Presentation short abstract

A poststructuralist urban political ecological approach helps analyse how the everyday state shapes urban water governance in the city of Udaipur in India. The focus is on touristic imaginaries shaping the waterscape of Udaipur, including River Ayad and interconnected lake system.

Presentation long abstract

This paper focuses on the production of urban environments in South Asian cities, through an analysis of the urban waterscape in the city of Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. The governance of River Ayad and its interconnected lake system in Udaipur is central to shaping the city’s touristic urban imaginaries, which has implications for its society, culture, economy and the urban environment. Water governance is influenced by a range of actors - both state and non-state – which leads to complex governance patterns which have underpinnings of power relations (Cornea et al., 2017, Swyngedouw, 1999; Truelove, 2019). Such power gets enacted and reproduced in everyday practices and micro-politics of the actors and is an integral aspect of urban environmental politics (Anand, 2017; Gandy, 2022; Ranganathan, 2014). I conducted an ethnographic governance study (Cornea et al., 2017) to analyse the diverse powers, rationalities, knowledges and interactions between state and non-state actors, adopting a poststructuralist urban political ecological lens which enables studying the diffused and dispersed forms of power in everyday governance. The findings suggest that the power relations between municipal actors and smart city experts, and the knowledge politics between state actors and environmental activists interplay to form specific forms of urban environmental governance in the city. This study highlights the challenges of urban water governance in water-stressed, small cities across the post-colonial developing world, which are grappling with pressures from population growth, rapid urbanization, and climate change.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the fluidity of memory narratives repositions Kashmir’s River Jhelum as a dynamic hydrosocial archive shaped by erasure, eco-social change, and lived experience, drawing on literary materials and fieldwork (in 2024) to map emergent riverhoods and shifting mnemonic ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

The River Jhelum in Kashmir is deeply embedded in the region's ecological and cultural fabric, yet often reduced to romanticized, monolithic narratives. Moving beyond this, memory narratives—through their fluid plurality—can potentially position the river as a dynamic archive of memory, identity and resilience, and critically reimagine it as a multiplicity informed by diverse determinants and lived experiences. These memories create a dialogic space for the interaction of riverhood strategies and eco-social interventions through repetition, spatial symbolism and sensory recollection, and serve to decenter fixed archives through emergent and affective forms of remembrance. Within this political ecology of river memory, this research maps the erasure of dominant mnemonic structures from the riverscape to interrogate the interaction between existing collective imaginaries of the river and the eco-social interventions that shape its political and ecological cartographies (like the displacement of Hanji houseboats and the degrading waters of the Jhelum) which together co-produce new rhetorics in river memory. It further examines how collective imaginaries confront ecological, infrastructural, and political interventions to shape emergent riverhoods created through these contesting forces.

Drawing on literary evidence—particularly select graphic novel panels and film scenes—and ethnographic mappings gathered during fieldwork in Kashmir (October-November, 2024), it critically locates how the Jhelum’s memories participate in a political ecology of resilience and retention using the framework of riverhood and eco-society (Escobar and Boelens). In doing so, the Jhelum becomes a critical site for examining how hydrosocial and mnemonic landscapes are continually reconfigured, shaping and shaped by the memory ecology into riverine futures.

Presentation short abstract

In peri-urban Coimbatore, urbanisation and socio-ecological constraints have undermined regenerative water use, culminating in the drying out of Kousika River. A grassroots movement formed to imagine and materialise hydrosocial (counter) territories to oppose the unsustainable mode of urbanisation.

Presentation long abstract

In peri-urban Coimbatore multiple stakeholders clash over water access. The city’s fringe constitutes an arena of contestation where rapid growth and social-ecological constraints lead to a mode of urbanisation that undermines the regenerative use of the local water resources. The complete drying out of Kousika River is a direct product of these dynamics. Within this context, a grassroots movement formed to counter this development. By mobilising the concept of hydrosocial territory, this study aims at understanding the intricate hydrosocial entanglements that make up Coimbatore’s urban fringe, its water and river management, as well as the exemplary struggle of a grassroots movement that stands in opposition to this unsustainable mode of urbanisation. The study is based on fieldwork including (exploratory) semi-structured interviews and transect walks. The analysis shows how peri-urbanisation creates a spatial regime where rivers and water bodies as well as their hydrological functions are ruptured, appropriated, and transformed. This restructuring of Coimbatore’s peri-urban hydrosocial territory is historically embedded and largely shaped by policy arrangements. Furthermore, the study traces how the local grassroots movement imagines and materialises hydrosocial counter territories. It asserts its territorial claims on multiple scales while leveraging the state’s ambiguity. Hereby, the movement successively extended its hydrosocial territory and achieved large-scale transformation of Coimbatore’s waterscape. By framing local hydrosocial dynamics in the broader theoretical context of urban metabolism, the study goes beyond understanding water flows as merely technical or politically neutral, but highlights how they are socially organised, subject to political struggles, and instrumental for environmental degradation.

Presentation short abstract

Communities in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans resist shrimp aquaculture and rising salinity through women-led mobilisation to restore freshwater and livelihoods. A multimodal photovoice project captures their struggles, solidarities, and climate justice claims.

Presentation long abstract

Bangladesh is widely recognised as a frontline of global climate change, where climatic vulnerabilities intersect with longstanding social inequalities. In the Sundarbans delta, located within the world’s largest river delta and mangrove forest, rural marginalisation, environmental degradation, and gendered burdens converge most sharply around the scarcity of safe drinking water. Although salinity intrusion is often attributed to sea-level rise, it has been exacerbated by the expansion of shrimp and crab aquaculture, which has been promoted since the 1980s as a climate adaptation strategy. While shrimp exports positioned Bangladesh among the world’s major producers, they also generated profound socio-ecological changes, reshaping gender roles, reconfiguring class relations, and destabilising rural livelihoods.

Women bear the heaviest consequences of salinity: walking long distances to collect freshwater and facing health risks, including skin infections, reproductive health complications, and racialised impacts that further influence social recognition. These everyday hardships have fuelled recurring waves of resistance. Since the 1990s, inhabitants have mobilised against shrimp aquaculture, demanding access to freshwater and a return to rice cultivation. Between November 2023 and July 2024, residents of three villages in Koikhali Union—led by small farming families and women—reclaim a government-abandoned rainwater-harvesting canal. Despite intimidation and political pressure, they dismantled saltwater infrastructure, restored the canal, and revived freshwater storage, enabling rice cultivation to resume.

This multimodal essay, created collaboratively by community members, photographer Rasel, and Hossain, draws on photovoice methods to combine images, text, and sound. It highlights how marginalised communities in the Sundarbans confront climate injustices through everyday struggles and solidarity.

Presentation short abstract

Chars (shifting riverine islands) in the Brahmaputra River are shaped by hydrosocial interventions that displace communities and dismantle indigenous ways of living with the river. This paper foregrounds subaltern knowledge and “settling-on-the-move” as climate-resilient alternative.

Presentation long abstract

The paper situates the Brahmaputra floodplains in Assam (India) as fluid territories where infrastructures, mapping regimes, and development discourses operate as instruments of state-making, ideological control, and contested development. State-led infrastructure projects displace riverine communities and erode vernacular ecologies, amplifying the socio-cultural othering of Bengali Muslims amid Assam's identity politics and India's rising authoritarianism. A dialectic emerges between two river ontologies: one based on taming nature through technocratic ‘risk fixes’ and the other grounded in adaptation and cohabitation with flooding, erosion and accretion.

This paper explores how eco-hydrologically insensitive governance and disaster management heighten exposure to hazards while delegitimizing amphibious livelihoods in the chars (shifting riverine islands) of the Brahmaputra River. In response, it proposes ‘settling-on-the-move’ as a critical design and policy heuristic that acknowledges the riverine communities’ situated expertise through seasonal mobility, amphibious land-use, and flexible tenure/rights. Drawing on fieldwork and interpretative mapping, it documents alternative knowledge systems and traces subaltern strategies of resistance that sustain ecological autonomy under conditions of surveillance, cartographic enclosure, and climate volatility.

Historically central to Assam’s agricultural economy and a refuge for Bengali Muslim communities, chars invite contemplation of alternative realities and narratives that envision char-scapes as uncharted territories, retaining the freedom that their inherent illegibility offers. By articulating a repertoire of grounded practices through which subaltern actors reconfigure hydrosocial territories and counter-mapping methods, the paper contributes to debates on river management, state control and subaltern resistance to inspire alternative development policies and climate adaptation strategies in other parts of South Asia.

Presentation short abstract

The springs of Kashmir (known locally as chashmas or nags) are not ordinary; they are special and sacred, spread throughout the region, and not a single one is without an interesting story. The stories surrounding their sacrality reveal different dimensions of state power.

Presentation long abstract

The springs of Kashmir are not ordinary springs; they are special and have long been considered sacred (muqaddas) in Kashmir, transcending religious affiliation. Their significance emerges from ancient Sanskrit traditions that link them to deities, Persianate histories (tārīkhs), and Sufi hagiographies (tazkiras) that imbue them with the barakah of saints. In the Mughal period, they were aestheticised within an architecture of power. Today, oral traditions continue to reveal how local communities relate to these waters as more than hydrological resources; they are storied landscapes through which spatial identity and political belonging are articulated. This talk brings Sanskrit and Persian textual traditions into conversation with contemporary oral ethnography to explore how ideas about the sacred nature of these water sources have been transmitted, reconfigured, and contested. In doing so, it highlights the epistemic gap between scientific studies of water quality and the historic, lived, and ecological meanings that such springs carry. Framing these waters as sites of contested knowledge production, the article asks how local narratives of sacrality complicate the state’s developmental projects and the framing of Kashmir’s ecology within an Indic national imaginary. By foregrounding local and historical perspectives, it contributes to debates on ecological justice by demonstrating how communities articulate alternative ways of knowing, belonging, and relating to these waters through narrative and ritual performance that resist statist framings. The article argues for a transdisciplinary approach that considers the interconnectedness of environment, history, and science in shaping just and sustainable futures

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the 'afterlives' of Sri Lanka's Mahaweli Development Project (1963-2010), showing how mega water infrastructure continues to shape water governance, climate politics and socio-ecological relations long after construction, with implications for understanding dam projects globally.

Presentation long abstract

For centuries, rivers have been dammed, diverted and engineered in the name of progress, transforming riverine landscapes and societies. Since the mid-twentieth century, mega irrigation and hydropower projects have been central to these transformations, justified by promises of economic growth, modernisation and nation-building. Such projects have reconfigured entire river basins and reshaped the livelihoods of millions, attracting widespread criticism for their social, ecological and economic costs. Far less attention, however, has been paid to their afterlives – not simply as the persistence of infrastructure over time, but as evolving political, epistemic, and socio-ecological processes through which their legacies acquire and produce new meanings, functions and forms of power. Drawing on insights from critical development studies, hydrosocial literature and work on infrastructure politics, the paper addresses this concern through an investigation into the afterlives of Sri Lanka’s Mahaweli Development Project (1963-2010), one of the world’s most ambitious postcolonial hydraulic infrastructure projects. Based on qualitative research conducted between 2017-2023, the study reveals how the MDP’s afterlives have evolved beyond a ‘water project’ into a government institution responsible for the country’s climate change policies. Additionally, the paper demonstrates how the MDP has produced an evolving series of socio-ecological issues that are difficult to detect, as they manifest intergenerationally. The paper concludes by outlining a conceptual framework for a future research agenda on studying the afterlives of hydraulic infrastructure projects at a time where a new wave of large dams is being constructed globally in response to climate change.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines visual stories by marginalized children and youth in the Indian Sundarbans, showing how climate threats and human interventions unsettle their hydro-social world and endanger livelihoods, urging a rethink of development through ecological justice.

Presentation long abstract

The Indian Sundarbans, a dynamic landscape where land and sea converge with the sky, is shaped by the intricate interplay between forest and river systems. Since November 2019, 'The Mangrove School Project' has shed light on the interconnected ecological health, tracing the long history of interventions across land, forest, and water, while foregrounding the lived experiences of children and youth (ages 12–21) within the Indian Sundarbans. In this region, livelihoods are inextricably linked to the environment. This research recognizes the often-silenced perspectives of its 7.2 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom belong to marginalized Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, who daily face the escalating threats of climate change and human-induced disasters. While climate challenges are seen as an unavoidable reality, it is the human-driven interventions that generate the greatest anxiety among local people.

This paper explores the visual narratives of the marginalized children and youth, who reflect on their lived realities and their parents’ ongoing struggle for survival. Through participatory visual methodologies, these young voices reveal how hydro-social spaces in the Sundarbans are being destabilized by technological interventions enacted under the guise of socio-economic development. Their stories warn of an impending erasure—not only of livelihoods but of entire habitats—underscoring an urgent need to rethink dominant developmental paradigms and to reimagine the delta through the lens of ecological justice, while reshaping this fragile deltaic region.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explains how the Indian state drives hydropower expansion through political-economic de-risking--weakening regulation, easing credit, absorbing stalled projects—while resisting local opposition, producing a form of green developmentalism that protects entrenched interests.

Presentation long abstract

This paper critically examines the political economy of hydropower in India since its global reconfiguration as ‘green energy’ in the early 2000s. While an expedient convergence of interests amongst key stakeholders--global, national and subnational- contributed to the greening of hydropower in India, this reframing did not produce the expected flows of private capital. The state has persisted in its support for hydropower development, citing its importance for grid stabilisation and national security, despite popular resistance among local stakeholders who contest the consumption-driven development model. To understand why the Indian state frames hydropower as green energy and continues to pursue it despite challenges in attracting private investment, the article posits that this greening experiment must be situated within a longer continuum of state policy towards hydropower. It argues that the greening of hydropower is driven less by global finance and more by domestic political economy that undermines local ecological autonomy. In particular, the state has adopted political and financial "de-risking" techniques that include diluting environmental regulation and easing access to credit, while handling contentious elements such as land acquisition, absorbing stalling (or stalled) projects when all else fails. It concludes that the Indian case of greening hydropower represents a distinctive form of green developmentalism, where the state pursues its long-term agendas, protects powerful interests, and leaves coal hegemony untouched.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how diverse governance rationalities shape water management across Nepal–India border rivers. It argues that embracing pluralistic and adaptive approaches can strengthen resilience to floods, droughts, and climate challenges in the Anthropocene.

Presentation long abstract

Nepal–India borderlands are increasingly vulnerable to hydrological extremes of floods and drought, worsened by climate change in the Anthropocene. While major river basins along the border, such as the Koshi and Gandak, are governed by bilateral treaties, these have been controversial and inadequate. Simultaneously, hundreds of small rivers, rivulets, and streams flow from Nepal into India, remaining outside formal bilateral frameworks and creating complex challenges. Existing scholarship has focused on state-centric, technocratic, legal, and fragmented community-based approaches, neglecting lived experiences and plural worldviews. Drawing on the Theory of Plural Rationality (Cultural Theory) by anthropologist Mary Douglas, this analysis examined how diverse governance rationalities (hierarchical, individualist, egalitarian, and fatalist) interact across three transboundary rivers: the treaty-based Koshi, the medium-sized and non-treaty Tinau, and the small, marginalised Pandai basin. The study used a qualitative case study approach, drawing on desk review, field observation, and semi-structured interviews with multiple actors in the borderlands. Findings show that the dominance of hierarchical, top-down governance has deepened water-related vulnerabilities. In contrast, spaces where multiple rationalities interact through informal cooperation or polycentric arrangements demonstrate greater adaptive capacity in managing extremes. The study contributes to policy thinking by advocating for “clumsy solutions” that embrace institutional diversity and enable dynamic negotiation among rationalities. Such an approach is suited to the complex and climate-stressed realities of transboundary river governance in the Anthropocene. The paper concludes that fostering pluralistic, adaptive, and multi-level governance is essential for sustainable and equitable water management in Nepal–India borderlands.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the legacy of control over River Adi Ganga,Kolkata, linking colonial science to contemporary statemaking and the exclusionary narratives of development that reinforced class hierarchies, which require a reimagining of inclusive urban water governance practices in the global South

Presentation long abstract

The River Adi Ganga in Kolkata, a historic channel of the Bhagirathi-Hooghly and a 'sacred space' or tirtha— has recently been a target of selective "revival" under Kolkata’s urban development agenda, a profound act of state-making, drawing its roots from colonial tools of control. Transformed from a once vibrant and sacralized waterway, into a neglected sewer choking under urban hubris— the Adi Ganga is not a dead river but remains a potent hydrosocialscape where histories of power, erasure, and resistance are sedimented.

This paper explores the role of colonial hydraulic interventions on South Asian environment and society beyond the technical fixes, but as oppressive apparatuses that imposed a modern, sanitized, and commercially legible order upon a complex waterscape central to local ecology, pilgrimage, and vernacular lifeworlds. It also sheds light on the post-colonial legacies of the Adi Ganga in the city, exploring the role of governance discourses of "pollution," "encroachment," and later, "heritage revival," in systematically reinforcing caste and class hierarchies and criminalizing vulnerable communities. This paper also highlights the need for subaltern strategies of resistance and remembrance, in mobilizing alternative hydrosocial imaginaries for the Adi Ganga, using old maps, vernacular literature, pilgrimage routes, and oral histories—to materially and discursively reclaim the river. These acts of hydrosocial counter-mapping, challenge the state’s fragmented, amnesiac governance and assert the Adi Ganga’s continued socio-ecological vitality, thus demonstrating how a "lost" urban river remains a critical site for contesting dominant development paradigms, and reconstructing more inclusive and 'just’ hydrosocial futures in South Asia.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how industrialization of the Kosasthalaiyar River in Ennore produces inter-subaltern hierarchies of vulnerability among fisher castes, Dalit fishers, women, and nonhumans, revealing how power, precarity, and resistance shape subaltern environmentalism.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the transformation of the Kosasthalaiyar River in North Chennai from an estuarine lifeline to an industrial river sustaining the city’s extractive economy. Once supporting fishing, saltpan, and agrarian livelihoods, the river now bears toxic effluents from power plants, ports, and petrochemical industries, intensifying ecological precarity and social inequality.

Grounded in political ecology, the paper conceptualizes the Kosasthalaiyar as a hydrosocial territory where state-led industrialization and caste-based urban planning reproduce spatial hierarchies. Subalternity is relational and is in continuous construction through its interaction with hegemony and power. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s notion of the Anthropocene as “unequal human agency, unequal human vulnerability, unequal impacts,” the paper emphasizes that the degree of subalternity differs among various groups within Ennore, among fisher castes, Dalit fishermen, women, and nonhuman species—creating inter-subaltern hierarchies.

Using ethnographic research, it documents the social practices and differentiated access, vulnerabilities, and precarity of Ennore’s communities, who contest environmental degradation through alternative practices of care, protest, and adaptation. In recognising how vulnerability and resistance are differentiated, the paper situates subaltern environmentalism as a politics attentive to layered precarity- human and nonhuman alike. It calls for urban and environmental planning that centers these plural voices, reimagining the Kosasthalaiyar not as an industrial frontier but as a living commons requiring justice, restoration, and inclusion.