Contesting the ‘greening’ of hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon

The 21st century has witnessed a resurgence of hydropower projects across the globe, with the energy source an integral part of contemporary sustainable energy transitions. Yet, the environmentalist credentials of hydropower remain contested by anti-dam movements. This paper details the cases of the Belo Monte and São Luiz do Tapajós dams in the Brazilian Amazon to explore how the development, submission and acceptance of an Environmental Impact Assessment provides a key site in the contestation of hydroelectric projects. Whilst the provision of this document – and the wider environmental licensing process – represents a key component in the asserted ‘green-ness’ of hydropower, opposition groups extend the scope of analysis to include indirect and cumulative impacts that remain understudied in official assessments. This paper analyses interviews and questionnaires with and documents provided by national and international civil society organisations to trace this process of challenge and critique. It details how civil society actors forward alternative assessments of the impacts of the projects studied, uncovering and illuminating overlooked and understudied externalities of hydropower in the Brazilian Amazon. An analysis of this process not only demonstrates that the ‘green’ credentials of hydropower remain far from assured but also highlights how anti-dam actors advance new ‘sustainabilities’ to discredit the terrain upon which such credentials are set.     

Towards relational geometries of public participation and hydropower governance in the Lower Mekong River Basin

The Lao People's Democratic Republic's aspirations to become the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia has involved plans for a cascade of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the transboundary Mekong River. This has triggered the unprecedented undertaking of public stakeholder consultations under the Mekong River Commission's Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). This paper focuses on PNPCA stakeholder consultations organized in Thailand and Cambodia, and seeks to understand how these stakeholder consultations, despite their merits in information sharing, have come to be criticized by civil society as a ‘rubber stamp’ for ‘participation’ in Lao hydropower development. Building upon the literature on public participation in development, critical hydropolitics, and stakeholder engagement in Mekong water governance, we seek to conceptualize a critical politics of public participation by adopting a relational approach towards identifying the key challenges relating to participation. We suggest that a relational approach must consider how the interrelations between the multiple formal and informal tracks of stakeholder engagement shape one another and overall opportunities for participation, and how power relations within these spaces impact on perceptions towards public participation. Distrust towards state-organized participatory spaces can be traced from the state-organized participatory spaces to another key interrelation: the power relations between state and nonstate actors in the multi-scalar political spaces that extend beyond participatory spaces. This paper examines how anti-participatory forces pose a challenge to the emergence of both state and nonstate participatory spaces, providing additional insights into the state-society dynamics that influence environmental outcomes around large-scale infrastructural development.     

Hydropolis: Reinterpreting the polis in water politics

The construction of a large dam is often a contested and controversial matter. Delicate aspects related to the dam construction business such as the resettlement of peoples, environmental impact and financial costs, can trigger popular discontent and hinder the realisation of a particular project. By advancing the notion of the hydropolis, a reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt (1958) definition of the polis, this paper will explore how ruling elites can manipulate the public opinion to politically construct a large dam as a foreign policy matter. This, it will be argued, serves to conceal the negative consequences of a dam so that issues related to its social and environmental impact are removed from the national political debate. Specifically, the case of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in Ethiopia will be used to illustrate how a large dam can become a geopolitical object grounded on the friend/enemy distinction, in the context of the longstanding geopolitical tensions in the Nile River Basin.     

非政府组织如何影响中国在柬埔寨投资项目？——基于地缘社会的解析

随着中国对外交流的日益频繁和“一带一路”倡议对“民心相通”的强调,针对地缘社会中各种行为体的研究需求愈发迫切。柬埔寨被认为是“一带一路”国际合作的新样板,但中国在此的项目也并非一帆风顺,地缘社会因素在其中发挥着重要作用,而非政府组织是当地地缘社会中的一个关键行为体和核心要素。因此,本文以柬埔寨的非政府组织为例,基于实地调研获取的观察和访谈以及二手文献资料和数据,考察中国在柬埔寨的柴阿润水电站项目中当地非政府组织的影响及其得以形成的机制因素。解析地缘社会环境可以帮助识别中国行为体在“走出去”过程中可能面临的社会风险因素,推动海外项目在当地社会顺利落地和融入。     

Furthering Mekong ontologies: On China and local uncertainties

In response to Hirsch's “The Shifting Regional Geopolitics of Mekong Dams”, this commentary focuses on two local imaginings of the Mekong River in Cambodia and Vietnam. First, we highlight the role of China in reimagining ownership over mainland Southeast Asia's portion of the river. Second, we consider some of the ways in which the river creates uncertainty over citizenship among Cambodians and Vietnamese living on the river in Vietnam. Our goal in adding these two dimensions to Hirsch's conceptualization is to encourage narratives of the river from the perspective of those living there.     

Archaeology, Development and Conflict: A Case Study from the African Continent

Apart from wars, other contexts of social conflict have recently become a setting in which archaeologists are faced with acute, sometimes armed, violence. On the African continent, a region often overlooked in discussions of “archaeology in conflict”, rapid economic development has led to several such scenes. The paper discusses a particularly poignant example from the Middle Nile valley in Sudan, where large dam projects have been met with various levels of opposition by affected populations. Local communities opposing the construction of further planned dams on the Nile are increasingly stressing ‘cultural survival’ and fear of ‘developmental genocide’ as two of their major motivations for fighting these projects. Assuming a close link between the developer and archaeological salvage missions, affected people have started to use the expulsion of salvage teams from their territory as a strategy of resistance—posing an ethical dilemma for the archaeologists who struggle to find a position in the increasingly violent controversies accompanying these contested development projects.     

大湄公河次区域旅游合作开发研究

大湄公河次区域经济合作区由中国云南省、缅甸、老挝、泰国、柬埔寨、越南等六个国家和地区组成。次区域内自然和人文旅游资源丰富,互补性强,并有一条天然大通道——湄公河将次区域的各个国家和地区联系起来,具有合作发展旅游的优越条件。本文在分析了次区域各方面的条件后认为,将投资少、见效快的旅游合作开发置于次区域经济合作的优先地位是最佳选择;同时对次区域旅游合作开发提出了具体的措施和建议。     

Scale frames and counter-scale frames: constructing the problem of environmental injustice

The concept of environmental injustice raises difficult questions about on how best to measure and address environmental inequities across space, and environmental justice politics are permeated by considerable debate over the nature and spatial extent of both problem and possible solutions. This paper theorizes the politics of environmental justice as a politics of scale in order to explore how environmental justice activists respond to the scalar ambiguity inherent in the political concept of environmental justice. With a case study of a controversy over a proposed polyvinylchloride production facility in rural Convent, Louisiana, I develop the concept of scale frames and counter-scale frames as strategic discursive representations of a social grievance that do the work of naming, blaming, and claiming, with meaningful reference to particular geographic scales. The significance of scale is expressed alternatively within these frames as an analytical spatial category, as scales of regulation, as territorial framework(s) for cultural legitimacy, and as a means of inclusion, exclusion and legitimation.     

Dams,Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal-political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when “under the radar”. These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin.     

Cultural cumulative effects: Communicating energy extraction's true costs

Residents of northeastern British Columbia's Peace River region concurrently confront intensifying oil/gas drilling, reinvigorated coal mining and the construction of a third massive hydroelectric dam. After years of approaching industrial impacts as temporally and spatially isolatable, calls to acknowledge cumulative ecological effects are finally being heard. Yet the sociocultural disruptions that accompany biophysical alterations are equally essential components of a comprehensive cumulative effects agenda. This article considers how frameworks for comprehending the consequences of landscape‐altering, life‐changing projects could be expanded to address both the complex realities of ecological degradation and the entangled cultural and political transformations that contour local communities and lives. Ultimately, the resource extraction experiences at the forefront of regional residents’ minds must be recognized as key determinants of forthcoming socio‐natural worlds, as they arise and aggregate out of countless culturally constituted and politically mediated decisions to embrace, accept or oppose extractive schemes.     

Interpreting Industry's Impacts: Micropolitical Ecologies of Divergent Community Responses

Where governments have failed to protect their citizens from the environmental and social impacts of industrial development, social movements have often arisen in response. However, other community members may defend — sometimes violently — the same corporations that are targeted by their peers. The contributions to this cluster explore some of the ways in which communities disagree about how to respond to the ecological impacts of industry, their reactions inflected by differential concerns about economics, landscapes, indigenous rights and human health. The three studies illustrate the heterogeneity that communities display in their interpretations of, and responses to, industrial development, and demonstrate how this diversity informs, in crucial ways, grassroots activism against the development, or acceptance of it. In particular, this cluster examines how community‐scale actions, and the interpretations of industry's impacts upon which these actions are based, are contested through multiple discourses centred around community identities and boundaries.     

Water,Geopolitics, and Economic Development in the Conceptualization of a Region

Two U.S.-based geographers outline three dimensions (geopolitical, economical, and biophysical) used to define the basin of the Mekong River as a region, which reveal multi-scalar water governance policies and discourses that lie at the core of current challenges and tensions within the basin. Drawing on their extensive knowledge and fieldwork, the authors demonstrate that processes integral to the framing of the Mekong as a region of economic integration and international cooperation (water resource development through construction of large dams) conflict sharply with the functioning of the Mekong as a region of highly connected biophysical processes. The approach utilized in the paper can be applied to the study of other transboundary river-basin regions in Eurasia and elsewhere facing similar contradictions among the geopolitical, economic, and biophysical dimensions used to define them. By focusing on a region as constructed simultaneously through multiple social and biophysical processes, the authors contribute to current debates within geography and related fields on the nature of regions.     

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King streets prompts us to think about place naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice, demonstrating the fundamental role that geography plays in constituting and structuring the processes of discrimination or equality.     

The Political Economy of the Three Gorges Project

This paper examines the debates over the decision to build the Three Gorges Dam, the subsequent flows of income to the firms involved in its construction, and the continuing implications of the dam for the Chinese space economy. The paper makes and justifies three claims. First, the construction project has been responsible for both dispossession and the formation of capital (primitive accumulation). But it is too simple to interpret the project as merely the face of modernity or development: proponents were reflecting traditional attitudes to bureaucracy and environmental management, whereas opponents sought liberalisation, marketisation, and opening up. It turns out that the concept of modernity, as a western programme introduced into China after the formation of the People's Republic, is of remarkably little value in understanding the construction of this dam. Secondly, the decision to build the dam reflects both structure and happenstance – particular political events and individuals were critical. Notably, the project shows few signs of having come into being to absorb over‐accumulated capital: mega‐projects like this do not have to satisfy any capitalist logic. Finally, I emphasise that such huge projects have long run effects on the structure of power in China – indeed, events at Three Gorges underpinned much of the later debate and struggle over dams on the Mekong, Salween, and Changjiang above Three Gorges.     

Community Archaeology from Below: a Response to Tully

Abstract

The Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, set up in 1996 as an experiment in 'democratic archaeology', was shaken by a major internal crisis between November 2007 and July 2008. An attempt by a small group of local people to establish top-down control over the project was defeated by a political mobilisation of the project's mass base of volunteer archaeologists and community activists. This article, by a leading protagonist, analyses the crisis and comes to some radical conclusions about the nature of community archaeology, democratic organisation, and the way in which political power is sometimes contested.     

The Key Role of Water Resources Management in Ecological Restoration in Western China

The interactions of nature and society are intimately reflected in the degradation of the vast, yet diverse, landscapes and ecosystems of arid western China. The development of agriculture, especially irrigation, has altered rivers, soils and ecosystems so much that major ecological rehabilitation and restoration efforts have been needed since 1950. The catchments of the Tarim River in southern Xinjiang (the Tarim Basin) and of the Black River (Hei He) in Gansu Province and western Inner Mongolia provide examples of the benefits, difficulties and conflicts involved in dryland water management. In the early stages of the human development of these catchments, agriculture depending on irrigation using water from these inland rivers was encouraged. The over‐exploitation of these water resources led to such ecological problems as desiccation of lakes, drying out of rivers, degradation of soils and vegetation and lowering of groundwater levels, with consequent environmental and economic impacts. Since 1990 several high‐cost, national projects to re‐establish ecosystems have been initiated. Water is now released from dams in the headwaters of the rivers in order to restore water flows to the dried out lake basins. Such schemes have inevitably led to social problems and difficulties for the people who depended on the water from the dams for local irrigation. The contrasts in adjustments and attitudes over the use of water for agriculture and other economic activities, as opposed to schemes of restoration of ecosystems and ecological engineering, stem largely from two issues; inconsistent provision of information from the scientific community, and differing ideologies, namely environmental protection versus economic development.     

The politics of hydropower: developing the Mekong

With renewed economic interest in the Southeast Asian region following the `peace dividend' of the early 1990s, numerous hydrodevelopment plans have been initiated in the Mekong basin. The river-as-resource, in a glibly bioregional metaphor, has been transformed from a Cold War `front line' into a `corridor of commerce', drawing six riparian states together in the pursuit of sustainable development through economic and infrastructural integration and cooperation, promoted by multi- and bilateral donors and lending institutions. Through a brief examination of the discursive framing of Mekong hydrodevelopment, this paper uncovers some of the implications of an emerging regional geopolitical imagination centred on the naturalising metaphor of the watershed. Through a discussion of the increasing involvement of private capital, and the politicisation of resource use, the implications of hydrodevelopment for Laos, an upstream state currently undergoing major hydrodevelopment, and Cambodia, a downstream state, are explored.     

Dynamiques hydrogéomorphologiques historiques et actuelles d'une rivière perturbée par les activités de la drave et analyse des impacts d'un démantèlement de barrage

In Quebec, the fluvial dynamics of the Escoumins River have been disturbed by the forestry industry for over a century. Most specifically, a dam was built near the mouth of the river in 1846 and dismantled in 2013. These disturbances had significant repercussions on the equilibrium of the river and Atlantic salmon habitat. This study therefore proposes to characterize the fluvial dynamics of the Escoumins River and to analyze the impacts of the dam dismantling from the perspective of restoring hydrogeomorphological processes and improving Atlantic salmon habitat. The results suggest that the trajectory of the river evolved differently depending on the fluvial style and the grain size composition of each of its homogeneous segments. However, log drive activities in river and dam removal appear to have been the most important controlling factors on the evolution of the stream trajectory. The dismantling notably allowed the restoration of hydrogeomorphological processes and the free movement of salmonids. A better procedure for dam removal and monitoring should be put in place in Canada to encourage this practice.     

Ontological politics of hydrosocial territories in the Salween River basin,Myanmar/Burma

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations.