The Institutional Condition of Contested Hydropower: The Theun Hinboun–International Rivers Collaboration

Abstract

This article describes an attempt to collaborate by a major hydropower firm in Laos with an activist NGO that had forced the company to deal with the environmental problems it had caused. The collaboration demonstrates activists’ destructuring effects on hydropower development institutions over the past three decades through a case study that can be examined in detail. Against the threat of greenwashing or other forms of sustainability communication, the attempt to forge a way to neutrally evaluate environmental claims both was doomed to fail and simply replicated, rather than resolved, the institutional conditions of contested hydropower. I argue that activists have denaturalized expert knowledge through systematic denial of authoritative expertise, while in turn creating the condition for sustainability enclaves that can take root wherever contestation makes its mark. This view comes from attention paid to risk management and its close relation to media, including durable environmental relations that function as ‘new media’ crucial for transnational activist networks.

Keywords:

• Laos
• hydropower
• networks
• new media
• institutions

Notes

¹Posting to LaoFab group email list 7 May 2011.

²IRN has since been renamed International Rivers.

³The ‘soft law’ perspective I offer here helps make sense of a series of obligatory norms which do not circulate through the state. See Moore (2001).

⁴Additionally, there was never a commitment within the company to rigorous social science to inform environmental practice. The emphasis was placed on experimenting to see what worked, under the belief that research – including baseline socio-economic data – was expensive and unnecessary. In my dissertation, I identify this poverty of knowledge infrastructure as one aspect of the ‘production of uncertainty’.

⁵Posting to LaoFab group email list 20 April 2011.