Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics

Abstract

For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang‐Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo‐Brahmaputra and Nu‐Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date ‐ the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change ‐ and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine‐grained analyses of power, control and contestation.

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

“…For instance, after 20 years of inactivity, 500 new hydropower dams were under construction in 2020 and by 2040, 3000 are expected to be built throughout the world (Zarfl et al, 2015). This growth (e.g., in dams, canals, reservoirs, pumping stations, rural-urban water transfers and centralized urban or rural water-supply systems) is occurring in China (Crow-Miller, Webber, & Rogers, 2017;Kaiman, 2014), India (Iyer, 2012), Ghana (Han & Webber, 2020), East and Southeast Asia (Harlan & Hennig, 2022;Rogers et al, 2023), Central Asia (Menga, 2017) and throughout South America (Gerlak et al, 2020;McCulligh & Tetreault, 2017;Mills-Novoa & Hermoza, 2017;Roman, 2017). Even the western United States, which has been described as a completely plumbed hydraulic system, is witnessing the construction of new canals to transfer water out of irrigation and into Las Vegas (Welsh & Endter-Wada, 2017).…”