Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: Promises, project life cycles, and precarities (original) (raw)
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Framing hydropower as green energy: assessing drivers, risks and tensions in the Eastern Himalayas
The culturally and ecologically diverse region of the Eastern Himalayas is the target of ambitious hydropower development plans. Policy discourses at national and international levels position this development as synergistically positive: it combines the production of clean energy to fuel economic growth at regional and national levels with initiatives to lift poor mountain communities out of poverty. Different from hydropower development in the 20th century in which development agencies and banks were important players, contemporary initiatives importantly rely on the involvement of private actors, with a prominent role of the private finance sector. This implies that hydropower development is not only financially viable but also understood as highly profitable. This paper examines the new development of hydropower in the Eastern Himalayas of Nepal and India. It questions its framing as green energy, interrogates its links with climate change, and examines its potential for investment and capital accumulation. To do this, we also review the evidence on the extent to which its construction and operation may modify existing hydrogeological processes and ecosystems, as well as its impacts on the livelihoods of diverse groups of people that depend on these. The paper concludes that hydropower development in the region is characterized by inherent contentions and uncertainties, refuting the idea that dams constitute development projects whose impacts can be simply predicted, controlled and mitigated. Indeed, in a highly complex geological, ecological, cultural and political context that is widely regarded to be especially vulnerable to the effects of climate change, hydropower as a development strategy makes for a toxic cocktail.
Geological Surprises: State Rationality and Himalayan Hydropower in India
Roadsides: https://roadsides.roadworkasia.com/ejournal/, 2019
This paper discusses the entangled temporalities of geological science and infrastructure in India, focusing in particular on “geological surprises”, that is, the ways in which the “young” Himalayan terrain interferes in state plans of dam construction. More specifically, this paper argues for a deeper engagement with colonial histories of science and expertise, specifically the discipline of geology in India.
Hydropower, Anti-Politics, and the Opening of New Political Spaces in the Eastern Himalayas
— Hydropower has lately been advocated by a multi-scalar public–private policy nexus for marrying objectives of green growth and climate mitigation. Such discursive constructions are reminiscent of a consensual development politics, which contradicts and overlooks long-standing socio-environmental controversies surrounding large dams. Here we argue that anti-political hydropower governance also risks fueling inherent societal antagonisms, with unexpected outcomes. Drawing on qualitative empirical research in Sikkim, Northeast India, we illustrate how attempts by state and private actors to restrict contestation of hydropower projects were countered with unprecedented voice and agency of affected communities, indicating nascent processes of politicization and democratization " from below " .
Hydropower in the Himalayan Hazardscape: Strategic Ignorance and the Production of Unequal Risk
Water, 2019
Rapidly expanding hydropower development in areas prone to geological and hydro-climatic hazards poses multiple environmental and technological risks. Yet, so far these have received scant attention in hydropower planning processes, and even in the campaigns of most citizen initiatives contesting these dams. Based on qualitative empirical research in Northeast India, this paper explores the reasons why dam safety and hazard potential are often marginal topics in hydropower governance and its contestation. Using a political ecology framework analyzing the production of unequal risks, I argue that a blind-eye to environmental risks facilitates the appropriation of economic benefits by powerful interest groups, while increasing the hazardousness of hydropower infrastructure, accelerating processes of social marginalization. More specifically, this paper brings into analytical focus the role of strategic ignorance and manufactured uncertainty in the production of risk, and explores the challenges and opportunities such knowledge politics create for public resistance against hazardous technologies. I posit that influencing the production of knowledge about risk can create a fertile terrain for contesting hazardous hydropower projects, and for promoting alternative popular conceptions of risk. These findings contribute to an emerging body of research about the implications of hydropower expansionism in the Himalayan hazardscape.
Economic Anthropology, 2016
This article interrogates Nepal’s ongoing and intensifying attempt to become a “hydropower nation” by focusing ethnographic attention on new kinds of subjectivity, identity, and agency emerging at the frontiers of hydropower development in the Upper Trishuli and Upper Tamakoshi watersheds of central Nepal. Drawing on 13 months of field study and ethnographic observation, this article makes a series of arguments about the coevolutionary relationship between the production of an imagined hydropower future and the diverse positions of Nepali citizens living and working along this expanding hydropower frontier. Thematically, my analysis focuses on (a) the scale and velocity of hydropower development in Nepal, (b) the polyvalent role of the hydropower sector within Nepal’s recent history of political volatility and vacuums of local governance, (c) an increasingly complex politics of recognition based on “project-affected” identities, and (d) emerging trends of financialization and mobilization sparked by the proliferation of shareholder-based models of benefit sharing that affect the discourse on risk sharing and stakeholder rights in crucial ways. Building on other critical scholarship on Himalayan hydropower development, this article seeks to disaggregate the technical and discursive abstractions of the Nepalese hydroscape by providing an ethnographic account of the micropolitics and praxis that shape the lived experience of hydropower development in Nepal. Keywords Energy Politics; Finance; Corporate Social Responsibility; State Making; Himalayan Studies
Speculation and Seismicity: Reconfiguring the Hydropower Future in Post-Earthquake Nepal
Water, Technology, and the Nation-State. Menga, F. and Swyngedouw, E. (Eds.). London: Routledge, 2018
In Nepal, the imagined hydropower future pervades the uncertain present. This paper examines the ways that 2015 Nepal earthquake prompted a reconfiguration of this imagined future and its economy of anticipation (Adams et al., 2009; Cross, 2015), focusing on the increasing importance of 'capitalist technologies of imagination' (Bear, 2015) used to encourage and coordinate practices of speculation. Focusing on the competing crisis narratives that emerged within the hydropower sector in the aftermath of the disaster, I describe the ways that different kinds of 'resource affect' (Weszkalnys, 2016) have helped shape both public discourse and official policies designed to secure the hydropower future. Ultimately, I argue that concerns about seismic risk in the Nepalese Himalaya have been eclipsed by the logics of finance capital, a resurgence of speculative practices, nationalist rhetoric focused on energy sovereignty, and renewed commitments to the dream of becoming a 'hydropower nation.' For more information and excerpts from this edited volume see: https://www.academia.edu/36679771/Menga\_F.\_and\_Swyngedouw\_E.\_Eds\_.\_Water\_Technology\_and\_the\_Nation-State\_Routledge\_Earthscan\_2018\_
Contested Modernities: Place, Subjectivity, and Himalayan Dam Infrastructures
Trans-Himalayan Borderlands, 2017
The Himalaya are a final frontier for much of the world's dam infrastructure. When set within seemingly remote border areas, these projects intersect with sociocultural landscapes in ways that reveal nuance in how the development agenda is accepted, adapted, resisted, or rejected. Focusing on a contested dam built along the Ganges-a river sacred to Hindus-in the Indian Himalaya, this chapter explores a diversity of responses to hydroelectric development alongside the mixed evaluations that interlocutors expressed about the projects of modernization and modernity. Analyzing these complexities, the chapter considers if the selective concession to dams in the Himalaya enable a better appreciation of the contested modernities that may be evident in the mountains that serve as Asia's 'water tower.'
2021
Developing run-of-the-river (ROR) hydropower can pose a sustainability paradox. The paradox can occur when countries prioritize hydropower development to achieve national-level sustainable development targets while failing to include project-affected communities in planning processes. This research developed a comparative study examining the ways social and political relations were articulated between hydropower companies and project-affected communities across 12 ROR hydropower sites in the Gandaki River basin of Nepal. The study details how the introduction of hydropower can feasibly offer local communities coveted benefits such as increased water and electricity access and availability. Outcomes of ROR hydropower development, however, were not uniform across study sites and spatially uneven development was manifest. Consequently, many of Nepal's ROR hydropower projects exacerbate social and political inequalities in Nepal's mountain river basins, which in turn fuel hydropower driven conflicts. Drawing on theories of global change, energy justice, and political ecology, this research highlights opportunities currently being neglected in Nepal to bring local communities into processes linked to national sustainable development goals and targets and to address injustices embedded in the development of ROR hydropower resources.
2014
Himalayan region is called the 'water tower of Asia'. This 'water tower' is now being harnessed into 'power tower' by many Himalayan countries (China, India, Nepal, Bhutan etc.) in the form of small and large hydropower projects. Himachal Pradesh, located in this region is known as 'power state' of India. The state has developed well framed policies and guidelines for growth of hydropower sector in the state. It has emerged as role model for identification, allotment and harnessing of small hydropower projects not only in India but in the whole Himalayan region. However, in the recent past, the growth of small hydropower projects is not as impressive as predicted. Local natural resources, ecology and livelihood of the local people are being destroyed in the garb of local development and false promises of employment. Benefits of this so called golden harvest are not being transferred to native people as envisaged. This article presents small hydropower development in a global, Indian and Himachal Pradesh perspective. It expresses in detail the current status, policy guidelines, challenges, initiatives taken by state, future scope and suggestions for smooth development of small hydropower projects in this beautiful, hydro rich hilly state of India. It is concluded that framing of policies favoring sustainable development and their effective implementation at grass-root level (involving all stakeholders) can only set the ball rolling for desired pace of small hydropower development in the state. Bringing of small hydropower projects in the ambit of environmental clearance process has also been advocated.