Presentation short abstract

I show how different actors mobilise divergent temporalities in the Environmental Impact Assessment for a proposed dam. While state actors use foreshortened timescales to obscure impacts and promote the dam, residents highlight impacts to seasonality, fish lifecycles, and livelihoods to resist it.

Presentation long abstract

Time is increasingly central to political ecology analyses of contests over proposed infrastructure development and struggles for socio-ecological justice. While scholars have shown how different actors narrow or broaden the spatial scale of impacts to obscure or highlight impacts during development processes, less work examines how temporality and temporal scale are mobilised. Drawing on empirical fieldwork, I examine the contested Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the long-proposed Yuam River water diversion project in the Thai-Myanmar borderlands of the Salween River Basin. I show how state actors and consultants deploy foreshortened timescales that overlook long-term and non-human temporalities to minimise project impacts. Salween residents and civil society actors draw on divergent temporalities to foreground overlooked impacts including disruptions to the timing and rhythms of seasonal water flows, and fish migration and lifecycles, as well as multi-generational impacts. Many residents emphasised the time that they had invested into caring for their land and homes, and that the project would negatively impact their seasonally-adapted livelihoods. These temporal impacts underpin residents’ opposition to the project and motivate resistance. Overall, this paper shows how differently-placed actors invoke divergent temporal frames to shape whose voices and which impacts count during EIA. Such debates over the temporal scale and scope of impacts matter because they shape development decision-making and outcomes. This paper addresses pertinent questions in political ecology about whose voices count in shaping the future of the river and riverine livelihoods in the Basin.