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How do ‘communist’ Chinese state companies handle sacredness and religions? What role do religions and sacredness play in infrastructural conflicts? Debates on Chinese investment and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) often highlight the failure of China’s largest-ever hydropower project overseas—the Myitsone Dam, located in war-torn Buddhist Burma (Myanmar) in an ethnic Kachin Christian area. Public outcry against this mega-development led the Burmese regime to halt construction in 2011, shocking Beijing and causing an international scandal. This article explores this infrastructural conflict’s religious, sacred, and more-than-human dimensions. Based on interviews, Chinese media analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork among Kachin people since 2010, the article focuses on the project site—the famous Myitsone confluence, birthplace of the Irrawaddy River. There, local village church leaders helped lead and shelter the very earliest anti-dam resistance, despite military state repression. There also, Chinese state-owned companies encountered Catholicism, Baptism, Theravada Buddhism, and indigenous animist worlds, and described these foreign, rural religious worlds for China’s domestic audiences. Kachin dragon-kin deities, anti-dam activists, and the more-than-human charms of the local natural landscape helped create a sacredness, which the Chinese dam developers could not easily disprove. Throughout, sacred politics shaped this international infrastructure conflict.

Today opponents of large-scale dam projects in China, rather than being greeted with indifference or repression, are part of the hydropower policymaking process itself. What accounts for this dramatic change in this critical policy area surrounding China's insatiable quest for energy? InChina's Water Warriors, Andrew C. Mertha argues that as China has become increasingly market driven, decentralized, and politically heterogeneous, the control and management of water has transformed from an unquestioned economic imperative to a lightning rod of bureaucratic infighting, societal opposition, and open protest. Although bargaining has always been present in Chinese politics, more recently the media, nongovernmental organizations, and other activists-actors hitherto denied a seat at the table-have emerged as serious players in the policy-making process. Drawing from extensive field research in some of the most remote parts of Southwest China,China's Water Warriorscontains rich narratives of the widespread opposition to dams in Pubugou and Dujiangyan in Sichuan province and the Nu River Project in Yunnan province. Mertha concludes that the impact and occasional success of such grassroots movements and policy activism signal a marked change in China's domestic politics. He questions democratization as the only, or even the most illuminating, indicator of political liberalization in China, instead offering an informed and hopeful picture of a growing pluralization of the Chinese policy process as exemplified by hydropower politics. For the 2010 paperback edition, Mertha tests his conclusions against events in China since 2008, including the Olympics, the devastating 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, and the Uighar and Tibetan protests of 2008 and 2009.

Controversies around large-scale development projects offer many cases and insights which may be analyzed through the lenses of corporate social (ir)responsibility (CSIR) and business ethics studies. In this paper, we confront the CSR narratives and strategies of WeBuild (formerly known as Salini Impregilo), an Italian transnational construction company. Starting from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), we collect evidence from NGOs, environmental justice organizations, journalists, scholars, and community leaders on socio-environmental injustices and controversies surrounding 38 large hydropower schemes built by the corporation throughout the last century. As a counter-reporting exercise, we code (un)sustainability discourses from a plurality of sources, looking at their discrepancy under the critical lenses of post-normal science and political ecology, with environmental justice as a normative framework. Our results show how the mismatch of narratives can be interpreted by considering the voluntary, self-reporting, non-binding nature of CSR accounting performed by a corporation wishing to grow in a global competitive market. Contributing to critical perspectives on political CS(I)R, we question the reliability of current CSR mechanisms and instruments, calling for the inclusion of complexity dimensions in and a re-politicization of CS(I)R accounting and ethics. We argue that the fields of post-normal science and political ecology can contribute to these goals.

This article examines collaborative environmental governance under authoritarian political structures. Building on the theoretical frame of authoritarian environmentalism, it peruses fieldwork material collected during 2009–2019 to determine the most prominent features of recent collaborative governance efforts in the field of water management in Vietnam, a historically seasonal flooding-dependent country. A key feature is technocratisation, where top-down management structures and practices prioritise technocratic solutions to environmental challenges over deliberation, awareness raising, and integration of local knowledge. Another equally important feature is authoritarian intensification, by which increasingly complex environmental management functions, coupled with the state’s determination to retain political control, reinforce authoritarian governance. We jointly refer to these features as captured collaboration, signifying a strong authoritarian regime dominance in both vertical and horizontal relations of environmental governance. However, while captured collaboration still appears to be a defining collaborative characteristic, the article acknowledges rising calls for deliberative government in Vietnamese society. This is particularly outspoken in relation to the highly contested issues of hydropower construction and enhanced floods, debates that simultaneously have paved the way for a burgeoning, though much delayed, paradigm shift.

Energy security, as one of the most important components of state security, is a permanent element of academic debates and political discussions. Owing to the multidimensional and multifaceted nature of energy security, defining it is a complex process, requiring the consideration of a wide range of factors straddling economics, geology, ecology and geopolitics which decide whether we are dealing with the state of energy security or the lack of it. Energy security is usually equated with the security of supply. Another group of definitions of energy security focuses on the concept of security of services. A different approach to energy security issues is presented by energy exporting countries, whose objective is to ensure sufficiently high and stable income from sales of energy resource exports (security of demand). The subject of this paper is an analysis of the energy security of hydropower-producing countries—Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Energy security has been analyzed in the context of security of supply, services, and demand on the basis of the approach proposed by Llamosas and Sovacool. So far, no work has been carried out to analyse the hydropower sectors of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the context of the energy security comparison of both countries. It is worth emphasising that their energy security and mutual relations are important from the point of view of the stability of the entire Central Asian region. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have large hydropower potential, which, if properly used, could cover their domestic electricity demand and the surplus can be exported to neighbouring countries. Unfortunately, both countries are not utilising this potential for the time being. The main difficulty in the area of security of supply and services is the seasonality and low reliability of electricity supplies. Among the reasons for this are the poor technical and economic conditions of energy companies as a result of maintaining low tariffs, the irrecoverability of consumers’ energy bills, electricity theft, significant transmission loses and a high level of corruption. Although both countries aspire to the role of an energy exporters, they are themselves forced to import electricity from neighboring countries.

This paper examines the intersection of regional geopolitics and the governance of transboundary rivers using the case studies of multipurpose reservoirs in Himalayan South Asia. It uncovers the various ways Indian hydrocracy uses its institutional and technical expertise to strengthen India’s centrality in Nepal’s water and hydropower sectors. The practices of security undertaken by the hydrocrats are classified as structural, institutional, and statutory acts. By focusing on practices of an epistemic community like hydrocrats, this paper addresses longstanding weaknesses of the securitisation theory of being elitist and ignoring the agency of mid-level bureaucrats. It also highlights the constructivist nature of international politics. The findings contribute empirically to securitisation theory’s ‘Paris School’ of thought.

Around the world, the development of large dams has been increasingly contested. India is no exception and has seen the mobilisation of powerful domestic and transnational socio-environmental movements against dams over more than four decades. In this context, the State of Sikkim in northeast India has been entangled in prolonged hydropower development conflicts since the late 1990s. This article analyses these conflictive entanglements between the Government of India, the State Government of Sikkim, power companies and Sikkim’s autochthonous tribe, the Lepchas. It zooms in on the period of 2011–2017, which saw an abrupt escalation of the conflicts to analyse the messy, deeply political and often unpredictable and contradictory world of dam construction and its contestations. Our analysis is informed by the power cube framework developed by John Gaventa. Our analysis shows how hydropower development is deeply intertwined with local patronage relationships. We show how local elections bring out dam conflict and the operation of power into the open, sometimes leading to abrupt and unexpected switches in positions in relation to hydropower development. We show that these switches should be seen not only as “strategic electoral tactics” but also and importantly as contentious political struggles that (re)configure power in the region. We show how in this process, powerful political actors continuously seek to stabilise power relations among the governing and the governed, choreographing a specific socio-hydraulic order that stretches way beyond simple pro- and anti-dam actors and coalitions as it is embedded in deep hydro(-electro) politics and power plays.

The ability of Southeast Asia's largest economies to develop renewable energy sectors is important for the reduction of carbon emissions. A popular policy tool for jump-starting growth in renewables is feed-in-tariffs (FITs), whereby the government pays a long-term and mutually agreed rate to independent power producers to develop renewable energies such as solar, biomass, wind, and hydropower. Indonesia and the Philippines have both adopted FITs in recent years, and the result has been a strong growth of renewable energy in the Philippines, but not in Indonesia. This difference can be partly explained by variances in policy design and political economic conditions that have impacted policy success. The Philippines enacted a FIT scheme that reflected several best practices in policy design. The political economic conditions of energy markets in the Philippines were also initially more favourable. The variance in these components helps to explain the divergent results of their respective FIT systems.

The political economy of dam development in South America is changing as a result of a resurgence in water infrastructure investments. The arrival of Chinese-funded projects in the region has altered a context traditionally dominated by multilateral development banks. Tensions are escalating around new dam projects and the environmental impact assessment process is increasingly the site of politicization around water in the region. In this perspective, we examine the most recent surge in dam development in South America, the resulting environmental and social impacts, and the mobilization of civil society and environmental groups that have developed in response to these projects. In the absence of regionally shared standards for environmental assessment and regional mechanisms to mitigate the emerging conflicts—primarily occurring between companies, states, and civil society—we argue there is a risk of a race to the bottom to finance infrastructure projects with laxer environmental and social standards.

This article explores the factors that hinder and promote the deployment of renewable energy generating infrastructure in/across the Swiss cantons (i.e., the country's federal units). Using the example of small-scale hydropower, we shed light on how political regulations at the cantonal level interact with national policies and the local political process to affect the deployment of renewable energy production. The analysis demonstrates that political regulations can both foster and hinder the deployment of renewable energy production. While the national feed-in tariff scheme is revealed to be a beneficial framework condition, cantonal regulations hamper, rather than facilitate, the deployment of small-scale hydropower. Moreover, inclusive local processes and the existence of local entrepreneurs seem to act as a trigger for the local acceptance of renewable energy generation infrastructure. More generally, we conclude that, quite independently of whether state structures are decentralized or centralized, subnational and local leeway in the definition and organization of projects can help to prevent or deal with local opposition.