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- Convenors:
-
Jessica Hope
(University of St Andrews)
Murat Arsel (International Institute of Social Studies - Erasmus University Rotterdam)
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- Formats:
- Papers
- Stream:
- Infrastructure and energy
- Sessions:
- Monday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In this session, we discuss papers that examine what the global turn to infrastructure means, both empirically and theoretically, for analysing the environmental consequences of infrastructure-led development.
Long Abstract:
As climate change accelerates to become the defining development issue of the twenty first century, there is simultaneously a global turn to infrastructure (Dodson 2017) that promotes infrastructure-led development as necessary for ensuring growth-led sustainable development. Plans for new infrastructure in the Amazon, for example, include new highways, waterways, railways, ports, dams, and power stations (Bebbington et al 2020). Within social science, an infrastructural turn has brought changes to contemporary conceptualisations of infrastructure that go beyond physical materiality to examine infrastructures as a manifestation of social and technological processes (Lemanski 2019:3; Larkin 2013; Von Schnitzler 2008), revealing how infrastructure is implicated in citizenship (Lemanski 2020), post-colonial politics (Cowen 2019; Enns & Bersaglio 2020), authoritarian developmentalism (Arsel et al. forthcoming), and political ecology (Anand 2017; Bebbington 2020; Hope forthcoming).
In this session, we discuss papers that examine what this turn to infrastructure means, both empirically and theoretically, for understanding and analysing the environmental consequences of infrastructure-led development.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 28 June, 2021, -Murat Arsel (International Institute of Social Studies - Erasmus University Rotterdam) Lorenzo Pellegrini
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the enduring commitment of Latin American states to infrastructural project despite their well-documented failures. In so doing, we highlight the autonomous power of the state to ask what infrastructural projects achieve from the perspective of the state.
Paper long abstract:
Much of the recent critique of Latin American infrastructural turn has focused on infrastructural investments' failure to generate (local) economic growth, their negative environmental impact, and their symbolic power in enabling authoritarian forms of governance that seek to erase socio-cultural diversity. This paper looks beyond these discussions to analyze the enduring commitment of Latin American states to infrastructural project despite their well-documented failures. In so doing, we highlight the autonomous power of the state to ask what infrastructural projects achieve from the perspective of the state. We highlight two related dynamics. First, infrastructural projects have the power to generate the type of political communities that are govern-able by a centralized and hierarchical state machinery. Second, they help the state insert itself - or rather, its governing logic - into (civil) society, structuring state-society relationships in such a way that consent can be created via a set of policies that presuppose the necessity of the state. We illustrate these arguments with examples from the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Charis Enns (University of Manchester) Brock Bersaglio (University of Birmingham)
Paper short abstract:
Over the last decade, development policymakers and planners have placed growing emphasis on infrastructure-led development. In this paper, we argue that infrastructure-led development is driving the reorganisation of ecological space.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last decade, development policymakers and planners have placed growing emphasis on infrastructure-led development, which is the idea that investment in infrastructure provides a sure pathway to development by integrating previously bypassed or disconnected rural areas into global networks of production and trade. The ambition of infrastructure-led development is to ‘get the territory right’ by reorganising national space, so that it can be made accessible and plugged in to global value chains to foster export-oriented growth (Schindler and Kanai 2019). In this paper, we reflect on a parallel process of ‘getting the ecology right’ in infrastructure-led development. We argue that infrastructure-led development is driving the reorganisation of ecological space, as there are growing expectations around the greening infrastructure investments from regulatory authorities, lending bodies, and even investors. At the same time, reorganising ecological space serves to make nature more accessible and attractive to global capital, thereby preparing nature to be propelled into new global networks of production and trade once new infrastructure is built. To make this argument, we draw on qualitative data collected in Kenya and Tanzania between 2016 and 2019 using walking interviews, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, oral histories, and participant observation. We focus specifically on the creation of new wildlife corridors around sites of infrastructure investment, suggesting that these corridors function much like transport infrastructure by enabling capital and ‘wild’ commodities to flow, land, and accumulate in previously bypassed or disconnected rural areas.
Lucy Goodman (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will compare two large dams' economic, social and environmental impacts in the ecologically fragile and culturally rich Indian Himalaya, using a mixed-methods political ecology approach. Both dams have over 1000MW capacity but also the potential for far-reaching and profound impacts.
Paper long abstract:
The Anthropocene's increasingly panicked politics justify infrastructure with far-reaching irreversible impacts to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Large hydropower dams are an example of this type of infrastructure. Understanding trade-offs around dams is critical within India, given its climate change mitigation and adaptation dilemmas and hydropower potential. The Himalaya provide a suitable landscape for hydropower generation for the nation, but also the potential for disaster, with frequent extreme weather events and earthquakes. Further dam construction will come at a significant cultural, financial and ecological cost. As hydropower scheme design is driven by the challenge of climate change adaptation and mitigation, countries may prefer dams with "storage" from reservoirs or ponds, which can release their water in response to cyclical and seasonal energy and water demand and periods of scarcity. However, the comparative costs and benefits of storage versus non-storage schemes remain contested.
This paper will compare two dams with and without storage in the Indian Himalayas to unpack dam design trade-offs in the region. Both dams were commissioned over 15 years ago in the Indian Himalaya by state-owned companies, Nathpa Jhakri a run-of-river dam and Tehri, a dam with a four cubic kilometres reservoir. I will use a political ecology approach to investigate the differentiated impacts of these dams and the changing narratives of why they were built and for whom. I will draw on data from a timeline of satellite-derived economic activity, stakeholder interviews and document analysis, and hope by reviewing these past dams, to influence future planning.
Selin Le Visage (Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour (UMR TREE))
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how the study of both the sociotechnical and political dimensions of infrastructures reveals the everyday ways of governing of the Turkish state, between coercion and arrangements. We will use the example of small hill reservoirs built for irrigation in Izmir region.
Paper long abstract:
The processes linking state action, the environment and infrastructure have been studied in Turkey through the notion of developmentalism. This paper proposes to continue this reflection by showing how looking at the very materiality of infrastructure also makes it possible to question state-society relations. While this issue has mainly been approached from the angle of conflict around conflictual infrastructure projects, we will focus this time on less contested small objects. In 2012, the Turkish government launched a national program aimed at the construction of "1000 gölet (small reservoirs) in 1000 days". Paying attention to these technical objects at the local level, in the region of Izmir, showed which actors appeared during the planning of projects, their implementation and then their appropriation by farmers. By looking at their everyday ‘ways of doing’, their encounters, the arrangements they find in circumventing the rules to make the projects work, this research proposes to study governance in acts, or in action. It thus shows how the study of both the sociotechnical and political aspects of infrastructure makes it possible to question state-society relations "from below", without falling into a binary opposition between a state whose intervention is only top-down and a society that is only in resistance. This approach is in no way opposed to conflict-centered research: it shows how, through infrastructure projects, an authoritarian state governs through both coercion and flexibility, repression and transactions, by force and compromise.