Presentation short abstract

Dams and energy infrastructures exemplifies the neoliberal strategy of co-opting Indigenous knowledge systems into dominant techno-bureaucratic frameworks. Through co-optation environmental governance processes must delegitimize Indigenous and local epistemologies, with the goal of epistemicide.

Presentation long abstract

The integration of Indigenous and local knowledge systems into decision-making processes reflects a continuation of colonial legacies, ultimately striving to create a singular epistemic culture. Onto-epistemologically, neoliberalism transcends political and economic phenomenon towards an epistemological culture that perpetuates epistemicide through appropriating Indigenous and local knowledge systems in order to delegitimize them. Through development projects and environmental governance neoliberalism attempts to homogenize social and ecological landscapes undermining myriad ways of knowing and social modes of living.

This study investigates 'co-option' as a strategy that reinforces neoliberal dominance through an intricate interplay across coercion and collaboration. This often manifests in the use of proxy representations of Indigenous identities, leading to a form of delegitimization and managerialism that is obscured within techno-bureaucratic environmental governance. The argument here demonstrates how neoliberalism seeks to assimilate Indigenous and local knowledge systems into prevailing power structures.

The global large dams industry and the energy infrastructure in the Sakha Republic of Northern Siberia serve as case studies that exemplify the neoliberal strategy of integrating knowledge systems into dominant techno-bureaucratic frameworks, consequently suppressing and delegitimizing diverse perspectives through co-option.

Epistemicide emerges as a manifestation of such neoliberal organizational forms that aim to delegitimize the relationships inherent in non-anthropocentric onto-epistemological worldviews. This suppression of socio-ecological life ultimately leads to the demise of ways of being that center relationships with other-than-human beings, forms, and elements. The processes marked and analyzed in this scholarship underscore a deliberate separation and dissolution of connections with other-than-human constituents, which subsequently drive the commodification of "nature."