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Paper short abstract

My paper examines the hybrid arrangements between the development sector and the Nepali state in governing labor. I explore this through the financial architecture of state-development arrangements, the spatial configurations of bureaucratic infrastructure, and the labor regimes of local government.

Paper long abstract

My research inquires into the Nepali state’s governance of labor as a form of state projectification. I examine this process ethnographically by situating myself within the Swiss-funded migration-for-development initiative known as the Safer Migration Project (SaMi). SaMi is a sector spanning program which sets migration policy agendas and provides public services to Nepali blue collar workers as they leave for the international labor circuits. It stitches the central, provincial, and local levels of the recently restructured Nepali state together along its project chain by giving each differential access to global capital. My paper focuses on the implementation of SaMi by local government in the Dhankuta district of the eastern province of Kosi. I examine the projectification of the state in three ways. First, I track the financial architecture of state-development arrangements, namely how aid money is distributed to local government via a complex mechanism mediated by the central government. At the center of this process is the project proposal, written jointly by local bureaucrats and aid workers. Second, I trace how the fluid boundaries between the state and development projects are inscribed into spatial arrangements. More specifically, I analyze the spatial configuration of the Migrant Resource Center, a SaMi institution, located within passport offices. Lastly, I inquire into the labor regimes of local government, specifically that of ‘half-sarkari’ contract workers whose salaries are paid for by projects. Neither politicians nor pensioned career bureaucrats, these projectariats who work on curbing migration paradoxically aspire to enter the international labor circuits themselves.