Masculinities and hydropower in India: A feminist political ecology perspective

Abstract

Mainstreaming gender in water governance through "how to do gender" toolkits has long been a development focus. It has been widely argued that such toolkits simplify the complex, nuanced realities of inequalities by gender in relation to water and fail to pay attention to the fact that the proposed users of such gender-water toolkits, i.e. mostly male water sector professionals, lack the skills, motivation and/or incentives to apply these toolkits in their everyday work. We adopt a feminist political ecology lens to analyse some of the barriers to reduce social inequalities in the management of global commons such as international rivers. Our findings highlight the leap of faith made in the belief that gender toolkits, as they exist, will filter through layers of a predominantly masculine institutional culture to enable change in ground realities of complex inequalities by gender. Analysing the everyday workings of two hydropower development organisations in India, we show how organisational structures demonstrate a blatant culture of masculinity. These two organisations, like many others, are sites where hierarchies and inequalities based on gender are produced, performed and reproduced. This performance of masculinity promotes and rewards a culture of technical pride in reshaping nature, abiding by and maintaining hierarchy and demonstrating physical strength and emotional hardiness. In such a setting, paying attention to vulnerabilities, inequalities and disparities are incompatible objectives. Masculinities and hydropower in India: a feminist political ecology perspective 131

Feminist political ecologies of the commons and commoning (Editorial to the Special Feature)

“…Following this understanding of power, one of FPE's focus is how communities respond to socio-natural and economic changes in everyday struggles and political organising for well-being in situations of inequality, exclusion and economic poverty (Nightingale 2019). In addition, an FPE perspective pays particular attention to the narrative or framing of community and collective in relation to climate, economic and environmental changes, enabling a gendered analysis of how power relations determine as well as are co-determined by change processes at scale (Shrestha et al 2019). As discussed in the articles in this special issue, the practice of commoning needs to be analysed through the intersectional lens in order to understand how practices of oppression operate, as well as how practices of mutual support and negotiation can create systems of well-being and fair socionatural relations (Leder et al 2019; Rap and Jaskolski 2019).…”

“…Through these analyses, the paper critically unpacks long-held assumptions of collectives and the commons. Shrestha et al (2019) explore gender power relations in the context of global commons management. They apply a FPE lens to examine how hierarchies and gender inequalities are produced through performances of masculinity in two hydropower development organisations in India.…”

“…Much of the discourse on collective action in relation to climate happens without much attention to the consensualisation and de-politicisation of climate change (Swyngedouw 2011). FPE helps draw focus to the centrality of the gender dimension of power, difference and divide in climate change and environmental discourses, notably in arenas beyond the community (see Shrestha et al 2019) It is important to note that FPE scholarship does not see gender as the 'end point of critique and analysis. (…) People are seen as inhabiting multiple and fragmented identities, in which gender is but one axis of difference' (Elmhirst 2011, 130-131).…”

“…FPE scholars instead boldly position themselves politically and as feminists in their research, and this positioning is explicit in their writing and analysis (Harcourt and Nelson 2015). In this special issue, we seek to challenge hegemonic masculinist conceptions and practices of knowledge production through in-depth case studies that analyse the implementation of hydropower projects in India (Shrestha et al 2019) to knowledge production in higher education international classrooms in the Global North (Harcourt 2019).…”

Political ecology 1: From margins to center

“…Such analyses have been applied to various types of struggles and diversified ranges of issues in FPE scholarship. Some recent examples include but are not limited to the following: agriculture (Leder et al, 2019), water (Adams et al, 2018; Truelove, 2019), climate change (Gonda, 2019; Nightingale, 2017; Ojeda et al, 2020; Sultana, 2018), land (Lamb et al, 2017; Mollett, 2017; Vaz-Jones, 2018), extractive industries (Elmhirst et al, 2017), payment for ecosystem services (Bee, 2019), conservation (Gillespie and Perry, 2019), biodiversity (Bezner-Kerr, 2014), species/animals (Doubleday and Adams, 2019), health (Barry and Grady, 2019), masculinities (Behzadi, 2019; Rose and Johnson, 2017; Shrestha et al, 2019), tourism (Cole, 2017), housing (Tilley, 2017; Tummers and MacGregor, 2019), migration (Baada et al, 2019), queer ecologies (McKeithen, 2017), and resistance (de Vos and Delabre, 2018; Graddy-Lovelace, 2017). This necessarily short list of examples illustrates recent, expanding work in FPE that advances theorizations into other fields of analyses and bodies of scholarship.…”