Climate and energy justice along the Brahmaputra river in Northeast India

Abstract

Recurrent summer floods along the Brahmaputra river and its tributaries are a major challenge for the people and state governments of Northeast India. While riverine communities in the region rely upon a variety of adaptation strategies to live with these destructive floods, climate change is expected to further exacerbate this challenge, as melting Himalayan glaciers and changes in the South Asian monsoon lead to an increase in the frequency of severe floods. At the same time, a multitude of new dams are under construction in the Brahmaputra river basin, to meet India’s growing energy demands. Though these dams could provide flood protection for downstream communities, political and economic factors have led dam-builders to prioritize hydroelectricity generation over flood control. Furthermore, hydroelectricity generated along the Brahmaputra is “evacuated” to distant urban centers, while rural dwellers in Northeast India suffer from high levels of energy poverty. Using the Ranganadi Hydroelectric Project in Arunachal Pradesh as a case study, this paper examines how, by changing the flood regime and undermining current adaptive strategies, large dams along the Brahmaputra are testing the capacity of downstream communities to live with summer floods. This work highlights the ways in which poor and vulnerable communities in Northeast India are forced to bear the costs of both climate change impacts and decarbonization efforts.

Mountains of inequality: encountering the politics of climate adaptation across the Himalaya

“…Nightingale (2018) refers to this as the "socioenvironmental state," a conceptualization built on the foundations of contested boundaries between state-society, society-nature, and citizenshipbelonging. Scholarship developing such ideas wield insights from critical developmental studies and political ecology, among others, to explore how power and politics in the context of CCA emerge from struggles over discursive and material governance and ownership of values and resources (Eriksen et al 2015, Nagoda and Nightingale 2017, Nightingale 2017, Wong 2020, Rampini 2021a).…”

Introduction: Uneven geographies of electricity capital

“…Harvey, in conversation with Arundhati Roy’s analysis in Power Politics , describes the privatization of energy companies as a dialectically related process of extended reproduction and “accumulation by dispossession.” As part of a neoliberal push to create and cannibalize resources within, yet “outside” capitalism “[a]ssets held by the state or in common were released into the market where overaccumulating capital could invest in them, upgrade them, and speculate in them” (Harvey, 2003: 158). Privatization of the power sector dispossessed citizens of state-owned infrastructures with a mandate to provide affordable electricity and ensure universal access as well as other social benefits such as quality job creation and economic development (see, Kumar, 2022; Rampini, 2021).…”

“…Public power does not automatically mean energy or climate justice. Authors in this special issue examine the distinct ways in which communities and workers have challenged electricity capital through union organizing, protests, and legal action to demand that the state use its regulatory influence to reign in private power (Pearse and Bryant, 2021;Luke, 2021) and to call out the patterns of labor exploitation, pollution and environmental degradation (Kumar, 2022;Rampini, 2021;Wang, 2022), and land enclosure and rent-seeking (L Baker, 2021) that the state allows. Current state capitalist, municipal and public utilities, and rural cooperatives are often enthusiastic burners of fossil fuels and run by reactionary social blocs (see, Schneider 2017).…”

Coalition and contradiction in managing Brahmaputra: Opportunities for more hydropower?

“…Advantages of upstream (China and Northern India) and dependences of downstream (South India and Bangladesh) areas are major concerns and are broadly and frequently re ected in news reporting and academia (Feng et al, 2019;Jiang et al, 2017). In addition, the bene ts of properly managed hydropower stations on the Brahmaputra River are understated and the negative impacts of ill-managed dams trigger too much panic in various conservation and humanitarian groups (Feng et al, 2019;Rampini, 2021). Consequently, few dare to confront the fact that hydropower is the obvious coordination base that is desired by all four nations (Table 4).…”

“…Besides border issues with China (Chellaney, 2012), India has to manage water and navigation-sharing issues with Bangladesh (Brichieri-Colombi & Bradnock, 2003), hydroelectricity transfer with Bhutan (Yasuda et al, 2017) and disaster preparation by sharing data from China and to Bangladesh (He, 2021b). Within the nation, India has to manage the relationship between the steeply increasing riverine population and the Brahmaputra, especially climate and energy justice issues, such as the impacts of upstream hydropower expansion on the adaptative capacities of downstream communities coping with ood in wet seasons (Nayak & Panda, 2016;Rampini, 2021).…”