Hydropower, Hope and the Politics of Uncertainty with Udisha Saklani

This seminar challenges the tendency to frame hydropower politics through simple binaries - pro-dam or anti-dam, consent or resistance, modernity or tradition. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across Nepal’s Himalayas and Sikkim in northeast

India between 2019 and 2022, I argue that communities living alongside large dams are neither passive victims nor unified resisters. Instead, they are hopeful, calculating, and often contradictory actors navigating uneven development on their own terms.

Communities near the Arun III project in eastern Nepal are enrolled in shareholding schemes, employment promises, and benefit-sharing arrangements that generate not only financial stakes but emotional ones - hope, pride, and aspiration, alongside frustration when those promises remain unfulfilled. Residents describe selling farmland to hydropower developers as climate change erodes agricultural livelihoods; investing borrowed savings in hydropower shares even as dividends remain years away; and supporting dam construction while demanding better roads, jobs, and schools.

By foregrounding these entangled material and affective dynamics, the paper introduces two analytical concepts. The first, financialised subjectivities, captures how communities are reshaped by investment logics, risk, and speculation. The second, affective governance, explains how states and developers mobilise emotions such as national pride, memories of electricity scarcity, and geopolitical anxieties to build legitimacy for large infrastructure. Together, these lenses reveal hydropower development as neither a straightforward imposition nor a freely chosen pathway, but an ongoing negotiation between state ambitions, global capital, and everyday life in the Himalayas. 

About the Just Transitions and Interdisciplinary Peace (JTIP) Seminar Series

The JTIP Seminar Series involves regular presentations and discussions convened in a hyflex format, where speakers share their ongoing and impactful research on the themes outlined above. Participation is open to the general public, although the JTIP research group is based at the Global Institutes at King’s College London. Please get in touch if you want to be involved.