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

Abstract

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.

Air Pressure: Temporal Hierarchies in Nepali Aviation

“…Thomas Yarrow (2017, 568), in his research on the Volta Resettlement dam project in Ghana, writes that the stalled project has created “a palpable sense of the failure of modernization to arrive, associated with an unstable and unresolved relationship between the actuality of existing circumstances and the imagined futures that continue to be projected from the unrealized plan.” But unlike in Yarrow's case, where there is a feeling of lament, and modernization is seen in the past tense, Nepali aviation personnel firmly believe they form a necessary part of the international aviation world—and by extension the flow of global capital—while timeframes are determined by international aviation regulators and protocol‐defining agencies. Their views resemble what Karine Gagné and others refer to as “technocratic time” in recent work on Himalayan hydropower (Gagné 2019; Lord, Drew, and Gergan 2020). The standards and expectations of the aviation world are often described as disconnected from specific local conditions, which seems ironic in an industry that prides itself on movement across this divide.…”

“…But unlike in Yar-row's case, where there is a feeling of lament, and modernization is seen in the past tense, Nepali aviation personnel firmly believe they form a necessary part of the international aviation world-and by extension the flow of global capital-while timeframes are determined by international aviation regulators and protocol-defining agencies. Their views resemble what Karine Gagné and others refer to as "technocratic time" in recent work on Himalayan hydropower (Gagné 2019;Lord, Drew, and Gergan 2020). The standards and expectations of the aviation world are often described as disconnected from specific local conditions, which seems ironic in an industry that prides itself on movement across this divide.…”

“…Infrastructures have always concerned constant maintenance, and they often fail or crumble (Graham and Thrift 2007;Cowen 2014;Berlant 2016;Anand 2017, 231-32). More recently, researchers have also paid careful attention to the temporality of infrastructures, for instance, how they can stretch beyond human lifetimes (Bowker 2015), or how they can be used to think through other nonhuman scales and time spans (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018;Hetherington 2019;Joniak-Lüthi 2019;Cons 2020;Lord, Drew, and Gergan 2020). Less clear is how daily negotiations of time used to maintain the movement of air traffic work in practice.…”

From climate adaptation to climate justice: Critical reflections on the IPCC and Himalayan climate knowledges

“…In the Himalayas, questions of representation and justice have marred science and policy regarding climate change (Ensor et al 2019;Nightingale 2016;Ojha et al 2020a, b;Satyal et al 2017;Sherpa 2014). Such critiques are rooted in a rich vein of critical and radical social science and humanities scholarship on nature-society relations that seek to interrogate environmental determinist narratives of risk, techno-managerial decision-making pathways, hegemonic state development policies, geopolitical contentions at multiple borderlands, and the active marginalization of the plurality of worldviews that constitute the region (Campbell 2017;Davis et al 2020;Drew, 2014, b;Gergan 2017;Huber 2019;Joshi 2014;Lord et al 2020;Ojha 2020;Poudel 2018;Sapkota et al 2016). This scholarship reveals the insidious nature of the theory of environmental degradation (THED), which still informs critical policy positions and has morphed into a regional narrative of the Anthropocene.…”

Improving pumpset selection to support intensification of groundwater irrigation in the Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains

“…This is in tandem with significant capital constraints faced by many households that may limit potential investment in technologies at current market prices (Agrawal and Jain, 2019). At the same time, expansion of rural electrification in the EIGP has historically been slow -in particular in Nepal and in parts of India -due to delays to major energy infrastructure projects (Lord et al, 2020;Saklani et al, 2020) along with sometimes restrictive government energy policies (Kishore, 2004;Oda and Tsujita, 2011;Mukherji et al, 2012). Given these factors, we argue that diesel and petrol pumps are likely to remain a key technology for irrigators across the EIGP for many years to come and that improving performance of these systems is likely to play an important role in supporting intensification of groundwater use among smallholder farmers.…”