The financialization of remittances in Nepal: Governing through the pedagogy of fear and hope

Paudel, Lekh Nath; Kunz, Rahel Article The financialization of remittances in Nepal: Governing through the pedagogy of fear and hope Finance and Society Provided in Cooperation with: Finance and Society Network (FSN) Suggested Citation: Paudel, Lekh Nath; Kunz, Rahel (2022) : The financialization of remittances in Nepal: Governing through the pedagogy of fear and hope, Finance and Society, ISSN 2059-5999, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Vol. 8, Iss. 2, pp. 169-188, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.7766 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/309414 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The financialization of remittances in Nepal: Governing through the pedagogy of fear and hope Corresponding author: Lekh Nath Paudel, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Université de Lausanne, Géopolis 4797, Lausanne, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]h. https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.7766 Lekh Nath Paudel, Rahel Kunz University of Lausanne, Switzerland Abstract In the last decade, remittances have become connected to financialization, expanding financial markets and deepening financial logics in what has been termed the financialization of remittances (FOR). In Nepal, where remittances are of key importance, this manifests itself in the country’s development strategy through attempts to formalize remittances and promote financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, and financial infrastructure. This article focuses on the most salient manifestation of the FOR in Nepal: a large-scale financial literacy education (FLE) campaign for transnational families. To examine how this FOR-FLE complex works, we bring together insights on emotional governance with those on the creation of (gendered) financial subjectivities. Based on an analysis of FLE pedagogical material and interviews with FLE experts, we suggest that the FOR-FLE complex in Nepal mobilizes a pedagogy of fear and hope to discipline the financial behavior of transnational families, transforming them into selfgoverning miniature financial corporations. We also highlight the gender dimensions of this emotional regime, which creates terror and works to patronize, shame, and stigmatize nonmigrant women of transnational families, rendering them responsible for development, decreasing out-migration, and reducing the economy’s import dependency. Keywords Remittances, financialization, financial literacy education, financial subjectivities, emotional regime, heteronormativity Introduction Every year, tens of thousands of Nepalis leave the country for foreign shores, hoping for better opportunities and a livelihood for themselves and their families back home. They send back billions (NPR) in remittances, Finance and Society 2022, 8(2): 169-88 © The Author(s) 10.2218/finsoc.7766 Article 170 Finance and Society 8(2) which have continued to fuel the Nepali economy for years now. But many of these Nepali workers never make it back home alive – every year, thousands make the journey home in a coffin.1 With the mounting crisis in development financing, remittances came to the attention of the international development community in the late 1990s. Since then, in the context of the ‘global remittance trend’, they have been promoted as a key instrument for development and poverty reduction (Kunz, 2011). In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the context of a stagnation of development aid, remittances have become linked to financial inclusion and poverty reduction agendas in what has been termed the ‘financialization of remittances’ (FOR) (Hudson, 2008; Kunz et al., 2021; Zapata, 2013). The FOR aims to spur development by linking remittances to financial education, services, and instruments. The FOR plays out in context-specific ways. In Nepal, the FOR focuses on three major elements: channelling remittances into formal financial circuits, integrating remittances with the financial inclusion agenda, and promoting the investment of remittances into financial products and entrepreneurship. The most salient manifestation of the FOR that brings these elements together is a large-scale financial literacy education (FLE) campaign aimed at transnational families and non-migrant women. What we term the FOR-FLE complex is a concerted effort aimed at formalizing remittances, promoting entrepreneurship, and strengthening financial infrastructure, particularly in rural Nepal. The FOR-FLE complex is driven by state agencies such as the ministries of Finance and Labor, the National Bank of Nepal – also known as Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) – the National Planning Commission, international financial institutions (such as DFID, World Bank, UNCDF, IFAD), NGOs, fintech companies, and money transfer companies. In this article, we analyze the functioning and governing implications of the FOR-FLE nexus in Nepal. In the global context, the FOR agenda associates positive emotions with remittances and transnational families, such as love, care, and happiness (Kunz et al., 2021). In this article, we focus on the role of emotions in the Nepali FOR-FLE complex. Emphasis has long been placed on the benefits of remittances for development (Dahal, 2014), yet since around 2015, the perils of the ‘remittance economy’ (Seddon et al., 2002) have received more attention. Political and media discourses emphasize family tragedies associated with migration, cases of exploitation and accidents, and the return of thousands of dead migrant workers in coffins. Such emotions of insecurity and fear linked to migrant hardship are also mobilized in the FORFLE complex, pushing transnational families to address the developmental challenges created by the ‘remittance economy’ through novel forms of emotional pressure. To analyze the mobilization of emotions related to FOR and FLE, we draw on insights from the critical literature on financial literacy, financial subjectivities, and emotional governance. We suggest that in the context of Nepal, the FOR-FLE complex draws on what we term a ‘pedagogy of fear and hope’ to govern transnational families. Following Kunz et al. (2021), we conceptualize this FOR-FLE pedagogy as an “emotional regime” (Reddy, 2004: 128), which allows us to focus on the mechanisms of governing through emotions. Through an emotive shift from fear to hope, financial investments and products are introduced as precautionary actions taken against an insecure future. We argue that the FOR-FLE complex normalizes forms of financial behavior and creates the ‘remittance-based family’ as a gendered programmatic collective financial subjectivity. Thereby, the emotional regime blames nonmigrant women for conspicuous consumption and imposes strict financial discipline on them in order to overcome the perils of the ‘remittance economy’. Our analysis focuses on these programmatic subjectivities; the extent to which this emotional regime fails or succeeds, or how it is experienced by the participants, lies beyond the scope of this article.2 Our findings 171 Paudel and Kunz regarding the transnational family as a gendered programmatic collective financial subjectivity complements the disproportionate focus in the literature on the individual financial subject. Our analysis draws on a corpus of key documents published after 2015 by institutions involved in FOR-FLE: the Nepali government; bilateral or multilateral institutions; international and financial institutions; key private financial and remittance transfer companies; and NGOs. In particular, we provide a detailed analysis of three key FOR-FLE initiatives and their pedagogic material.3 To complement the document analysis, we conducted 41 in-depth interviews with experts and trainers involved in preparing and delivering FLE, specifically government officials, representatives of financial institutions, and local researchers.4 The interviews were conducted from 2018-2020, partially in and around Kathmandu, partially online.5 The following section outlines our conceptualization of the FOR-FLE complex, after which we contextualize its emergence in Nepal. In the fourth section, we analyze Nepali FORFLE initiatives before concluding with some broader reflections. Fear and hope in financial literacy education Though contested, the concept of financialization has been widely used to analyze a number of “processes, structures, practices, and outcomes” in the last two decades (Aalbers, 2017: 2; Bernards, 2019; Christophers, 2015). Here we use ‘financialization’ to denote a global phenomenon entailing the growing power and influence of financial actors, motives, practices, and narratives resulting in the transformation of economy and society (Epstein, 2006; French and Kneale, 2009; Pike and Pollard, 2010). Financial logics increasingly shape everyday life through global disciplinary mechanisms and the growing role of debt in financing social reproduction (Rankin, 2013). Financialization is most prominently promoted through FLE and the broader global financial inclusion agenda (Mader, 2018). FLE is both a result and instrument of financialization and has been spreading since the end of the 1990s (Lazarus, 2020). In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and ongoing austerity, FLE has been endorsed globally in the belief that the crisis was caused by a lack of financial literacy and that FLE could prevent future crises by promoting individual and collective financial security. FLE posits that “individual responsibility, planning, and rational risk management” are necessary capabilities for “proper financial conduct” (Maman and Rosenhek, 2019: 12; 2020: 2). Thereby, future uncertainties are constructed as risk and rendered legible, calculable, and manageable. FLE typically takes the form of curricular activities in educational institutions, manuals, pamphlets, workshops, personal coaching, or long-term financial counselling, as well as the mobilizing of media and public exhibitions (Arthur, 2014; Haiven, 2017; Lai, 2017; Morris, 2018). Critics argue that conventional forms of FLE tend to reinforce neoliberal attitudes and ideologies (Haiven, 2017; Lazarus, 2020). They conceptualize FLE as a form of neoliberal governing aimed at transforming cognitive, normative, and behavioral dispositions to shape a selfgoverning financial subject that is disciplined, responsible, and reliable (Lazarus, 2020; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). They also criticize FLE for the “risk shift” (Lazarus, 2020: 395), whereby financial hardship is understood as an “individual responsibility that can be overcome by education, planning, and perseverance” (Haiven, 2017: 349) – a perspective which obscures structural factors that shape financial experiences and well-being. An emerging body of research shows that emotions are a key dimension of FLE (Lai, 2017; Maman and Rosenhek, 2019; Morris, 2018; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). FLE draws on emotionally charged moral terminology and character virtues to attach emotions to financial markets and products and to define “principles of proper financial conduct and 172 Finance and Society 8(2) dispositions” (Maman and Rosenhek, 2019: 6). It creates, and governs through, emotions, based on the assumption that “knowledge is necessary but insufficient. Individuals need the appropriate feelings, desires, and moral intuitions … The spark must come from within (even if it must be put in there by others)” (Arthur, 2018: 438). In this article, we draw on and seek to further develop this literature. Following Ahmed (2004) and D’Aoust (2013; 2014), we understand emotions as relational, performative, and a part of processes of governance. Ahmed defines emotions as “productive as they circulate between individual and collective subjects to create, control, and challenge bodies and social hierarchies” (Ahmed, 2004: 9-10). Further, we conceptualize emotions as socio-cultural phenomena with political functions in the processes of meaning-making, subjectification, and governing (Ahmed, 2004; D’Aoust, 2013; Fierke, 2013). To investigate the ways in which emotions are implicated in governing, we draw on the concept of the ‘emotional regime’, understood as a “set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them” (Reddy, 2004: 128). Emotives refer to speech acts: discursive emotional expressions mobilized for political purposes. Emotives are used to “impart stimuli for behaviour and can as a result be implemented in policies and eventually embedded in institutions” (Ariffin, 2016: 207). Existing studies demonstrate the various context-specific ways in which emotions are mobilized in FLE. As Pettersson and Wettergren (2021: 42) emphasize, “emotions are not attached to financial rationality per se, but the specific feeling rules concerning the orientation and objects of emotions (e.g., trust the market, fear future personal finance misery) are concrete and specific”. In the global context, the FOR mobilizes predominantly positive emotives, such as love, care, and happiness (Kunz et al., 2021). The ‘remittance market’ is thus a site associated with trust, happiness, and desire for financial inclusion, encouraging financial subjects to formalize, save, and invest remittances. In Nepal, the key emotives that the FOR-FLE complex draws on are fear and hope, both of which will be the focus of our analysis in subsequent sections. The broader literature on emotions emphasizes that each emotion has its distinct functioning and politics (Ahmed, 2004; D’Aoust, 2013; Wrangel, 2019). Furthermore, it draws our attention to the dynamic evolution and interaction between emotions in an emotional regime (Ahmed, 2004; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). In her analysis of the complex cultural politics of emotions, Ahmed emphasizes the context-specific ways of experiencing and embodying emotions. Analyzing the political functioning of emotions, she suggests that fear often works “as an ‘affective politics’, which ‘preserves’ only through announcing a threat to life itself” (Ahmed, 2004: 64). The ultimate fear is therefore the fear of our own death or the death of family or community members. This fear can move us closer to loved ones or can create objects and subjects against which we should defend ourselves. This in turn creates and justifies the imperative to make things and people secure. Fear works to secure collectives and the existence of the individual subject is imagined through the collective (Ahmed, 2004: 71). Hope is often considered as the opposite to fear. Instead, fear and hope can be seen as simultaneous and constitutive of each other. Hope does not replace “the primacy of fear” but regulates its imaginative horizon (Wrangel, 2019: 671). It can shape and limit the capacity to envision alternative worlds beyond the fear of insecurities. While fear projects unpleasant lived experience into the future, anticipating hurt or injury, hope creates the imagination of a positive future. Yet, hope can also reinforce fear: having hope renders us anxious, because we desire something that might or might not happen (Ahmed, 2010: 343). One particular political and personal horizon of hope is happiness, an emotion or state-of-being that most people 173 Paudel and Kunz aspire towards. Critics have argued that happiness is a new moral and emotional regime of neoliberal societies that “defines the norms of what is good, desirable, prosperous, and healthy” (Cabanas, 2016: 468). In this way, the hope for happiness reinforces the belief that wealth will bring happiness and becomes a disciplinary technique governing feeling, acting, and being (Ahmed, 2010; Cabanas, 2016). In FLE, through an emotive shift from fear to hope, financial investments and products are introduced as preventive actions taken against an insecure future. Therefore “fear is not rejected, but rather, reoriented to motivate” particular forms of behavior and promote the idea that financial stability is an individual responsibility (Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021: 40). Overall, fear and hope work together as a “biopedagogical tool” to govern bodies and relations between bodies (Wrangel, 2019: 666). Bringing these insights to bear on the FOR-FLE nexus in Nepal, we analyze how what we term the ‘pedagogy of fear and hope’ draws on the productive and dynamic interactions of these two emotives to produce a particular emotional regime.6 Our analysis is also inspired by insights on the gendered nature of emotions. Ahmed argues that it is impossible to “separate images of the good life from the historic privileging of heterosexual conduct” (Ahmed, 2010: 174; Fullagar, 2012). Fear, hope, and happiness are gendered, orienting subjects towards heteronormativity that shapes notions of the ‘good life’ produced through an “affective repertoire of happiness” (Ahmed, 2010: 174). For example, the image of the ‘happy housewife’ who finds happiness in heterosexual marriage and a stable heteronormative family strongly orients behavior in Western societies (Ahmed, 2010: 101) and has been ‘exported’ across the world through development initiatives (Bedford, 2009). The figure of the happy housewife justifies gendered divisions of labor and conceals unhappiness. It is thus crucial to integrate gender into our analysis of the emotional regime established by the pedagogy of fear and hope of the Nepali FOR-FLE complex. The transnational family as a programmatic collective financial subjectivity Various studies analyze the creation of the financial subject as part of financialization processes (Adkins, 2019; Lai, 2017; Loomis, 2018; Maman and Rosenhek, 2019; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021; Weiss, 2020). The financial subject is created as a self-governing, responsible, and calculative financial actor; a ‘reliable debtor’, ‘cautious saver’, ‘selfdisciplined investor,’ savvy ‘risk-manager’, or ‘entrepreneurial’ self. Through participation in financial markets this subject supposedly ensures social reproduction and economic security, coping with life’s uncertainties and realizing their economic aspirations (Aitken, 2015; Langley, 2014; Loomis, 2018; Montgomerie, 2008). This model behavior is instilled in individuals through various technologies of government, most notably through FLE (Arthur, 2014; Clarke, 2015; Maman and Rosenhek, 2020; Marron, 2014; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). In the context of a broader ‘emotional turn’ in the study of finance and society, scholars increasingly challenge the tendency to concentrate only on the rationality of financial subjects, emphasizing instead the key role of emotions in creating financial subjects (Adkins, 2019; Lai, 2017; Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021). Morris (2018: 47) documents the “intuitions, affect and feeling of economic phenomena” that constitute “financialized subjects who understand and feel the material forces of the economy” and behave in prescribed ways. In an attempt to create financially rational self-reliant subjects, emotions are used in FLE to “foster emotional capacities”, motivate, orient, and reward the financial subject (Pettersson and Wettergren, 2021: 41). Recent studies challenge the focus in the literature on the individual, universal financial subject. Scholars have started investigating processes of subjectivation that create “multiple 174 Finance and Society 8(2) forms of financial subjectivities” (Lai, 2017: 922; Lai and Tan, 2015). Kim (2020), for example, demonstrates how members of an online financial community in South Korea were shaped as ‘networked financial subjects’. Other scholars show how FLE mobilizes family relations and targets households to encourage saving and investment, turning the family into a site where financial subjectivities are constructed (Adkins, 2019; Ailon, 2021; Lazarus, 2020; Weiss, 2020; Zaloom, 2018). Feminist scholarship analyzes the ways in which the particular model of the heteronormative family is implicated in processes of financialization and FLE (Adkins, 2019; Ailon, 2021; Allon, 2014; Joseph, 2013; Predmore, 2020). These studies highlight the affective ramifications and gender dimensions of the financialized household. Through financialization, the heteronormative family that relied on a male wage and women’s unpaid work for the social reproduction of labor power becomes a supplier of family capital and safe assets for financial institutions (Adkins, 2019). Economic management and future-oriented financial calculations become new forms of domestic labor and the household becomes a “financial object”: a site of financial interventions that redefine “what ‘women’ are and can be” (Allon, 2014: 13). In this article, we draw on these insights by linking a ‘pedagogy of fear and hope’ to governance of transnational families via FOR-FLE in Nepal. More specifically, we use the concept of ‘programmatic subjectivities’ (Pühl and Schultz, 2001; Kunz and Schwenken, 2014) to conceptualize the heteronormative transnational family as a programmatic collective financial subjectivity. This allows us to distinguish between a model subjectivity and the failure or success of its implementation and lived experience. Thus, programmatic subjectivities do not necessarily correlate in any straightforward way with the embodied identities and experiences of those they target. As Dean (1999: 43) points out, “the forms of identity promoted and presupposed by various practices and programs of government should not be confused with a real subject, subjectivity or subject position”. The financialization of remittances in Nepal The emergence of the FOR-FLE complex in Nepal is situated in broader development trends. The implementation of structural adjustment programs in the 1990s paved the way for more profound financial interventions in Nepal (Rankin, 2004). These interventions removed the poverty lending regulations that ensured limited social protection and provided affordable credit in rural areas through government-owned banks. Under the Rural Financial Markets Development Scheme, development was pursued through microcredit programs with the aim of building rural financial markets (Rankin, 2004). Microfinance was considered a way of alleviating credit supply shortage in rural areas, promoting poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment while extending logics of market rationality to rural areas. Yet the enthusiasm for ‘poverty finance’ faded away when critics documented its multiple limits (Shakya and Rankin, 2008). Critical scholars have shown how financing immediate social reproduction needs through credit, rather than empowering the poor, has often worked to exacerbate existing social hierarchies and women’s dependency in particular (Rankin, 2004; see also Elyachar, 2005). In this context, harnessing remittances for macroeconomic stability and productive investment, particularly in rural areas, became the new development mantra in Nepal (Dahal, 2014). According to this mantra, remittances are expected to reduce poverty and inequality. However, critics have argued that they instead contribute to the formation of a “remittance economy” that is dependent upon migration and remittances (Seddon et al., 2002). Nepal relies on remittances for its foreign currency reserves, which in turn enable it to maintain 175 Paudel and Kunz macroeconomic stability via a positive current account balance, a positive balance of payments, and a steady growth of revenue from import and consumption taxes (Tuladhar et al., 2014). Critics also argue that remittances fuel conspicuous consumption, form an economy dependent on imports, and provoke de-agriculturalization, increased rural-urban migration, and overheating of real-estate markets (Tuladhar et al., 2014). To correct these perils of the ‘remittance economy’, development policy turned towards connecting remittances with the financial inclusion agenda, in what has been termed the FOR. In this context, a large-scale FLE campaign was launched, targeting transnational families in order to harness remittances for development through curtailing consumption, imposing financial discipline and promoting entrepreneurship and the commercialization of agriculture. The FOR and the financial inclusion agenda in Nepal are also associated with a broader shift in political discourse from “New Nepal” to “Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali” (CPN/UML, 2014; Pandey, 2010). The “New Nepal” slogan emerged in the aftermath of the 2006 peace deal, with the post-conflict transition signalling a new start through the constitution-making process and state restructuring (Pandey, 2010). The shift towards “Prosperous Nepal, Happy Nepali” first appeared in the 2014 program of the Nepal Communist Party (Unified Marxist Leninist), then became part of the Fifteenth Five Year Plan and Annual Development Programs of 2018 and thereafter (CPN/UML, 2014; NPC-GON, 2020; 2018). The slogan expresses peace and political stability alongside a drive to build a stronger national economy through economic growth, financial inclusion, and infrastructure development. It was in this context that the migrant coffins from the Gulf countries and southeast Asia started to get serious attention. Several reports about deaths and injuries of Nepali migrant workers started to appear in influential national and international media. The Nepal Labour Migration Report recorded 7,467 deaths of migrant workers for the period of 2008-2019 (Government of Nepal, 2020).7 Political, media, and development discourse started to take up the issue around 2015 (ILO, 2016). This discourse gradually replaced the two-decade long period of pictures and stories of conflict-related deaths that haunted people and created fear. It was at this point that the FOR-FLE initiatives targeting transnational families emerged, explicitly drawing on fear generated by coffins and creating hope for happiness through remittances and financial inclusion. Under the emerging FOR-FLE regime in Nepal, inappropriate financial behavior caused by a lack of financial literacy among rural populations and transnational households has come to be understood as the root cause of a “generational transfer of poverty” now hindering “economic growth and poverty alleviation” (SAMRIDDHI, 2020a: i). This definition of poverty as a behavioral problem allows the development industry to justify behavioral engineering interventions (Berndt, 2015: 567). The FOR-FLE complex is supposed to bridge the gap, in terms of knowledge and practice, between “the supply side and demand side, that is, between formal financial institutions on the one hand, and migrants and their families in the rural areas on the other … to create an enhanced financial ecosystem” (Interview, FP-S July 2020, Zoom). FOR-FLE interventions are geared towards deepening the financial infrastructure in ‘unbanked’ areas and spurring behavioral transformation and entrepreneurship among the rural population (NRB, 2013). The stated objective of FOR-FLE projects is to educate “family members of persons involved in foreign employment on how to receive remittances through secured means, save them and invest productively” (SAMI, 2017: Foreword). As part of this ‘public pedagogy of finance’ (Arthur, 2014), a range of pedagogic materials has been developed. These include formal and informal educational sessions, workshops, guidebooks, manuals, street theatre, songs, audio visual advertisements, and entertainment materials through mass media, stories 176 Finance and Society 8(2) of success and failure, articles in media, radio programs, TV shows, illustrations, and cartoons. As part of the FOR-FLE complex there emerged a group of ‘finance pedagogues’ (FP) (Weiss, 2020), composed of policy makers and financial literacy content producers, master trainers, facilitators and peer leaders. In rural Nepal, FOR-FLE works mostly through workshops, usually involving about 20-30 participants, largely non-migrant female members of transnational families. Typically, NGOs collaborate with local staff to identify participants and manage the trainings. These range from single sessions of about an hour long to weekly workshops lasting 36 weeks. Whereas early FLE initiatives targeted individuals, the approach came under criticism as of 2015 and is now considered insufficient. FPs argue that early FLE was “successful in transferring the knowledge to the participants but failed to result in behavioral transformations” (Interview, FP-K, July 2020, Zoom). The focus was thus shifted to the transnational family, based on two justifications. First, FPs identify conflicts in the family associated with the arrival of remittances as a major problem: when we were in (rural) villages we had a feeling of increasing family conflicts because of the arrival of the remittances in families, for the wife it’s money from her husband, for parents it’s money from their son [sic]. Therefore, we thought family management is a major issue, so we emphasized on family management in financial literacy contents. (Interview, FP-W, July 2020, Zoom) FOR-FLE’s orientation toward the family is thus based on the assumption that remittances are sent to families and not to individuals and that their arrival can trigger conflict in transnational families (Interview, FP-W, K & P July 2020, Zoom). Second, the family is considered to facilitate FLE interventions, as one FP claimed: “the family environment influences implementation of the knowledge and skills people learned, therefore without creating family support it’s not possible to achieve what financial literacy trainings intend to achieve” (Interview, FP-W, September 2020, Kathmandu). This shift also led to the introduction of more collective pedagogies focused on the transnational family, such as family financial planning and counselling, peer-to-peer learning,8 stories focusing on family success and failure, and family visits by the official from cooperatives, financial NGOs, and NGOs (Interview, FP-K, Sep 2020, Kathmandu). According to one FP, family visits and family financial counselling are the most effective ways to educate and transform financial behavior that encourages mutual monitoring and disciplining within the family (Interviews, FP-K & G, July 2020, Zoom). Thus, in the context of FOR-FLE in Nepal, transnational families become both the object and subject of pedagogic interventions. Governing through fear All FOR-FLE manuals and workshops create a similar narrative around fear and hope. They first attach fear to poverty and instil fear of an insecure future and death of family members in transnational families, defined as “a household unit with husband, wife, children and other members” in which at least one member is abroad for work (SAMI, 2017: 19). As the solution, they then mobilize hope of transforming into a prosperous and happy family. This forms an emotional regime that mobilizes family ties and invokes intimacy, fear, trust, sadness, guilt, and happiness to normalize particular forms of financial behavior. FOR-FLE manuals and workshops begin with condemning and stigmatizing poverty as a behavioral problem. This is achieved through making poverty an object of fear by associating it with an insecure future, injuries and death of migrants. The SAMI manual identifies as a major 183 Paudel and Kunz making, yet it also reproduces gendered hierarchies and adds additional social reproduction tasks. Moreover, the FOR-FLE complex reproduces a model of the remittance-based family that relies on male wages in the form of remittances and women’s unpaid work for the social reproduction of the transnational labor force. In the context of Nepal, the programmatic subjectivity of the transnational family takes the form of a small business corporation that strives for financial surplus and growth. Such corporatization of the transnational family legitimizes and facilitates FOR-FLE interventions to expand financial infrastructure to rural areas and constitute a financial ecosystem by linking transnational families with microfinance. It is designed as a correction measure to the ‘remittance economy’ to reverse the problems of de-agriculturalization, deindustrialization, and dependency on imports. This also turns transnational families into a source of capital for financial institutions in rural areas. Adkins (2019) shows that financialization transforms families from a unit that contributes to the social reproduction of the labor force into a supplier of financial flows and assets for financial institutions. In Nepal, ‘remittance-based families’ do both. This programmatic subjectivity also obscures internal power relations and emotional difficulties, portraying the transnational family as an enabler of financial discipline and horizon of hope for happiness. Paradoxically, by acting in prescribed ways, the ‘remittance-based family’ reproduces a regime of accumulation associated with financial insecurity and rising levels of indebtedness. This increasingly exposes transnational families to the risks and uncertainties of financial markets aligned with the imperatives of financialization. It also distracts from the problems associated with financial markets, naturalizes social inequalities, and depoliticizes finance. In addition to forming new hierarchies (consumptive, financial, social), the FOR-FLE complex exacerbates existing ones in so far as it subjects social understandings and practices to financial logics that facilitate everyday financialization. In the end, it reproduces the responsibility of transnational families for poverty reduction and development. Conclusion The financialization of remittances (FOR) in Nepal, embedded in a broader framework of financial inclusion and intended to correct the limitations of the ‘remittance economy’, functions through financial literacy education (FLE) to promote a formal financial ecosystem on the back of remittances. Our analysis in this article highlights the problematic implications of the FOR-FLE complex, which makes transnational families dependent on formal financial institutions, erodes social solidarities, increases exposure of transnational families to financial markets, and diminishes alternative ways of living, framing life through financial markets. This makes transnational families increasingly responsible for development, freeing the state from its role in this domain and silencing criticisms of its failures in social provisioning. Simultaneously, it allows the international community to appear as contributing to development by funding FOR-FLE projects. Our analysis shows that these projects work to entrench market rationality and neoliberal governmentality in rural areas, benefitting financial institutions on the back of remittances and transnational families. The FOR-FLE complex works through an emotional regime that mobilizes a pedagogy of fear and hope associated with appropriate financial behavior. This regime promotes a linear understanding of life and progress through financial inclusion, echoing modernist ‘stages of development’ theories. It also works to decontextualize and depoliticize highly political situations, prescribing technocratic fixes for social problems. Despite its apparent neutrality, the FOR-FLE emotional regime is deeply gendered, targeting non-migrant women of 184 Finance and Society 8(2) transnational families. We highlight the problematic implications of this emotional regime in terms of the patronizing, shaming, and stigmatizing of these women, and the creation of emotional pressure and terror to conform to financial discipline. Psychological interventions play an increasingly important role in intensifying the effect of this emotional regime to deepen the financialization of everyday lives. Thereby, these women are made responsible for managing household finances according to strict discipline; investing remittances and managing debt responsibly; decreasing the out-migration of the male members of their family; and reducing their consumption to curtail the economy’s import dependency. Simultaneously, the problematic increase of women’s indebtedness is obscured. Future research should focus on these highly gendered links between emotions and financialization. These findings constitute an important corrective to the disproportionate focus in the literature on the individual financial subject. We fundamentally question the idea of the individual, rational, universal, gender-neutral financial subject and call for more research into the variety and complexity of financial subjectivation processes and people’s experience of these. Through novel pedagogic techniques, the FOR-FLE regime creates the programmatic collective financial subjectivity of the ‘remittance-based family’. It reproduces and normalizes gendered hierarchies and divisions of labor, serving to increase the workload of non-migrant women. Through FOR-FLE, the role of the family in social reproduction is aligned with the gendered imperatives of financialization, reproducing heteronormativity and creating a model of the ‘remittance-based family’ in which happy housewives manage family finance. In this way, the transnational family plays a key role in financialization processes as both an object and subject of governance. The transformation of the transnational family into a selfgoverning miniature financial corporation facilitates the construction of a financial ecosystem which reconfigures rural finance around market rationalities. This analysis resonates with the literature that shows seemingly neutral FLE to be inherently normative and embedded within the neoliberal agenda (Haiven, 2017; Lazarus, 2020). But our research also shows that this neoliberal agenda takes a particular and ambiguous form in the Nepali context, where it works alongside policies to substitute import dependency, increase internal production, and build a stronger national economy. Moreover, effective though the emotional pedagogies of the FORFLE complex may be, anecdotal evidence shows that they are also unpredictable; they never work out entirely as planned. For example, the failure of various microenterprises indicates that the push to form financial ecosystems in rural Nepal is fragile. A detailed analysis of these limits requires further analysis. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Michael Dorrity for very careful proofreading and Grégoire Rieder for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments, which greatly improved the argument presented here. The article draws on findings from a research project on the financialization of remittances. Funding by the Swiss National Science Foundation is gratefully acknowledged (Grant Number: 10001A_172945). Notes 1. <https://kathmandupost.com/national/2020/02/29/hundreds-of-young-healthy-nepalis-die- sudden-deaths-in-foreign-lands-no-one-knows-what-s-killing-them>. 185 Paudel and Kunz 2. For an analysis of the complex and contradictory ways in which people experience, negotiate, and resist financial subjectivities, see Guermond (2020) and Kunz and Ramirez (2021). 3. Pedagogic materials include guidebooks and financial literacy manuals, such as the Safer Migration Initiative (SAMI, 2017), the Rural Enterprises and Remittance Project (SAMRIDDHI, 2020a; b), and the Nepal Banking Institute Financial Literacy Campaign (Simkhada and Adhikari, 2015). All pedagogic materials and interviews are in Nepali and were translated by Lekh Nath Paudel. 4. Interviews: SAMI (Aug, 2019), (July, 2020), (Sep, 2020); SAMRIDDI (Aug, 2019), (July, 2020); NBI (July, 2020); Ministry of Labor (Aug, 2019); Local officials (July, 2019); NRB (Aug, 2019); National Planning Commission (Aug, 2019); Financial Institutions-Money Transfer Companies and Bank (July, 2019); Authors of manuals (July, 2020); Trainers (July, 2020). 5. We would like to thank our interview partners. All interviews were carried out by Lekh Nath Paudel and have been anonymized for confidentiality. All documents in English and Nepali were coded and analyzed by Lekh Nath Paudel using NVivo software. 6. We draw on Leonardo and Porter’s (2010) ‘pedagogy of fear’ concept, which refers to the role of fear in race literacy teaching. 7. The actual numbers are estimated to be higher because official numbers do not include deaths in India, which is the largest emigration destination. 8. Peer-to-peer learning is a practice promoted in FLE whereby one or two group leaders are identified, trained, and encouraged to educate other participants through weekly peer-to-peer sessions over 36 weeks (SAMRIDDHI, 2020b). 9. <https://www.sami.org.np/psychosocial-support>. 10. <https://kathmandupost.com/money/2020/03/07/in-one-nawalpur-village-women-are-using- remittance-to-start-businesses-and-prevent-their-husbands-from-migrating-again>. 11. <https://thahakhabar.com/news/118516/>. 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