Disastrous hydropower, uneven regional development, and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands

Timescapes of Himalayan hydropower: Promises, project life cycles, and precarities

“…Because the reasons for these contestations are site-dependent and multiscalar, scholars have repeatedly highlighted the need for greater attention to national histories of center-periphery relations, subregional political dynamics, and legacies of political exclusion (cf. Akhter, 2015;Drew, 2017b;Forbes, 1999;Gergan, 2017Gergan, , 2020Ghale & Ghale, 2017;Hanasz, 2015;McDuie-Ra & Chettri, 2020;Murton & Lord, 2020;Suhardiman, Bastakoti, Karki, & Bharati, 2018), foregrounding the ways that the timescapes of Himalayan hydropower are sedimented by uneven historical trajectories.…”

“…Several "national priority" hydropower projects have been delayed for decades in Nepal-most notably the Arun 3 (Forbes, 1999;Gyawali, 2003;Rest, 2012) and the Upper Karnali (Suhardiman & Karki, 2019). In Sikkim, a handful of projects have been postponed or canceled in response to local protests (Dukpa et al, 2019;Gergan, 2020;Huber & Joshi, 2015), while a series of scientific debates over the impacts of the Lower Subansiri Dam in Arunachal Pradesh have clouded the future of the project (Huber, 2019;Menon, 2019;Rahman, 2014). Many hydropower projects were damaged or delayed by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal (Butler & Rest, 2017;Lord, 2017Lord, , 2018Rest, Lord, & Butler, 2015) while some projects in Uttarakhand lie abandoned in the wake of the 2012 and 2013 floods (Agrawal, 2013;Drew, 2014Drew, , 2017a.…”

“…Many hydropower projects were damaged or delayed by the 2015 Gorkha earthquake in Nepal (Butler & Rest, 2017;Lord, 2017Lord, , 2018Rest, Lord, & Butler, 2015) while some projects in Uttarakhand lie abandoned in the wake of the 2012 and 2013 floods (Agrawal, 2013;Drew, 2014Drew, , 2017a. These moments of apparent breakdown and failure, when project timelines are disrupted or forced to come to a screeching halt due to disasters, can also establish new pathways of critique and democratic contestation (Drew, 2017b;Ete, 2017;Gergan, 2020;Huber & Joshi, 2015).…”

“…In these ways, "the uneven geographies of risk and infrastructural development in the Indian Himalaya form on historical terrains shaped not only by specific geologies but also by the powerful, unbroken legacy of colonial and postcolonial state rationality" (Gergan, 2019, p. 39). As the Anthropocene epoch unfolds, it is increasingly necessary to recognize the temporal orientations of those who carry embodied and place-based forms of environmental knowledge (Gergan, 2017(Gergan, , 2020Kipgen, 2017), in the Himalayas and beyond.…”

“…In this paper, we review the growing body of social science scholarship on hydropower development in the Himalayas using an interpretive lens attuned to issues of time and temporality. Several thoughtful analyses have explicitly theorized the spatial politics of Himalayan hydropower development, at multiple scales (Akhter, 2015; Baruah, 2012; Drew, 2017a, 2018; Dukpa, Joshi, & Boelens, 2019; Forbes, 1999; Gergan, 2017, 2020; Gyawali, 2003; Huber & Joshi, 2015; Lord, 2014, 2016; McDuie‐Ra, 2011; Murton & Lord, 2020; Suhardiman & Karki, 2019). Here, we highlight major themes regarding time and the temporal politics implicit in the existing literature to form a conceptual framework for understanding the timescapes of Himalayan hydropower.…”