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