AbstractThe Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) is a transnational multi-dam infrastructural development project to sell water from Lesotho to South Africa. Based on field and secondary research in Lesotho, I demonstrate how infrastructural projects such as the LHWP shape a geography of risk and become a medium through which riskscapes are created or exacerbated in both South Africa and Lesotho. Project-induced changes interacted with and intensified co-occurring vulnerabilities for communities directly and indirectly affected by the LHWP over time. I focus specifically on risks to livelihood, food insecurity and health, within the context of increased climatic shocks in the region.
The construction phases of large dam and infrastructural projects often extend over long periods of time, creating social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic consequences in the proximate communities and landscapes. The temporality of the phases of the project – from planning to construction to post-construction – reveal more layered and wide-ranging consequences from the social and environmental changes that result, sharpened by greater attention to how these changes unfold across multiple timescales and sites of the project. Using the case study of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), I draw on a political ecology approach that uses longitudinal data, including interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lesotho since 1997, to illustrate how active project narratives draw from and promulgate an affective economy of anticipation in ways that aim to both sustain the hope of people affected by the project and contain their criticism of the project amidst a continued investment by the state in the expansion of the LHWP. As people directly affected experience disjunctures between the promises and the realities of the project over time, subsequent phases of the project are simultaneously renewed and recast through a logic of improvement that emphasizes changes in the implementation of the project while continuing to invest in the future imaginary of development that requires going forward with project plans. A logic of continuity and improvement structures this continued commitment to the capital intensive LHWP through the strategic mobilization of phases that scaffold both the material and physical dimensions of the project, but also the affective and anticipatory hopes of prosperity that the project represents. In this case, it also reveals how project authorities weave these dimensions – the material and the aspirational – into specific planned changes and improvements to address previous and ongoing concerns as projects progress over time. This longitudinal approach demonstrates the importance of temporal and affective dimensions to our understanding of the complex, multi-faceted consequences of resource extractive mega-dam projects such as the LHWP, particularly as they further rationalize the resource extractive approach to economic development in the region.Keywords: development, dams, infrastructure, political ecology, temporality, affect, resource extraction, economy of anticipation, displacement, construction, Lesotho, Southern Africa
The construction phases of large dam and infrastructural projects often extend over long periods of time, creating social, environmental, cultural, political, and economic consequences in the proximate communities and landscapes. The temporality of the phases of the project – from planning to construction to post-construction – reveal more layered and wide-ranging consequences from the social and environmental changes that result, sharpened by greater attention to how these changes unfold across multiple timescales and sites of the project. Using the case study of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), I draw on a political ecology approach that uses longitudinal data, including interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lesotho since 1997, to illustrate how active project narratives draw from and promulgate an affective economy of anticipation in ways that aim to both sustain the hope of people affected by the project and contain their criticism of the project amidst a continued investment by the state in the expansion of the LHWP. As people directly affected experience disjunctures between the promises and the realities of the project over time, subsequent phases of the project are simultaneously renewed and recast through a logic of improvement that emphasizes changes in the implementation of the project while continuing to invest in the future imaginary of development that requires going forward with project plans. A logic of continuity and improvement structures this continued commitment to the capital intensive LHWP through the strategic mobilization of phases that scaffold both the material and physical dimensions of the project, but also the affective and anticipatory hopes of prosperity that the project represents. In this case, it also reveals how project authorities weave these dimensions – the material and the aspirational – into specific planned changes and improvements to address previous and ongoing concerns as projects progress over time. This longitudinal approach demonstrates the importance of temporal and affective dimensions to our understanding of the complex, multi-faceted consequences of resource extractive mega-dam projects such as the LHWP, particularly as they further rationalize the resource extractive approach to economic development in the region.Keywords: development, dams, infrastructure, political ecology, temporality, affect, resource extraction, economy of anticipation, displacement, construction, Lesotho, Southern Africa
In: L' Europe en formation: revue d'études sur la construction européenne et le fédéralisme = journal of studies on European integration and federalism, Band 385, Heft 1, S. 74-86
L'article montre que la rhétorique du gouvernement tadjik sur le « mythe de la radicalisation » relative à la menace « islamiste » dans le pays rend difficile la distinction entre ce récit et le véritable danger posé par les mouvements islamistes. Cela crée un climat opaque et confus au Tadjikistan avec des acteurs différents, un droit restreint à la liberté de religion pour les citoyens tadjiks et un gouvernement tadjik pas toujours coopératif. Il est donc difficile pour l'UE d'aborder le phénomène de manière adéquate. L'article indique finalement comment l'UE peut affiner sa stratégie actuelle en appliquant des définitions exactes, en fixant des objectifs clairs et réalistes, en tenant compte des opportunités de coopération mondiales et régionales, et en se concentrant sur son approche en termes de « soft power ».
In: Integration: Vierteljahreszeitschrift des Instituts für Europäische Politik in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Arbeitskreis Europäische Integration, Band 39, Heft 4, S. 333-340
Research and policy interest in questions of environmental waste is growing, especially plastic bag pollution. Where trash disposal and recycling are not highly regulated, the proliferation of plastic bags has created dramatic social and environmental consequences. In this article, we draw on 30 interviews with women who sell goods in markets in Mali as an entry point into investigating this issue through the interrelated dimensions of identity, gender, globalization, and the environment. We find the choices of women become suspect and blamed for this environmental issue despite their having few socio-political options, while global and local political and economic elites have largely been responsible for implementing a series of policies and programs that have heightened the local effects of globalization while diminishing the services available to deal with the environmental and cultural dimensions of these changes. The issue of plastic bag pollution demonstrates the environmental consequences of development strategies that have emphasized economic growth with seemingly little concern or value for local cultures and environments, let alone the experiences and lives of poor women.
Women generally initiate, lead, and constitute the rank and file of environmental justice activism. However, there is little research on why there are comparatively so few men involved in these movements. Using the environmental justice movement in the Central Appalachian coalfields as a case study, we examine the ways that environmental justice activism is gendered, with a focus on how women's and men's identities both shape and constrain their involvement in gendered ways. The analysis relies on 20 interviews with women and men grassroots activists working for environmental justice in the coalfields of Appalachia. We find that women draw on their identities as "mothers" and "Appalachians" to justify their activism, while the hegemonic masculinity of the region, which is tied to the coal industry, has the opposite effect on men, deterring their movement involvement. We explore the implications of these findings for understanding the relationship of gender to environmental justice activism.