The Slow Violence of Nationalising Dutch Water Management

Keywords: hydropower, political ecology, Netherlands, nature and society, state theory
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19

Abstract

The concentration of Dutch hydropower has historically been approached as a consequence of the social liberalist ideology that became prevalent in the early 20th century. Water management is in this way conceptualized as secondary to broader state building strategies in the Netherlands. This paper instead argues that the development of centralized hydropower in the Netherlands was integral to the production of a liberal modernist rationality, in turn harnessing the slow violence of a shift to liberalism. Specifically, I mobilize Lefebvre’s notes on the production of space as state-effect to analyse the centralization of Dutch water management into the Rijkswaterstaat – the Ministry of Water Management – between 1910-1930. Two relations become apparent. First, the logics and strategies of the liberal state were partly produced in the hydrological state bureaucracy, through formalizing an economism of the social. And second, large-scale water projects served to practically embody the spatial prevalence of the state. I argue that together these facets highlight that hydrological modernity was not merely the result of a prevailing liberal ideology but integral to the production of a socio-technical belief in the state, depoliticising the stark move away from local environmental management.