Low-carbon yak cheese: transition to biogas in a Himalayan socio-technical niche

Abstract

This study looks at how potential for resilient low-carbon solutions can be understood and enhanced in the diverse environmental, economic and socio-political contexts in which actual scenarios of energy needs and diverse development pathways take shape. It discusses socio-technical transition approaches to assist implementation of a biogas digester system. This will replace fuelwood use in the high forests of Central Nepal, where yak cheese production provides livelihood income but is under threat from the Langtang National Park, which is concerned to protect biodiversity. Alternatives for digester design are discussed, and the consultative issues for deliberative processes among stakeholders' varied agendas raised.

The uptake and diffusion of solar power in Africa: Socio-cultural and political insights on a rapidly emerging socio-technical transition

“…Some recent work on sustainable energy has witnessed the beginnings of a "socio-cultural turn" [15]. A small number of contributions, including a handful from the previous ERSS SI on renewable energy in Africa, operationalize theoretical insights from social anthropology [17,18,19,20,21,22], socio-technical transitions [16,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], and commonpool resource management perspectives [33], and there is a growing (albeit arguably still too small) literature on the gender dimensions of energy and development [e.g. 34,35,36].…”

Rethinking the sustainability and institutional governance of electricity access and mini-grids: Electricity as a common pool resource

“…24,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. And recent years have witnessed what might be described as a nascent "socio-cultural turn" [12] in energy access research, with a number of contributions operationalizing insights from the socio-technical transitions literature [32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] and social anthropology [40][41][42]. These contributions have cast analytic light on a range of socio-cultural aspects of energy access, including understanding the social, cultural, gendered and, inevitably, political dimensions of electrification and the implications of involving potential users in the design, development and implementation of rural electrification projects.…”

Communities of energy

“…The organization of agropastoral production is based on common property resources, but this has historical links to state economies of premodern value extraction. Campbell (2013) describes the corvée labor system by which royal butter-making dairy herds moved each summer into forests of Tamang-speaking villages, requiring each household to provide numerous days' labor to carry equipment and construct timber shelters for the state herds of cattle. When Swiss technology for European-style cheese making was introduced in the 1950s in the Langtang Valley, the state was therefore well acquainted with the territory and the viability of the project.…”

“…The World Wide Fund for Nature and World Bank have actively funded biogas extension in buffer zone areas of national parks in the lowlands of Nepal since the early 2000s. By 2009, a quarter of a million homes had biogas units in southern Nepal (Campbell and Sallis 2013). Anecdotally, the biogas concrete dome technology has moved uphill through its own persuasive efficiency, often being adopted en masse by entire villages (K. Adhikari of Kaski District, personal communication, 2013).…”