Visualizing water conflicts: Mapping contested hydropower projects in the Mekong Basin

Keywords: Hydropower conflicts, data visualization, critical hydropolitics, Mekong
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 world is beset by conflicts over water that assume a multitude of forms. Conventional definitions of “water conflict” in academia and the general public do not begin to do justice to the complexity of ways that human and nonhuman actors relate to water and interact with one another. Despite a rich literature on water conflict, a nuanced understanding of the multiple forms that water conflicts take on is still lacking. Water conflicts are often accompanied and shaped by a multitude of interrelated social, political, and environmental processes, which manifest at multiple spatial and temporal scales. This is particularly the case with conflicts over hydropower development and the damming of rivers. Such conflicts are also seldom exclusively about water as a resource, but nearly always about its meaning, transformation, knowledge, identity, authority, and discourses as well. This paper asks three central questions: How do we begin to think about different modes of water conflict? How can water conflicts over hydropower development be effectively visualized? How might such visualizations be of benefit to scholars, officials, and civil society organizations engaged in conflicts? Our central case for this research focuses on the past, present, and to some extent future conflicts over hydroelectric dams in the Mekong River Basin. Drawing on a range of literature in political ecology and critical hydropolitics, we first explicate the multiple definitions of hydropower conflict. We then adopt approaches in feminist data visualization and critical cartography to explore ways to effectively visualize different modes of conflict.