Negotiating Water and Technology—Competing Expectations and Confronting Knowledges in the Case of the Coca Codo Sinclair in Ecuador

Abstract

Recent and on-going mega-hydraulic development in the global South implies profound socio-technical, ecological, territorial and cultural transformations at different levels and spaces of society. The transformations often involve conflicts and also new governance arrangements between different knowledge regimes, local practices and national and global frameworks of climate mitigation, water resources management and the green economy. Significantly, they also entail varying expectations concerning the meaning of water and the political promises of technology in advancing more sustainable futures. Drawing on sociological science and technology studies, particularly the sociology of expectations, this article analyses competing, parallel and confronting expectations regarding water and technology that different actors produce, negotiate and contest in the context of the recently launched 1500 MW hydropower megaproject Coca Codo Sinclair in Ecuador. It takes expectations as performative as they may shape and challenge policies, discourses, social interactions, institutions and power relations. By analysing and comparing these expectations, the article scrutinises the socio-technical imaginaries and related knowledge regimes they represent, derive from and support, and what kinds of repercussions these have in terms of water resources management in particular and sustainability governance in general.

Contested Knowledges: Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development

“…"A range of powerful, transnationally allied groups and organizations have historically promoted the construction of these projects: politicians, bureaucrats, landed classes, and industrialists, multinational corporations, the World Bank, and other international organizations, as well as transnational professional associations of engineers and scientists" [7] (p. 3), which he calls an informal international "big dam regime". Underlying this regime are the deeply rooted values, norms and principles that, together, have promoted a development vision that was conceptualized nearly a century ago and which has been unleashed since the 1950s and 1960s (see, in this issue [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]). This vision equated development as the largescale, top-down, techno-centric pursuit of economic growth through the intensive exploitation of natural resources, that commonly disregards alternative knowledge systems, development trajectories and human suffering.…”

“…Hydropower and other mega-hydraulic projects have long been a deeply controversial issue, generating intense local, national and transnational disputes among proponents and opponents. Large-scale water infrastructure development has been shown to generate profound social and environmental impacts, the more so since the burdens and benefits are unevenly distributed among population groups and locations [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Commonly, mega-hydraulic projects aim to supply water and/or energy to industrial growth sectors, large-scale capitalist export agriculture, and the growing thirst of mega-cities and urban zones [18,19].…”

“…Throughout the world, the conquering of nature and the ordering of humans and ecology through large dams, reservoirs, tunnels and canals, to take water from the 'backward rural areas' to 'modern urban metropoles', has invoked utopian-inspired exaltations of modernity, civilization and progress [31,45,80]. Several papers in this special issue [9,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17] detail how mega-hydraulic projects shape and materialize visions about technological and economic modernization, the mastery of territories and natural resources, and, as Teräväinen frames it, enhance the nation-state's depoliticized, techno-scientific knowledge base.…”

“…In the process, local indigenous territorial livelihoods and worldviews were largely disregarded, and the treaty rights of indigenous peoples were conveniently overlooked. The article by Teräväinen [16] in this volume studies divergent and competing expectations about water and technological development through the prism of the Coca Codo Sinclair Hydropower mega-project in Ecuador. During the design and implementation of the project the local peasantry and indigenous people were sidelined and their territorially rooted knowledge regimes ignored.…”

Dams and Damages. Conflicting Epistemological Frameworks and Interests Concerning “Compensation” for the Misicuni Project’s Socio-Environmental Impacts in Cochabamba, Bolivia

“…However, from our examination, we concluded that the popular interest in and defense of the project did not result in a more protective stand towards affected host communities. Similar to the position and actions of dominant mega-hydraulic proponents in other cases around the world (e.g., [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]), the popular supporters (city inhabitants and valley peasants) ignored the fate of the affected highland indigenous communities.…”