Anthropogenic Rivers
The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 16996543 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jerome Whitington (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Pages | 288 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-15 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | Anthropogenic Rivers (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.7591/9781501730924 |
| OpenAlex | W4243847970 |
| ISBN | 9781501730924 |
| Open Library | OL33563751M |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated 'hactivism.' Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas 'anthropogenic' usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a "historical ontology of ourselves," Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures
Business · Economics · Environmental planning · Environmental protection · Geography · Hydropower · Water resource management · Chemistry · Engineering · Environmental Chemistry · Environmental Science · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Transboundary Water Resource Management · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure · asia · Dams · Environmental aspects · Ethnology · Human ecology · Human Ecology · Hydroelectric power plants · Social aspects · Sustainable development
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2025 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |