Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Return of Mega-HydraulicsHydropower and other mega-hydraulic projects have long been a deeply controversial issue, generating intense local, national and transnational disputes among proponents and opponents
Water Resources Management Group, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation (CEDLA), University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 33, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands
We will argue that large dam and mega-hydraulic knowledge schemes form the core of crucial power and knowledge encounters because they represent ‘universalized’ solutions that sideline many alternative arrangements
Summary
Hydropower and other mega-hydraulic projects have long been a deeply controversial issue, generating intense local, national and transnational disputes among proponents and opponents. 2) conceptualize the hydro-social territory notion as “the contested imaginary and socioenvironmental materialization of a spatially bound multi-scalar network in which humans, water flows, ecological relations, hydraulic infrastructure, financial means, legal and administrative arrangements and cultural institutions and practices are interactively defined, aligned and mobilized through epistemological belief systems, political hierarchies and naturalizing discourses”) This is not just a ‘social affair’: mega-dam based reterritorialization projects entail efforts to embed these new knowledge contents, principles, social–political norms, morals and hydro-cultural relations in material infrastructure, artefacts and technological network relationships. Large dam knowledge encounters powerfully produce new (and always contested) social and symbolic materialities (cf. [74,75,76,77,78,79])
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