High Mountain Agriculture and Changing Socionatures in Nagar, Northern Pakistan

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on high-mountain farming in Nagar, a rural district in the Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan. It deals with the question of how local farming systems have been affected over the last 30–40 years by multiple interacting processes of change, including climate change. More specifically, it investigates how a diversity of actors and factors — or ‘actants’ — have contributed to these changes in manifold ways. This investigation follows an assemblage approach to agricultural change, emphasising the complexity and heterogeneity of change processes that are simultaneously co-produced by multiple actants. led to an overall enhancement of the water supply. To some extent, farming systems in certain villages have also been affected by changes in the local environment: glacier dynamics, among other things, have desiccated irrigation channels; rising temperatures have benefited crop production; and a drop in snowfall has negatively affected water supply. However, these changes have so far been of little significance compared to other processes of agricultural change. Several actors and factors have been found to be responsible for recent agricultural developments in Nagar. Government actors have played an important role through political reforms, subsidies and infrastructure projects. The new road infrastructure, especially the Karakoram Highway has been particularly pivotal in facilitating access to agricultural markets. Local and external traders, new sources of financial capital, and social networks have also played major roles in these developments. Much of the technological change has been initiated by external development agencies in collaboration with local community organisations and individual activists. By and large, social, political, and economic actors and factors have been far more influential in transforming local farming assemblages than changes in the biophysical environment. Nonetheless, significant trends in local climate change indicate that this may evolve to some extent in the future. As the assemblage approach suggests, the effects of these trends can only be evaluated by considering them as one of many co-occurring and often interrelated processes of local change.