Analyze

Sylvia Wynter (2003) suggests that our current struggles in Western colonized society regarding racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ethnicism, climate change, environmental destruction, and the unequal distribution of resources are rooted in what she argues is the overrepresentation of the descriptive statement of Man as human, which only recognizes white, wealthy, able-bodied, heterosexual men as "human." As such, just as I argue Black feminist writers and scholars have drawn on speculative methods and Afrofuturism, the use of twentieth-century technology and speculative imagination to address issues within Black and African diasporic communities (see Dery & Dery, 1994), to insist on and explore the full humanity of Black girls, women, and femmes, so too have Black and African diasporic scholars called on Afrofuturism to imagine new ways technology and traditional knowledge practices can address environmental injustice. Suékama (2018) argues that as a form of resistant knowledge building and theorizing, an Afrofuturist approach to environmentalism “integrates speculation with the ecological and scientific, and the spiritual or metaphysical'' to make our environmental justice less European, male, human, (and I would add capitalist) centered. Thus, an Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice asks us to think about our collective struggle for environmental justice as a part of and connected to other forms of systemic oppression rooted in the rejection of African diasporic and Indigenous people and their knowledge practices through the overrepresentation of Man as human in Western society. In this way, a speculative and Afrofuturist approach to environmental injustice draws on African diasporic knowledge practices in conjunction with modern and traditional technologies to imagine new solutions to environmental injustice that center the needs, values, and traditional practices of African diasporic people.

Peterson-Salahuddin, Chelsea. 2023. "An Afrofuturist Approach to Unsettling Environmental injustice." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Protests to demand inclusion as project-affected people

Oppositional mobilizations - “internal to the logic of the project” p153 - so people do not consider something less damaging to the land and animals or a way to do it with less extraction of resources and profit for elite people in Kathmandu or in Europe/the US/China who do not really have to bear any of the cost of it. 

The author thinks that information circulated about the shareholder model - financial education - would be helpful - he notes that it would have to be oversimplified and made into financial narratives even though it is a complex socioenvironmental decisions. But his final conclusion is more optimistic. I think this kind of corporate-led education is a big foreclosure.

The certifications, following through with trainings that were asked for, and doing the certification ceremony for an audience

Rhetoric of benefit-sharing

The high levels of buy-in; the quotes from locals themselves supporting the dam and the company, they can honestly boast strong local support of the projects - what better proof than that people have dug up their life savings from the ground to buy the stocks?

The corporate actors aren’t particularly fleshed out in this account. The World Bank people weren’t expecting the Nepalese people to come deliver demands in a very educated and efficient way 

Ah there was one part where the corporate actors feel like the Nepalese people who live near the dam sites are extorting them - in this case they don’t feel like they’re helping but rather conceding to unreasonable demands, the poor corporation has to be the government and the villagers have these crazy ideas about how much money the corporation has (the corporation does have the money… it’s extremely ironic)

We don’t get to know how the corporate actors feel about the shareholder model - do they begrudge the shares not being sold to their family or something like that, or do they recognize that this is really also a sharing of risk and cost, more than just being pure benefits in a ‘help’ way?

Power outages and material scarcity → moral and social authority for government and corps to act quickly - “Discursive momentum”

Hydropower has been reframed as a sustainable/green energy source, esp. With carbon finance, so now institutions like the World Bank are funding it - it is a responsible way to bring about development. In Nepal, the government is also trying to declare Nepal as “open to business” - the ethical thing to do is to let corporations in to build hydropower dams 

Local people are there with them - some people say they are willing to have their houses submerged, the government is the unethical party for blocking the development from happening - the quote from someone is ‘some foreign country should get Nepal and develop it’ (Rest 2012:113), p151 here.

This text has a lot on governance:

More people bought shares during Chilime Hydropower Company public offering in 2010 than voted in the recent national elections in that more remote district. 

“Hydropower is our government now” - p150 - there is a “vacuum of governance” - so “hydropower sector has become a major political force in its own right, at both the national and local scales, adn investment in the hydropower sector is seen as a bellwether of political stability. The Nepalese state is reforming alongside the political economy of hydropower - the production of the hydropower future ensures the economic and political coherence of the state, and vice versa” - p150 - hydropower sector and Nepalese government are mutually constructive

P151 - “role of hydropower companies seems to rival or eclipse the role of government as a provider of social services…” So when people get classified as project-affected they finally get services that the government has failed to provide - better entitlements, faster, more promising recognition. The corporations even complain about being treated as the government: “To them we are the government, they give us all their demands” p151

Not just the corporation, but “industry beholden to donor standards and international conventions is a much more effective” p152

“Neoliberal spaces of exception” - so the state has made a lot of exceptions and ceded a lot of power to the corps (this isn’t directly CSR) 

Corps can make competing territorial claims - people who are project-affected “now attempt to make claims as project-affected people with rights, based on the architecture of international conventions and agreements”  p153

P155 - the corporation collected data to determine who would qualify as “project-affected” - it was more detailed and recent than the census - they provided this data to the local government - the corporation made not only eligibility determinations but also about what counts as living there and what documents are good enough as proof

Villagers have specifically requested cooking classes for Chinese and European food because they expect the infrastructure to bring tourists. And they did indeed get the cooking classes - there was a ceremony to certify the women who did the 2 week class, they wore traditional Tamang clothes. 

“Shareholder model” - also known as “benefit sharing” - “local” people who are categorized by the company as “project-affected” have 10% of shares reserved for them. This model was also the result of a court case - the shares are typically sold to the people that Nepali politicians are friendly with, so an alliance of people living near where the dam was being constructed demanded a share of the benefits. And presumably, the Colonial country where the hydropower company is based, in the frequent cases where the company is international, gets a very healthy chunk of the 90% of unreserved stock. 

People are familiar with the logics of CSR and mobilize to get their demands - efficiently deliver their demands when they know world bank officials are coming. 

“People-public-private-partnership” - another way to describe it.