43 research outputs found
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Bigger is better or how governments learned to stop worrying and love megaprojects
Megaprojects, with their sheer size and their physical and emotional impact, can emerge as central elements around which political elites construct an ideology. Following a comparison of the narratives surrounding the Strait of Messina Bridge in Italy and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan, I find that similar narratives appear in arguments for mega projects across different regime types, as advocates portray large infrastructure as a panacea for varied problems and thus justify the significant investment such projects require. Politicians in both Italy and Tajikistan have embraced images of heroic progress toward a better future to frame megaprojects as inevitable signs of progress and national well-being
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Hydropolis: reinterpreting the polis in water politics
The construction of a large dam is often a contested and controversial matter. Delicate aspects related to the dam construction business such as the resettlement of peoples, environmental impact and financial costs, can trigger popular discontent and hinder the realisation of a particular project. By advancing the notion of the hydropolis, a reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt (1958) definition of the polis, this paper will explore how ruling elites can manipulate the public opinion to politically construct a large dam as a foreign policy matter. This, it will be argued, serves to conceal the negative consequences of a dam so that issues related to its social and environmental impact are removed from the national political debate. Specifically, the case of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in Ethiopia will be used to illustrate how a large dam can become a geopolitical object grounded on the friend/enemy distinction, in the context of the longstanding geopolitical tensions in the Nile River Basin
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Reconceptualizing hegemony: the circle of hydro-hegemony
This paper proposes a partial reconceptualization and a redesign of the Framework of Hydro-Hegemony, an analytical tool devised to study how power, hegemony, and power asymmetries can influence transboundary water politics. This is done by presenting the original Circle of Hydro-Hegemony (CHH), an analytical framework that places the neo-Gramscian notion of hegemony at the centre of its structure, to illustrate how various forms of power are connective in the function of hegemony. Following a theoretical discussion on how the concepts of power and hegemony can interact, the case of the Aral Sea basin in Central Asia will provide a practical application of the CHH to transboundary water politics
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Domestic and international dimensions of transboundary water politics
A considerable amount of research in the field of International Relations (IR) has acknowledged the
interplay between domestic politics and foreign policy. Few studies, however, have investigated this phenomenon
in the narrower field of transboundary water politics. There is also a general lack of research exploring how the
formation of a national identity can overlap with the construction of a large hydraulic infrastructure, and how this
can have repercussions at the international level. This paper draws on Robert Putnamâs (1988) two-level game
theory to illustrate how the interrelation between the domestic and the international dimensions matters in
transboundary water politics. Perspectives from IR, political geography, and water politics serve to present a
conceptual framework which is then linked to studies on nationalism. This helps to highlight the analytical
relevance of such a perspective to understand the issue of large dams. The paper takes the cases of the Grand
Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Ethiopia and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan as examples
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The circle of hydro-hegemony between riparian states, development policies and borderlands: evidence from the Talas waterscape (Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan)
Since the 1990s, transboundary water management has come to play a key role both in global environmental politics debates and in the shaping of international development policies, specifically in the Global South. As a consequence, a growing body of literature in the framework of critical hydropolitics has emerged reflecting on the role that power, discourses, and strategies play in shaping transboundary water policies and in influencing riparian relations. The focus on a state-centric perspective, however, often has led to neglect of the role of international development actors in shaping these policies. Through a critical application of the Circle of Hydro-Hegemony (CHH) and ethnographic qualitative field research in borderlands, this contribution aims to analyse how the establishment of a development initiative known as the Chu-Talas Commission, supported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and other donors, has influenced and shaped transboundary water politics in the Talas waterscape, which is shared by Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The evidence shows that despite the international narration of the Chu-Talas Commission as a success story for water cooperation in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, through the deployment of both material and bargaining power strategies, has been able to shape UNECE development policies in its favour, impose its agenda on Kyrgyzstan, and emerge as the basin hydro-hegemon
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Fostering Tajik hydraulic development: examining the role of soft power in the case of the Rogun Dam
Basin riparians are not equally endowed in their resources and capacity to control water within a shared international river basin. Beyond hydrological constraints and geographical positions, other less tangible factors such as discourses and narratives influence interactions among basin riparians for water resources control and river basin development, requiring further analytical refinement of the role of power. The analysis of discursive and ideological dimensions of power, or 'soft' power, in particular, enables insights to strategies and tactics of water control under conditions of power asymmetries between basin states. This paper examines the debate around the controversial large-scale Rogun Dam project on the Vakhsh River in Tajikistan, exploring how the exercise of 'soft' power can, and sometimes cannot, shape transboundary water outcomes over water allocation. By focusing on international diplomacy and narratives, the paper provides insights into the noncoercive ways in which hydraulic development is justified. In particular, it is shown how 'soft' power was utilised by the Tajik decision-makers to legitimise dam development both at the international and domestic levels. The paper illustrates how, in the case of the Rogun Dam, 'soft' power falls short of determining a hydraulic
development that changes the status quo of water allocation for Tajikistan
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In the shadows of power: the infrastructural violence of thermal power generation in Ghana's coastal commodity frontier
This research adopts Jason Moore's concept of the commodity frontier, which portrays the socio-ecological impacts of capitalist expansion, to analyze the spread of Independent Power Provision in Sub-Saharan Africa. This form of power provision has thus far been under-theorized, especially its impacts on local communities, which must be addressed considering its contemporary popularity in the region. The article uses the concept of 'infrastructural violence' as an analytical lens, drawing upon its language and theories that describe the ways in which physical infrastructures often deemed benign can inflict violence on specific regions and social groups. Using a case study of the Takoradi Thermal Power Station in the Western Region of Ghana, the ethnographic research depicts the subtle yet highly deleterious forms of violence that occur within Aboadze, the small-scale fishing community the power station is embedded in, reducing access to vital resources including food, water and land, as well as the various exclusions that impact the livelihoods of a community already suffering from marginalization and poverty
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Linking water scarcity to mental health : hydro-social interruptions in the Lake Urmia Basin, Iran
This research was conducted with the support of the Secretariat of Universities and Research, Ministry of Economy and Knowledge, Government of Catalonia (AGAUR-FI grant).Unidad de excelencia MarĂa de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Alterations of water flows resulting from the manifestation of powerful hydro-social imaginaries often produce an uneven distribution of burdens and benefits for different social groups or regions, reflecting their social and political power. Marginalized regions can suffer manufactured territorialized water scarcity, which disturbs the natural, economic and socio-political order of water users, and as this article shows, inevitably affects their psychological wellbeing. Set in the context of the surroundings of Lake Urmia in Iran, once one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world and now a severely degraded ecosystem mainly as a result of water overuse in its watershed, this article explores how and through which pathways this manufactured water scarcity impacted the mental health of the water users in the region. The research findings reveal that alterations in this local hydro-social territory and the resulting biophysical, financial and social changes, as well as impacts on physical health of water users, relate to chronic psychological stress, social isolation, intra-community conflicts, despair, hopelessness, depression and anxiety
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States of water
This chapter outlines the aims and content of this volume, delving into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state. The chapter initially delineates the main theoretical and conceptual approaches underpinning our understanding of how water resources are enmeshed with multiscalar processes related to technology and the nation-state. It then provides an overview of the contributions to this volume, outlining how all of the case studies unfold through choreographies of oppression and domination, while also, and inevitably, bringing to the fore the opportunity to enact strategies of resistance and contestation aimed at sharing water resources more equally
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The high priests of global development: capitalism, religion and the political economy of sacrifice in a celebrityâled water charity
Throughout the world, 785 million people lack a basic drinking-water service and at least 2 billion people consume contaminated drinking water. At the same time, numerous global water charities fronted by âcaringâ, politicized celebrity figures â dubbed the âhigh priestsâ of global development by the authors of this article â have sought to âsolveâ inequalities in access to clean water through market-based solutions and charity donations. This article engages with the fields of critical social theory, political theology, political ecology and celebrity studies to analyse the interrelationship between capitalism and religion, to interrogate the drivers of international development, and to historically situate the work of celebrity-led water charities and the growing role of these âhigh priestsâ. It takes the case of Matt Damonâs Water.org to examine the increasingly religious nature of these neoliberalized charity processes, and outlines the main elements of what the authors term a contemporary political economy of sacrifice. They argue that this results in charities that, rather than reducing inequalities, actually reproduce, normalize and legitimize the very system and exploitative relations that are responsible for these inequalities and environmental problems in the first place, while scattered and localized fixes sustain the illusion that things are getting better