Dams and Damages. Conflicting Epistemological Frameworks and Interests Concerning “Compensation” for the Misicuni Project’s Socio-Environmental Impacts in Cochabamba, Bolivia

Abstract

The Misicuni multipurpose hydraulic project was designed to transfer water from a neighboring watershed to the Cochabamba Valley in the center of Bolivia for domestic, hydropower, and agricultural use. The project involved the construction of a 120 m high large dam and a 19 km transfer tunnel, which negatively affected the rural indigenous host communities that were deprived of productive lands, houses, and livelihoods. This article critically analyzes the process to compensate for harmful effects, demonstrating the existence of divergent knowledge systems, interpretations, and valuing of what was affected and how the impacts had to be compensated. The analysis shows that the compensation was fundamentally a process of negotiation about the meaning and the contested commensuration that was implemented in a context of unequal power relations between state institutions and the indigenous population. This led to unfavorable arrangements for the affected communities. The article details the discussions about impacts, knowledge, and values of key elements of the compensation process and highlights how “compensation” was embedded in the wider struggle over territorial control and natural resource governance. The unreliability of the state institutions worsened the negative impacts for the rural communities because the negotiated outcomes were not always materialized.

Contesting Hydropower Dams in the Eastern Himalaya: The Cultural Politics of Identity, Territory and Self-Governance Institutions in Sikkim, India

“…Continuously maintained and updated collective identity enables them to engage in fierce, successful collective actions. In times of modernist commensuration through large-scale hydropower development (imposing a common metric to determine "value", "progress", "development", and "efficient hydro-territorial knowledge" [24,88]), the Dzumsas strategically respond with incommensurate cultural-political notions of animated mountains and sacred territory, such as manifested in the Chya ritual practice. This way, the Lachungpas and Lachenpas effectively engage in the battlefield of culture, knowledge and identity, defending and at the same time reshaping their collective identity and territory.…”

Contested Knowledges: Large Dams and Mega-Hydraulic Development

“…"A range of powerful, transnationally allied groups and organizations have historically promoted the construction of these projects: politicians, bureaucrats, landed classes, and industrialists, multinational corporations, the World Bank, and other international organizations, as well as transnational professional associations of engineers and scientists" [7] (p. 3), which he calls an informal international "big dam regime". Underlying this regime are the deeply rooted values, norms and principles that, together, have promoted a development vision that was conceptualized nearly a century ago and which has been unleashed since the 1950s and 1960s (see, in this issue [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]). This vision equated development as the largescale, top-down, techno-centric pursuit of economic growth through the intensive exploitation of natural resources, that commonly disregards alternative knowledge systems, development trajectories and human suffering.…”

“…Hydropower and other mega-hydraulic projects have long been a deeply controversial issue, generating intense local, national and transnational disputes among proponents and opponents. Large-scale water infrastructure development has been shown to generate profound social and environmental impacts, the more so since the burdens and benefits are unevenly distributed among population groups and locations [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. Commonly, mega-hydraulic projects aim to supply water and/or energy to industrial growth sectors, large-scale capitalist export agriculture, and the growing thirst of mega-cities and urban zones [18,19].…”

Mobilizing Water Actors and Bodies of Knowledge. The Multi-Scalar Movement against the Río Grande Dam in Málaga, Spain

“…This drive to tame and control natural order through technical-positivist science and large-scale engineering-a universalizing phenomenon and force that is also present in other parts of the world-has been portrayed as indispensable for cities to develop and grow, and conceptualized as 'urbanizing nature' [31] (p. 276) (for comparison with similar experiences in other regions, see for instance [12,13,16,22,28,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]). For this, a range of modernist 'commensuration' mechanisms are put to work that oversimplify, standardize, and sideline the diversities and complexities intrinsic in life, to build a common metric that will make territories, livelihoods, values, meanings, and knowledge comparisons, which are manageable and governable [42] (see also the Bolivian Misicuni case, in this Special Issue, on defining 'rightful' compensation for dam damages [37]). As a political utopian project, it is rooted, among others, in philosophical thinking that ranges from Francis Bacon [43] to Jeremy Bentham [44,45]-seeking 'the greatest happiness for the majority' by means of calculability, technology, and socio-technical control [46,47].…”