Canal Spawn Dams? Exploring the Filiation of Hydraulic Infrastructure (original) (raw)
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Canals Spawn Dams? Exploring the Filiation of Hydraulic Infrastructure
Environment and History, 2010
This article studies the aetiology underlying water management by exploring the social hermeneutics that determined its construction. It details how science, technology and political relations construct each other mutually, both producing and harnessing the scientific discourse on the environment. Supply management continues to prevail, in spite of contradictory claims, through the filiation process linking successive generations of water infrastructure. The case study of the Neste Canal inducing the construction of the Charlas Dam, allows the identification of three types of mechanisms participating in the construction of water deficits that now lead both proponents and opponents of dam construction to harness the environmental discourse. The first lies in the social construction of water science and technology. The second lies in the evolution of power relations among the various actors. The third lies in the insertion of the 'expert' within these power relations.
Reflections: Contested Epistemologies on Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development
Water, 2019
The contributions to the Special Issue on Contested Knowledges: Water Conflicts on Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development have looked at the politics of contested knowledge as manifested in the conceptualization, design, development, implementation and governance of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects in various parts of the world. The contributing authors have amply demonstrated that the mega-hydraulic developments all over the world involve profound socio-technical, ecological and territorial transformations. The contributions have also abundantly shown how multiple knowledge claims are constructed using different grounds for claiming the truth about water design, development and implementation, and how both dominant and 'local', 'vernacular', or 'indigenous' knowledge frameworks underlying (or disputing) hydraulic projects and water control regimes, are not neutral nor 'independent', but culturally and politically laden and historically produced-and often, co-created. In this concluding chapter we aim to give an overview and also briefly discuss and summarize the main findings of the contributions addressing the core question: Which knowledge regimes and claims on mega-hydraulic projects are encountered, and how are they shaped, validated, negotiated and contested in concrete contexts? For that, the authors have focused also on the issue of whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is downplayed in water development conflict situations, and how different epistemic communities and cultural-political identities (including class, ethnic, gender or professional forms of identification) have shaped the practices of design, planning and construction of dams and mega-hydraulic projects. They also scrutinized how these epistemic communities interactively shape norms, rules, beliefs and values about water problems and solutions, including notions of justice, citizenship and progress that subsequently are to become embedded in material artefacts. The introductory article has laid out the theoretical and conceptual groundwork for examining the following issues, for instance: The notions of the dark legend of ungovernance; hydromodernity and modernizing paradigms; the depersonalization by objectifying and universalist water governance models and how they construct 'otherness' and manufacture ignorance; the issue of governmentality, power, epistemological contestations and subjugated water knowledges; the questions of constructing 'risk', commensurating values and (mis)calculating societal values; the contested reconfiguration of hydrosocial territories; the problem of reifying local and indigenous water ontologies and epistemologies; the multiple 'modes of power and response'; and multi-scalar mobilizations and the co-production of alternative knowledges. For conceptual elaborations we refer to this editorial paper [1].
Contested Knowledges: Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development
Water, 2019
Locally and globally, mega-hydraulic projects have become deeply controversial. Recently, despite widespread critique, they have regained a new impetus worldwide. The development and operation of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects are manifestations of contested knowledge regimes. In this special issue we present, analyze and critically engage with situations where multiple knowledge regimes interact and conflict with each other, and where different grounds for claiming the truth are used to construct hydrosocial realities. In this introductory paper, we outline the conceptual groundwork. We discuss 'the dark legend of UnGovernance' as an epistemological mainstay underlying the mega-hydraulic knowledge regimes, involving a deep, often subconscious, neglect of the multiplicity of hydrosocial territories and water cultures. Accordingly, modernist epistemic regimes tend to subjugate other knowledge systems and dichotomize 'civilized Self' versus 'backward Other'; they depend upon depersonalized planning models that manufacture ignorance. Romanticizing and reifying the 'othered' hydrosocial territories and vernacular/indigenous knowledge, however, may pose a serious danger to dam-affected communities. Instead, we show how multiple forms of power challenge mega-hydraulic rationality thereby repoliticizing large dam regimes. This happens often through complex, multi-actor, multi-scalar coalitions that make that knowledge is co-created in informal arenas and battlefields.
Water, 2019
Just as in other parts of Spain, the Guadalhorce Valley, Málaga, has a long history of policies based on 'hydraulic utopianism' (regenerationist and Franco-ist), bent on 'reorganizing' political, geographic, and human nature. Residents of the neighboring sub-basin, the Río Grande valley, have seen how these policies, designed to transfer rural water to modern urban centers, have turned the Guadalhorce hydrosocial territory into a 'hydraulic dystopia'. In this article, we examine how Río Grande valley residents mobilized to maintain control over the development and use of their resources, livelihoods, and knowledge systems, when modernist-urbanist policies planned to take their water from a major dam on the Río Grande. Interviewing actors at different scales we examined how this anti-dam movement organized massively in a creative, multi-actor, and multi-scale network. Our results also show that this unified, successful fight against the 'common enemy', the mega-hydraulic construction, has become more complex, as threats crop up not only from the 'city over there' but also from 'internal' hydro-territorial transformations. These sprout from policies to modernize traditional irrigation systems, supposedly to 'save water', but critical voices assume that it is all about passing on the 'surplus' to Málaga city, or using that water to expand agribusiness. We conclude that the challenge lies in critically integrating multiple forms of knowledge, stakeholders, and scales to both defend collective water management and creatively construct anti-hegemonic alternatives.
Contested water, contested development: unpacking the hydro-social cycle of the Ñuble River, Chile
The way that water is entangled with broader social relations has become a prominent concern in political ecology, geography and beyond. Employing the concept of the hydro-social cycle highlights how water is produced by, and simultaneously constitutes, social and power relations. Applying and expanding the hydro-social cycle as an analytical lens, this paper explores the contestation of different discourses of water. Looking at the conflict over the construction of a proposed dam in Chile, we examine different meanings given to water to understand how these produce uneven power relations with material and symbolic implications. By teasing out the workings and contestations of this conflict as a hydro-social cycle, we aim to highlight the diverse range of elements enlisted in it beyond water, to expose its complexity and to search for more just and inclusive alternatives.
Dam construction in Francoist Spain in the 1950s and 1960s: Negotiating the future and the past
Sustainable Development, 2019
In the 1950s and 1960s, dams were crucial to governmental campaigns for development, progress, and modernity in many world regions. This article focuses on the local aspects of a particular development scheme, namely, the construction of the Mequinenza Dam in Spain (1955-1964). This case study shows that dams were contested on a local level from the beginning, even within authoritarian contexts like Francoist Spain. It offers a closer look at processes of transformation and contestation in connection with the construction of dams, focusing on the actors, their points of view and arguments. It shows that the cleavages between interest groups that were later dichotomously labeled as strong supporters or opponents of the ideas connected to the dam construction were complex and shifted over time. These findings are relevant today because they show how the notion of development through dam building was controversial per se and challenged from the beginning.
Hydraulic Order and the Politics of the Governed: The Baba Dam in Coastal Ecuador
Water, 2019
Mega-dams are commonly designed, constructed, and implemented under governors' rule and technocrats' knowledge. Such hydraulic infrastructures are characteristically presented as if based on monolithic technical consensus and unidirectional engineering. However, those who are affected by these water interventions, and eventually governed by the changes brought by them, often dispute the forms of knowledge, norms, morals, and operation and use rules embedded in mega-hydraulic engineers' designs. Protests may also deeply influence the design and development of the technological artifacts. By using approaches related to the Social Construction of Technology and Partha Chatterjee's politics of the governed, this article shows (i) how protests against the Baba dam in coastal Ecuador greatly influenced the dam's designs, protecting communities' lands from being flooded; and (ii) how, at the same time, techno-political decision-makers deployed hydraulic design as a dividing rule, turning potentially affected communities against each other. We conclude that megadam designs are shaped by the power interplay among governors and governed, with the latter being internally differentiated. By critically analyzing the role of technology development-materializing changing 'political context and relationships'-we show how contested and adapted dam design may favor some stakeholders while simultaneously affecting others and weakening united dam-resistance movements.
The Agency of Water and the Canal du Midi
University of California Press eBooks, 2021
Water is an underestimated tool of power. Its useful properties-what I would call agential properties-are so crucial to human life that hydraulic infrastructures can shape social relations and mediate power (Cronon 1992, 207-52; Lansing 1991). Water is used to power mills, carry boats, nourish animals, irrigate fields, take away refuse, and wash laundry. Water is not only necessary for the nourishment of living things, but it acts independently of human will in ways that can affect social possibilities. It flows and floods, evading capture and overcoming boundaries by flowing over and around them; or it can collect in low-lying areas, be tapped with wells, or disappear into the sand. Water's physical properties can be made to serve human communities through engineering, enhancing the agency of individuals or the powers of political regimes, but water can also be a trickster, defying or eluding human control. Both the powers of water and the difficulties in governing them are the reasons why hydraulic engineering can be a tool of power, or, more specifically, a legitimating means of impersonal rule. The importance of water for public administration was made obvious in eventeenth-century France when the state authorized the construction of a canal through Languedoc-what would come to be called the Canal du Midi. The king, Louis XIV, indemnified land for the project, taking it away from local nobles, and the canal itself shifted the form of life around it, eroding traditional relations of power. It changed transport, manufacture, the location of mills, the movement of mail, and what people did with their laundry, in mundane ways altering the lives of people through the impersonal exercise of territorial governance. In the roughly twenty years between 1663 and 1684, this navigational canal of 240 kilometers length and 50 locks was cut across Languedoc just north of the
Water Alternatives, 2017
There is a normative consensus that science should contribute to decision-making in environmental policy, given that science provides a means of understanding natural systems, human impacts upon them, and the consequences of those impacts for human systems. Despite this general agreement, however, the means through which science is transmitted into policy is contested. This paper envisions several of the competing characterisations of the science-policy interface as a continuum with the endpoints of 'fortress science' and 'co-production', and applies this continuum in an empirical analysis of the transboundary expert community promoting a 'new water culture' on the Iberian Peninsula. In engaging directly with members of this community, the paper finds that these characterisations are better seen as strategies among which scientists and their communities may choose and over which they may disagree. These trade-offs and disagreements in turn have implications f...