Mountain Women, Dams, and the Gendered Dimensions of Environmental Protest in the Garhwal Himalaya

Drew, Georgina

doi:10.1659/mrd-journal-d-13-00075.1

Cited by 18 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…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. 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).…”

Section: The Life Cycles Of Himalayan Hydropower Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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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.

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Section: The Life Cycles Of Himalayan Hydropower Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2020

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“…Finally, what is easily overlooked, especially when thinking in terms of large-scale dam disasters, is the "slow violence" of everyday ecological precarity accompanying the construction of hydropower infrastructure in fragile geological settings [25,76]. Phenomena reported from hydropower-affected areas across the Himalayas, such as the sudden appearance of cracks in houses, the activation of landslide zones, or water resources running dry may represent more tangible and cumulatively impactful hazards to the lives and livelihoods of rural Himalayan communities [26,57,[77][78][79]. Excavation works for hydropower infrastructure tend to destabilize fragile mountain slopes, with impacts often felt for months or years post-construction, exacerbated by natural hazard activity.…”

Section: Hydropower Risks In An Intensifying Hazardscapementioning

confidence: 99%

Hydropower in the Himalayan Hazardscape: Strategic Ignorance and the Production of Unequal Risk

Huber

2019

Water

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Rapidly expanding hydropower development in areas prone to geological and hydro-climatic hazards poses multiple environmental and technological risks. Yet, so far these have received scant attention in hydropower planning processes, and even in the campaigns of most citizen initiatives contesting these dams. Based on qualitative empirical research in Northeast India, this paper explores the reasons why dam safety and hazard potential are often marginal topics in hydropower governance and its contestation. Using a political ecology framework analyzing the production of unequal risks, I argue that a blind-eye to environmental risks facilitates the appropriation of economic benefits by powerful interest groups, while increasing the hazardousness of hydropower infrastructure, accelerating processes of social marginalization. More specifically, this paper brings into analytical focus the role of strategic ignorance and manufactured uncertainty in the production of risk, and explores the challenges and opportunities such knowledge politics create for public resistance against hazardous technologies. I posit that influencing the production of knowledge about risk can create a fertile terrain for contesting hazardous hydropower projects, and for promoting alternative popular conceptions of risk. These findings contribute to an emerging body of research about the implications of hydropower expansionism in the Himalayan hazardscape.

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“…Research shows that both structural and individual factors influence women’s and men’s engagement with innovation (Ahl, 2006; Ahl & Marlow, 2012; Pecis, 2016). A number of authors explore the dialectical relations between gender and innovation (see Badstue et al., 2018, Bossenbroek & Zwarteveen, 2014; Drew, 2014; Padmanabhan, 2002; Pyburn, 2014). Kingiri (2013) concludes that capacity to innovate is determined by a combination of individual skills, actions, and experiences as well as by broader institutional, market, policy, and financial domains.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and agricultural innovation in Oromia region, Ethiopia: from innovator to tempered radical

Farnworth¹,

López

Badstue

et al. 2018

Gender, Technology and Development

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Tempered radicals are change agents who experience the dominant culture as a violation of the integrity and authenticity of their personal values and beliefs. They seek to move forward whilst challenging the status quo. Does the concept provide a useful analytic lens through which the strategies of women and men farmer innovators, who are ‘doing things differently’ in agriculture, can be interpreted? What are their strategies for turning ambivalence and tension to their advantage? The paper uses research data derived from two wheat-growing communities in Oromia Region, Ethiopia, an area characterized by generally restrictive gendered norms and a technology transfer extension system. The findings demonstrate that women and men innovators actively interrogate and contest gender norms and extension narratives. Whilst both women and men innovators face considerable challenges, women, in particular, are precariously located ‘outsiders within,’ negotiating carefully between norm and sanction. Although the findings are drawn from a small sample, they have implications for interventions aiming to support agricultural innovation processes which support women’s, as well as men’s, innovatory practice. The framework facilitates a useful understanding of how farmer innovators operate and in particular, significant differences in how women and men interrogate, negotiate and align themselves with competing narratives.

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Mountain Women, Dams, and the Gendered Dimensions of Environmental Protest in the Garhwal Himalaya

Cited by 18 publications

References 9 publications

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

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

Hydropower in the Himalayan Hazardscape: Strategic Ignorance and the Production of Unequal Risk

Gender and agricultural innovation in Oromia region, Ethiopia: from innovator to tempered radical

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