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This article interrogates Nepal's ongoing and intensifying attempt to become a “hydropower nation” by focusing ethnographic attention on new kinds of subjectivity, identity, and agency emerging at the frontiers of hydropower development in the Upper Trishuli and Upper Tamakoshi watersheds of central Nepal. Drawing on 13 months of field study and ethnographic observation, this article makes a series of arguments about the coevolutionary relationship between the production of an imagined hydropower future and the diverse positions of Nepali citizens living and working along this expanding hydropower frontier. Thematically, my analysis focuses on (a) the scale and velocity of hydropower development in Nepal, (b) the polyvalent role of the hydropower sector within Nepal's recent history of political volatility and vacuums of local governance, (c) an increasingly complex politics of recognition based on “project‐affected” identities, and (d) emerging trends of financialization and mobilization sparked by the proliferation of shareholder‐based models of benefit sharing that affect the discourse on risk sharing and stakeholder rights in crucial ways. Building on other critical scholarship on Himalayan hydropower development, this article seeks to disaggregate the technical and discursive abstractions of the Nepalese hydroscape by providing an ethnographic account of the micropolitics and praxis that shape the lived experience of hydropower development in Nepal.

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In this paper, we review the existing social science scholarship focused on hydropower development in the Himalayan region, using an interpretive lens attuned to issues of time and temporality. While the spatial politics of Himalayan hydropower are well examined in the literature, an explicit examination of temporal politics is lacking. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework organized around the heuristic of timescapes, highlighting temporal themes implicit in the existing literature. In three sections, we explore the temporal politics of anticipation that shape hydropower dreams, the intersecting temporalities and rhythms that modulate the life cycles of hydropower projects, and the ways that geological and hydrological time affect both hydropower development and broader Himalayan futures. Along the way, we pose a series of questions useful for framing future research given the significant climatic, geophysical, and sociopolitical changes underway in the Himalayan bioregion, calling for greater analytical attention to time, temporality, and temporal ethics in future studies of hydropower in the Himalayas and beyond.

In the aftermath of major natural disasters, governments, aid agencies, and affected populations engage in practices of sense-making to gauge the extent and severity of the crisis, direct response activities, and coordinate recovery planning. To understand the conduct and implications of these practices, we examined the official damage assessment implemented by the Government of Nepal following the April 2015 earthquake. In addition, we undertook participatory mapping to examine the consequences of this assessment in the Langtang Valley, a severely-affected area of the country. We argue that the informatics of post-disaster damage assessment in Nepal played a primary role in narrating the events of the 2015 earthquake, legitimating particular paths toward recovery in the aftermath, and limiting opportunities for alternative configurations of social life that emerge during disasters. Our research demonstrates the ways that forms of sense-making afforded by information technologies play central roles in enacting repair-work following crisis and breakdown.