Paper short abstract:

Highland Asia is currently in a process of unprecedented hydropower construction. In Nepal, the majority of the large dams to come are funded by para-statal Indian and Chinese developers. Through hydropower, the two neighbours aim to capture geostrategically important places in the mountains.

Paper long abstract:

After thirty years of almost complete production hiatus, Nepal's authorities have recently licensed around 500 hydropower projects. While consumers had to endure up to 16 hours of daily power cuts until 2016, by 2024 the installed capacity is projected to quadruple to 4000MW. With this come plans of massive exports while domestic consumption remains the lowest in Asia and rapid urbanization leads to extreme dependency on fossil fuel imports from India. Ironically, the main reason for the uninterrupted electricity supply is the construction of a new international transmission line to India intended for the export of the excess electricity that is currently used for the opposite purpose.

Foreign donors have been keen to develop Nepal's hydropower potential for decades. But the challenging environment - political, financial, hydro- and geological - has established a recurring pattern of the announcement of grand schemes, years of planning and eventual abandonment. The main actors left are Chinese and Indian developers with strong government backing. China is mostly interested in new contracts for its construction industry and extended control beyond its Tibetan border. For India, however, a host of objectives converge in Nepal's rivers: dominance, electricity, upstream control over the Ganga's tributaries and close proximity to China's border.

This extension of sovereignty through hydropower infrastructures solidifies in places like the Arun valley where an Indian state-owned company recently started constructing Nepal's longest-delayed dam. Discussing competing territorial claims my paper will investigate Stuart Elden's claim that "territory is a volume rather than an area."