Paper short abstract:

This paper will assert the importance of Discourse Theory in understanding the hegemonic struggles that surround the meaning of mega-dams. Within the case of Brazil, it will do so by exploring how sustainable development has been articulated as hegemonic tool to fragment the opposition.

Paper long abstract:

As Karen Bakker (2000) has stated, the management of water resources has become a discursive practice - with competing narratives working to define the resource. The result is that dams, from the Three Gorges of China to the Aswan of Egypt, have become constructed by language, as well as concrete. The meanings and representations of dams often have histories that are located in wider understandings of power - but, these histories are never fixed. Instead, they are always open to reinvention and transformation by the actors that perceive it. The result is often the contestation over the meaning of the infrastructure and the consequences of its construction.

This paper will assert that these contested meanings of dams opens up the study of dams to the influence of Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's Discourse Analytic framework. It will do so by exploring how recent Brazilian governments have appropriated narratives of Sustainable Development as a means to legitimise the construction of mega-dams in the Amazon region. A rearticulation of existing storylines has occurred - and the construction of dams and notions of sustainable development have been joined.

These appeals to sustainability often serve as a hegemonic tool to isolate opposition networks, fragment alliances, and further legitimate construction. As a result, this paper will assert that this articulation has occurred within a struggle over the meaning of dams, and that infrastructure cannot be separated from the discourse that generates meaning.