Small hydropower, slow violence, and gendered struggles in Northwest Vietnam

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7153152
AutoresNga Dao (0000-0002-3975-8711, York University, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume43
Fascículo6
Páginas1158-1176
Data de publicação2025-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning C Politics and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2399-6544 • E-ISSN: 2399-6552
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/23996544251318589
OpenAlexW4407162970
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas28

Small hydropower has widely been considered a renewable energy source with minimum adverse social and environmental impacts. However, the expansion of small hydropower in the northwest uplands of Vietnam over the last two decades has created and even normalized persistent and multidimensional water injustice for ethnic minority groups in the region. For some, this expansion has meant persistent, but silent, generational, and cumulative experiences of marginalization and impoverishment as well as the erosion of a way of life. Extractive activities reconstruct identities and redistribute resources and decision-making power, but not without igniting resistance. Local ethnic minority households struggle in negotiating their everyday realities, which are occupied with livelihood maintenance, social interactions, and fights over their use and control of resources. This paper unravels the particular gendered workings in responding to slow violence, drawing on photovoice and over a decade of fieldwork in the northwest uplands where hundreds of small hydrodevelopment projects have been planned and implemented since the early 2000s. The paper argues that the seemingly mundane tasks that women carry out, including cooking, weaving and dyeing fabrics, and growing crops, which are revealed through a gendered perspective to be foundational in cultivating community resilience, self-help, solidarity, resistance, and reworking in the face of ongoing structural injustices and hardships brought about by small hydropower development in Vietnam’s northwest uplands

Geography · Hydropower · Political science · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Studies · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Water Governance and Infrastructure