage system and limited municipal facilities. Nevertheless, due to the low price of land and proximity to Ghana’s commercial core, Ashaiman is also home to an upwardly mobile social stratum. With space, capital, and status to spare, many well-off households invest in excrement-based enterprise, tapping the bodily needs and pocketbooks of less prosperous neighbors. Variations on a theme, the four models highlighted here afford different opportunities for privacy, propriety, and enterprise development and offer a range of for-profit sanitary solutions, from flush and squat toilets and showers and baths to tap, tank, and purified water; water closet; septic tank; and pit latrine. Each one is already in use in the city. All of the DBPTs showcased offer a distinctive synthesis of domestic space, public access, sanitary infrastructure, and commercial imperatives in a context of minimal state provisioning.

These popularly derived solutions to pressing urban and human needs are presented via customized real estate brochures, a promotional and informational modality common across the African continent. The brochures are juxtaposed with architectural drawings and three-dimensional models derived from the structures built and used by Ashaiman residents. This format provides a way to ponder the viability of corporatized mass production of vernacular problem solving. Mixing low and high, public service and for-profit urban sanitation solutions, and aestheticized abstraction and on-the-ground realities, Excrementa Estates uses the conditions of the present to imagine designs for the future in Africa’s fast-growing cities. Abstracted and miniaturized, these designs for living and the pan-human need for bodily care and evacuation raise questions about the source, scale, and replicability of “development devices.” Although the sanitary solutions found in Ashaiman can be packaged and promoted, their capacity for circulation and adaptation is open to debate.

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THE MODELS

Stomach Has No Holiday is situated amid the shanties of Ashaiman’s working poor. With 16 toilets and 8 showers stalls, it is near but detached from the owner-operator’s family home among a cluster of other family-based enterprises. A source of retirement income and status recognition for the proprietor, Stomach represents a beacon of prosperity and service provision in an otherwise impoverished locale. Bucking the municipality’s efforts to control its operation or design, the low-tech, low-cost, yet well-maintained pit latrine offers affordability for the local populace and promises profits and permanence in a largely transient space.

Adepa (a Twi term meaning “It’s nice”) is a compact enclosure containing eight top-of-the-line flush water closet (WC) toilets and porcelain hand sinks. Situated at the rear of the domicile, its separate entrance sets it apart from residential space, which is close enough for convenient monitoring and servicing yet affords privacy. Located in a long-settled neighborhood of large compound-style homes, Adepa is an attractive alternative to the overburdened and sensorially offensive municipal toilet. Despite the steep price of entry, Adepa is well patronized due to the high quality of service and good reputation of its proprietors. Toilet-related services and socializing extend into the public space and thoroughfares surrounding Adepa, all the while maintaining respect and discretion for customers.

The Lady Di DBPT is altogether different in design. Contiguous with the family living area, this 20-toilet and 12-bath complex is equivalent in size to the already spacious home to which it is connected. Combining the toilet and bath enterprise with a lucrative water business consisting of an on-site borehole, multiple storage tanks, and a dedicated filtration system, there is no clear boundary between dwelling space and commercial operations. As such, toilet customers and toilet cleaners are incorporated into household life. In turn, the businesswoman and her female offspring who run, own, and live within the facility gain wealth, regard, and a broad network of dependents by keeping waste-work at home.

The Doctor depicts a DBPT owned and operated by a prominent physician. Located on an expansive lot in an up-and-coming neighborhood well beyond Ashaiman’s congested commercial core, the toilet occupies the entirety of a structure originally built to serve as a residence. Now converted to a toilet facility, with 14 men’s rooms on one side and 14 ladies’ rooms on the other, the only dwelling space that remains is the office area reserved for the attendants; the doctor-owner lives elsewhere. The attractive fence, decorated gate, airy veranda, and large lot provide cover for a multi-corridor shower area. Blending in with neighboring domestic structures, this large-scale facility is well prepared to handle urban infill.

Continue to part II…

Acknowledgements

Brenda Chalfin, Concept, Text, Brochures; Xhulio Binjaku, Models, Drawings; Brenda Chalfin and Eva Egensteiner, Photographs. Prepared with the support of Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and The Mellon Foundation.

[ Ed. note: This  is the second of a three part collaboration on “Excrementa Estates.”  Read parts I and III. ]

In architecture schools, models are the most direct way for students to communicate their designs so others can understand. The thinking goes: If the design can be physically modeled to scale, it most likely can be built. In this way, models are a way to legitimize design. Of course, there is a long history of architecture being used as a way to legitimize political power (religious buildings, state houses, prisons, etc.), but before the built structure, there is usually a model to solidify ideas. Known to designers and defined by Jane Bennett (2010:6), models have thing-power, “the curious ability of inanimate objects to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.” Thing-power does not necessarily rely on cultural significance but on the model’s material body. The common wisdom passed down from professional architects to students is that clients love models. The model really sells the project; it is a direct translation from thing-power to capital through its physicality.

English architects Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who worked on the plans of Tema, Ghana’s planned modern city, used models of sanitary and “climactically designed” village units to persuade authorities and villagers of the legitimacy of their design. Though sensitive to climate and villagers’ needs, the project was rooted in the politics of the neocolonial English New Town. When the villagers disapproved of their design, they vandalized the prototypes (Provoost 2017a), lashing out against the models.

After independence from England in 1957, Ghana’s new president Kwame Nkrumah let go of Fry and Drew and hired Greek architect-planner Constantine Doxiadis to design a large-scale and fast-paced development for Tema. Doxiadis’s master plan featured a modernist grid slightly on the diagonal to take advantage of winds. Doxiadis’s master plan was to “facilitate social cohesion” among many different communities migrating to Tema for work; however, his plan was rigidly hierarchical, separated by different income classes (Proovost 2017b). Community 9, designed for the poorest, featured a plot of land where migrants could build their own homes. Just north of Community 9 grew Ashaiman, a largely self-organized sister city that lacked formal infrastructure.

Doxiadis’s hasty planning resulted in the popular solution of what Brenda Chalfin calls “dwelling-based public toilets” (DBPTs). DBPTs are an on-the-ground solution already at work; they provide revenue for the owners, sanitation for workers, and a semi-public space in the city. With Brenda, I made models of the toilet structures for the “Excrementa Estates” installation. In turning DBPTs into models of a kind routinely exhibited in client meetings or commercial sales events, similar to the ones made by Drew and Fry and Doxiadis, we sought to explore and question the role of the model in upholding regimes of power, expertise, and commerce.

Derived from a low place (latrines of Ashaiman) but presented in the mode of high architecture (clean white models with drawings and brochures), the models and the installation for Excrementa Estates are a cheeky attempt to insert existing alternatives into contemporary efforts by architects, urban planners, and anthropologists, among others, to design idealized solutions to poverty. DBPTs are a solution from a difficult place, a radical alternative that provides income, social mobility, and pride in providing what government and its hired architects cannot.

By borrowing the techniques and aesthetics of the architectural proposal, the models for Excrementa Estates—made miniature, stripped white, and affording the viewer a privileged, high point of view—are a critique of the legitimizing power normally held by the architect/expert. The models show radical public–private solutions designed and built by the citizens of Ashaiman in spite of neglect from expert agencies. The models are learning from Ashiaman rather than learning of Ashaiman, a shift in preposition and position. To go low instead of high may contain a powerful lesson for architecture and other forms of planning.

Continue to part III…

References

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Provoost, Michelle. 2017a. Tema Manhaen. International New Town Institute. Available at link.

———. 2017b. Tema. International New Town Institute. Available at link.

[ Ed. note: This  is the third of a three part collaboration on “Excrementa Estates.”  Read parts I and II. ]

I

In July 2016, I was invited to a conference on technology in Durban, South Africa, held over several days at a tourist lodge turned meeting venue (Mellon Foundation 2016). Shunning the redundancy of read-out-loud conference papers and PowerPoints, conference organizers sought nontraditional presentations. Because the purpose of the gathering was to ask questions about the conventions and limits of technology and infrastructure studies in Africa, a contribution that was in some way concrete seemed appropriate. I was in the middle of a fellowship year devoted to turning my field research in Ghana on popular solutions to urban sanitation into a book. I was awash in words: transcripts from the field, journal articles, and the written and rewritten words of my manuscript. I welcomed the opportunity to work in a format where the tight textual conventions of anthropology could be sidelined.

In collaboration with Xhulio Binjaku, a student architect at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), I created an installation of architectural models and real estate brochures featuring the public toilets I encountered in the course of field research in urban Ghana. I initially conceived the installation as a type of interdisciplinary play, putting anthropology into new conversations and materials. Play soon became provocation as I jumbled commercial stylistics with ethnographic analysis and the jest that inevitably accompanies popular treatment of fecal matters with a critique of expert-derived development prescriptions.

This special issue of Limn provides an opportunity to share and critically reflect on the Durban installation and the concerns and design processes behind it. What happens when a vernacular “fix” never intended for objectification becomes a model subject to replication and circulation? Can such ad hoc infrastructural solutions be turned into “development devices” amenable to abstraction and adaptation to other times and places? Could and should consumer and class-based desires be used to guide the making and marketing of such templates for development and design?

II

From the start of my field research in 2010, I found myself curating and collecting images and pondering how I could incorporate them into published work. My book project addresses the larger topic of public life and the politics of infrastructure in urban West Africa through a portrait of Ghana’s planned city of Tema, once considered a paragon of mid-twentieth century modernism in the tropics (D’Auria 2010). Alongside ethnographic fieldwork, a major part of my investigations involved reviewing thousands of pages of documents related to the city’s built environment. Largely graphic in form, they included house plans, architectural elevations, neighborhood layouts, sketches, diagrams, flow charts, maps, materials lists, and promotional material, along with what remained of the photographic record of Tema’s early construction, retrieved from the dusty storerooms of the city’s governing authority.

With the aid of this trove of images, from among the many possible points of entry into urban planning and public life in Tema, I chose to go underground and trace the forms and logics of sanitary infrastructure. The sanitary underground, what urbanist Lewis Mumford (1961) called the “invisible city,” was by all means a tangible, visceral component of urban experience in Tema, even if not fully knowable or entirely functional.  Besides early sewerage plans, engineering specs, and logs of sewage volumes and system bottlenecks, there were complaint ledgers and tax schedules, and remnants of repair tenders and contracts.

Conducted over the course of a half-dozen visits to Ghana from 2010 to 2015, my fieldwork and archival studies showed a striking juxtaposition. Marking the aspirations of Ghana’s newly won national independence, Tema at its founding in the late 1950s embodied the sanitary standards of Euro-American high modernity (Harvey 2003; Melosi 2001). This included a citywide gravity-borne sewage system serving individual homes, each equipped with private water closets provisioned with identical imported fixtures. For more than 50 years, the original infrastructure remained in place. With heavy use, strained maintenance, and limited investment, the sanitary order I encountered a half-century later was in a state of grave disrepair. Reflecting Tema’s expanding population and footprint, urban residents from an array of occupations and class strata had devised a range of alternative approaches to large-scale human waste management across the city, supplementing and substituting for municipal provisioning (Chalfin 2014, 2017).

Alongside the top-down schemes of mid-century urban planners and civil engineers, I found bottom-up solutions relying on diverse technologies, layouts, and fee structures, catering to different neighborhoods and constituencies (Chalfin 2014, 2017). Designed, built, and run by urban residents, these “popular infrastructures” operate largely outside the regulatory grasp of municipal authorities despite their value to a broad swath of urban dwellers. Some of the most intriguing sanitary arrangements I came across were located in Tema’s sister city of Ashaiman. Settled in the late 1950s to house casual laborers essential to the construction and operation of Tema’s port and industrial core, Ashaiman quickly became a commercial hub and migrant catchment area in its own right (Amarteifio et al. 1966). Though under the auspices of Tema’s municipal authority until 2008, investment in basic public services in Ashaiman was minimal, sanitation, sewerage, and public toilets included. As a consequence, human waste management across Ashaiman was and remains largely a function of self-organization.

Providing a forceful example of what Graham and Marvin (2001) call “splintering urbanism,” distinguishing Ashaiman from other systems of sanitary self-provisioning, the city contains a vast array of what I label dwelling-based public toilets (DBPTs). These are not the conventional, standalone commercial toilets in places of public thoroughfare. Rather, as the accompanying models drawings and images demonstrate, the individuals who own and operate the toilets fully incorporate them into domestic and dwelling spaces despite the facilities’ considerable sizes, with 8 to 20 seats and numerous technical entailments from water cisterns to large underground sewage holding tanks and sometimes biogas hook-ups. Most significant, situated within private residences by choice, these public sanitation systems are widely available to an otherwise underserved urban populace for a small fee per visit. In the face of gaps and lapses in state services, the designers cum proprietors of these vernacular infrastructures turn them into means of respectability and bodily relief for their customers, and a source of profit and public recognition for themselves.

III

Taken as a “type” all its own, Ashaiman’s DBPTs offer a compelling alternative to both the modernist ideal of private toilets in private homes and the developmentalist reality of public toilets in public places for the unplumbed urban dweller. They equally depart from the emerging array of sanitary novelties devised by humanitarian donor designers, from the Without Water Closet and Urine Diversion Toilet to the neo-chamberpot Dignity Toilet or the biodegradable Eco-bag (Redfield and Robins 2016). Ashaiman’s DBPTs instead represent what might be called a “fourth way” that innovates the possibilities of public toilet facilities and extant sanitary technologies. Those who devise and use Ashaiman’s varied DBPTs, moreover, are unabashed in their embrace of conspicuous consumerism, status aspiration, and profit making. As lifestyle choices integral to the persons and communities the toilets serve, these DPBPTs mark a radical departure from the utilitarian aesthetics of humanitarian design as well as the private house–private toilet mantra of public health experts.

Selectively reassembled for this issue of Limn, Binjaku’s and my contribution to the Durban conference showcased these realities in a site-specific installation titled “Excrementa Estates.” It included three-dimensional architectural models, two-dimensional layouts and projections, and photograph-rich brochures detailing four of the more than 150 DBPTs currently in operation across Ashaiman. My foremost aim was to objectify what can be called “African solutions to African problems” by posing the promise of vernacular infrastructure for development design. With public health campaigns around the world driven by the United Nations Millennial Development Goals of eradicating open defecation (United Nations 2006), Ashaiman’s DBPTs suggest a viable alternative. In sync with the social mores, living conditions, and incomes of the urban underclass, they are marked by wide availability, easy access, and relative affordability.

Ashaiman’s DBPTs likewise represent a better option than the oft-noted ideal of home-based facilities exclusively for residential use. A bourgeois rendering of sanitary modernity not too different from that envisioned at Tema’s founding, the World Health Organization and the World Bank are still promoting this approach as the best sanitary model for the Global South (World Bank 2014). However, it has met with only limited success due to the difficulty and high upfront cost of installation across the vast number and variety of urban dwellings and the sheer impossibility of ensuring access for all. This is especially so in urban areas such as Ashaiman, where a large portion of the population is transient and permanent accommodation is never assured.

In the Durban installation, a slideshow juxtaposing Ashaiman’s present-day sanitary realities with the original plans for the city of Tema accompanied the models, pamphlets, and posters of Excrementa Estates. Also included were images taken from recent promotional material from a new class of upscale planned communities in Ghana. In these neoliberal “New Towns,” with names like Apollonia, Heaven’s Gate, and Mirage, the promise of class mobility and domestic status symbols are key selling points. Featured in Limn, these ideals are deliberately reiterated in the illustrated brochures of Excrementa Estates, formatted to resemble popular real estate offerings. Though the dust and disarray of the booklets’ snapshots of actual urban living contrast with the clean surfaces and air-brushed messaging of the real-life real estate marketing material, their impulse is largely the same. Affirming the project’s plausibility, the advertising banner I printed in Ghana for the Durban event, reading, “Excrementa Estates: West Africa’s Sanitary Frontier,” was not considered out of the ordinary by the graphic designer who assisted with production and layout.

Highlighting the capitalization of property rights across the continent, the Durban conference was held at a small conference center and lodge located within a sprawling golf resort and residential development in the lush hills on the city’s outskirts. In addition to accommodating meetings, the lodge hosted the resort’s real estate sales. Its reception area included a plush, catalog-laden showroom containing house plans, price charts, and maps of the development’s numerous subdivisions. Nearby, a modest meeting room was reserved for the installation. Stocked with drinks, snacks, pads, and pens, it was appointed with the same warm lighting and mahogany furniture as the showroom. Giving further credence to Excrementa Estates’ resemblance to an actual real estate showcase, the architectural models were placed on the glass-topped table surrounded by their associated brochures. The large-format floorplans of the four structures were posted on the textured beige walls. These design elements helped convey a more serious point: the prime proponents of DBPTs will likely be upwardly mobile peri-urbanites with capital to invest in lucrative home-based enterprises. Class driven and profit based, though Ashaiman’s DBPTs have the potential to raise the quality of life for the many, the installation seeks to make clear they cannot be separated from the economic success of the few.

Reiterated by the very context of display, instead of couching Ashaiman’s sanitary prototypes in the guise of philanthropic good works, the installation marked the shared late-capitalist context of urban real estate development and humanitarian interventions. Attuned to these realities, the models and motifs of Excrementa Estates deliberately challenge the ethos of abjection that informs mainstream humanitarian design. Garnering awards for merging artistry and instrumentality, there is no doubt that many of the humanitarian devices that have emerged from the expansion of the development industry are marked by considerable elegance reflective of the modernist aesthetic of functional efficiency (Bell and Wakeford 2008; Redfield 2012). Yet, focused on Agamben-esque (1998) “bare-life,” humanitarianism by definition shuns gaudy excess, making little allowance for the superfluities of humor and pleasure, and, most of all, waste. Countering these principles of parsimony, the installation’s imagery highlights built forms overflowing with life, registering desire, disgust, shame, and delight.

IV

As an exercise in the nascent field of design anthropology, an uneasy translation of disciplinary knowledge was required to put these elements in dialogue. There was the fundamental challenge of hands-on three-dimensional construction. I willingly outsourced the task to Xhulio Binjaku, an architecture student at MIT and a University of Florida graduate who was already knowledgeable about my research and well informed about architecture in Africa. As much an epistemological impasse as technical problem, the fact remained that model making is not part of the mainstream of cultural anthropology. Besides the well-known anthropological penchant for textuality and conventions of “writing culture” (Clifford and Marcus 2010), the very act of modeling—stripping a complex, historically determined form down to its bare essentials—is antithetical to anthropological investment in context and specificity. Whereas distillation of the core elements of a social formation for purposes of analysis and comparison is well accepted, reduction in the service of replication and transferability is not because it compromises the anthropological precepts of cultural relativism and historical specificity.

My goal, however, was to have it both ways and leverage the aesthetic and analytic power of a miniaturized mobile model while staying true to critique and context. Harking back to Geertz’s (1973) classic distinction, there was the lure of bringing into conversations about human development in Africa not just “models for” derived from technical abstractions and ideal types with the Global North as reference point. Injecting “models of” drawn from on-the-ground conditions into the humanitarian mainstream, the design templates derived from Ashaiman provide an opportunity to see “the real” as more radical than purely imagined alternatives. The abstractions, amplifications, and erasures entailed by modeling also make it possible to put aside particularities of time and place to see infrastructural configurations as functional wholes beyond the cobbled-together attributes of individual parts, persons, and ad hoc uses and repairs. Though models by definition are simplifications, they privilege integrity over idiosyncrasy. In this way models can be powerful agents of legitimation as they call out singular solutions for recognition and contemplation and amplify their unique features and potential impacts by rendering them “legible.”

Despite these attractions, ethical questions loom large. Who gets to model? Who has the skill and authority to make and circulate models? Who gets to claim that something is worth modeling? Even more consequential is the question of to whom the models belong: Are the models themselves a form of intellectual property, or do they encapsulate the intellectual investments that stand behind them? Are they attributable to a single, deliberate author, or are the origins much more diffuse? In the face of a rising market for workable, replicable, and adaptable humanitarian devices and interventions, these are real concerns. For the models presented here, at the very least, we seek acknowledgment of their multiple sources: location, owner-operator, ethnographer, photographer, model-maker.

Also looming is the question of the very propositions these models encode. Although Ashaiman’s DBPTs promote the satisfaction of basic bodily needs in the face of limited wealth and considerable government constraint, they differ substantially from the broader catalog of humanitarian solutions in terms of scale. As this issue of Limn well illustrates, humanitarian interventions increasingly center on the design and distribution of little devices. Along with the generic emergency tents and tarps, there is, however, a rising prevalence of prefabricated field hospitals and “out of the box” schoolrooms and feeding centers, with every element designed and detailed from top to bottom (UNICEF 2017). Between the penchant for “little” or “large,” capitalist “excess” or modernist “parsimony,” Excrementa Estates captures design possibilities that emerge through living.

Acknowledgements

Brenda Chalfin, Concept, Text, Brochures; Xhulio Binjaku, Models, Drawings; Brenda Chalfin and Eva Egensteiner, Photographs. Prepared with the support of Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and The Mellon Foundation.

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