Altered dams? Shifting power formations, volatilised rivers and infrastructural violence

Keywords: Grijalva, hydropower, infrastructural violence, Mekong, rivers
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

In this paper we explore continuities and alterations in damming rivers in the global South through cases from the Mekong (Laos and Cambodia), and the Grijalva (Mexico) River Basins. By accounting for the commonalities and differences, we demonstrate how the damming has evolved from high-modern, multi-purpose projects to the variegated (green) neoliberalisation of dams, which uncouples damming from river basin management by gearing dams at hydroelectricity maximisation, and contradicts with the justificatory attempts of repurposing dams to serve climate responses. Instead of climate-proofing rivers we show how changing climate together with hydraulic infrastructuring co-produce newly volatile rivers that exceed the ordering capacities of the dams, which, in turn, evokes new forms of infrastructural harm and violence. Our conceptual work with volatile rivers and infrastructural harms and violence draws from efforts to bridge political-ecological approaches to dams and hydrosocial relations (Linton and Budds 2014, Swyngedouw 2015, Blake and Barney 2018) with recent social studies on infrastructure (Larkin 2013, Appel et al. 2018). We are thus attuned to the complexity of infrastructural assemblages (Sneddon 2015) including the material qualities of dams and rivers, while maintaining interest in revealing unjustly distributed harms and obscured relations of responsibility.