Executive Summary
The building and expansion of roads signify public investment in the long-term development of a community. Yet in the messy fields of planning and engineering, politics and markets, disaster and violence, all too often infrastructure becomes a zone of suspension, or decay, or even tyranny, yielding experiences of risk, injury, discomfort and injustice. The gap between plans and outcomes is notoriously wide. This talk focuses on the timely topic of corruption, a term that is often used to explain this gap, but which also glosses over a finer grain of situated ethics in Nepali communities. It draws on ethnographic research on rural road building for the recently published book, Infrastructures of Democracy: Politics and Processes of Rural Road Building in Nepal (Rankin, Shneiderman and Tamang, eds., Chautari Books, 2026), combined a consideration of some classic songs and poems from the last decade. Together these sources reveal a double edge—how practices of embezzlement, bribery, collusion and other forms of illicit extraction foster cynicism and distrust, while also forging a terrain for critique and radical accountability in planning.
Katharine Rankin is Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto and Faculty Fellow 2025-2026 at the Jackman Humanities Institute