This paper analyzes the socio-cultural dimensions of obstacles facing solar photovoltaic projects in two villages in rural Nepal. The study was conducted in Humla District, Nepal, one of the most remote and impoverished regions of the country. There are no roads in the district, homes lack running water and villagers' health suffers from high levels of indoor air pollution from open cooking/heating fires and the smoky torches traditionally burned for light. The introduction of solar energy is important to these villagers, as it removes one major source of indoor air pollution from homes and provides brighter light than the traditional torches. Solar energy is preferable in many villages in the region due to the lack of suitable streams or rivers for micro-hydroelectric projects. In the villages under study in this paper, in-home solar electricity is a novel and recent innovation, and was installed within the last three years in two different geo-spatial styles, depending upon the configuration of homes in the village. In some villages, houses are grouped together, while in others households are widely dispersed. In the former, solar photovoltaic systems were installed in a "cluster" fashion with multiple homes utilizing power from a central battery store under the control of the householder storing the battery bank. In villages with widely spaced households, a single home system was used so that each home had a separate solar photovoltaic array, wiring system and battery bank. It became clear that the cluster system was the sensible choice due to the geographic layout of certain villages, but this put people into management groups that did not always work well due to caste or other differences. This paper describes the two systems and their management and usage costs and benefits from the perspective of the villagers themselves.

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Development workers' understanding of subsistence farmers' and herders' reluctance to adopt new technologies has been informed for several decades by a focus on the perception of risks and on patterns of diffusion of innovations. People living on the produce of their own land and herds have been described as "risk-averse" and culturally "conservative," and as preferring not to adopt new technologies and farming or husbandry methods that might negatively impact their ability to make it through the next dry or cold season. We have been living and working with agropas

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Nepalese agropastoralists' confrontations with forces of change in the last generation have altered villagers' abilities to gain access to health services, clean water, and nutrition in Humla District, Nepal. Development efforts and Nepal's recent armed conflict, in particular, introduced novel technologies and ideologies that a subsection of villagers have responded to in a fashion that we did not expect. In this article, based on theories about the diffusion of innovation and risk, we argue that, together, villagers and other change agents have cocreated new contexts of vulnerability in the postconflict setting of rural Nepal, as observed in remote Humla District. Using ArcGIS to represent landscapes of health and health-seeking behavior, we explore the integration of neoliberal health development in this postconflict setting in which medical pluralism, caste, Hinduism, and cultural conservatism all shape decision making. Based on in-depth and long-term research conducted in the region over the past 15 years, we describe the strengths and weaknesses of GIS as a tool for enhancing our understanding of this "health landscape." In Humla, topography is a major determinant of access to healthcare. Our analyses reveal interesting relationships among health, culture, and vulnerability and provide insight into directions for future health interventions in similar contexts elsewhere.