ABSTRACT
First, although many development projects end in failure – thus often making poor people poorer and corrupt states even more corrupt – some development projects have beneficial impacts on poverty alleviation, the accumulation of social capital, environmental protection and the improvement of people’s health and general well-being. This is perhaps an unsurprising conclusion, but still worth noting given the current policy debates about development aid around the world, which range from ‘close the [World] Bank!’ on the one hand to ‘triple development aid!’ on the other (Verweij and Gyawali 2006). Nepal is strewn with highly expensive development failures that have lined the pockets of Western consultants and companies, as well as less-than-honest domestic decision makers (see Chapters 3, 4 and 10). These include the infamous Arun 3 dam and similarly large hydro projects, often pushed by the World Bank and other aid donors (Chapter 8). They also include the ill-fated privatisation of Bara Forest, foisted upon local communities by a Finnish logging company and the Finnish International Development Agency in the 1980s (Chapter 1).
