“…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.…”