Large Dams, Technopolitics, and Development
Large Dams, Technopolitics, and Development
Large dams, brought into being through a combination of technological prowess, engineering expertise and political-economic calculation, have radically altered humanity’s relationship with planetary river systems. This ‘concrete revolution’ was deeply connected to global geopolitics and efforts by the United States foreign policy apparatus to exert influence over newly emerging nation-states via technical and economic assistance. This chapter introduces the book’s major themes: the intimate linkages among geopolitics, technologies, and large-scale environmental transformations carried out in the name of “development”; and the production and transfer of the powerful ideal that the river basin is the most appropriate unit for a host of inter-related water development and management activities. These themes are examined through a conceptual framework that integrates contemporary thinking on assemblages, technopolitics, environmental history and the geopolitics of development. Large dams, as technological objects constituted through assemblages of capital, knowledge and power, represent a crucial spatial and temporal node of technopolitics in the 20th century. These hybrids behave in often unpredictable ways, despite the best efforts to plan for and take account of the social and biophysical changes wrought by damming a river.
Keywords: assemblage, cold war, concrete revolution, environmental history, geopolitics of development, modernization, science and technology studies (STS), technopolitics, World Commission on Dams
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