2023
In recent years scholars have advanced our understanding of the biophysical, socioeconomic, and geopolitical impacts of dams and hydropower infrastructure around the globe. Databases and maps have emerged that allow global comparisons between countries and river basins. However, reliable and freely available data do not exist for many regions. As a result, data limitations and quality issues persist, which limit the quality of analyses based on these datasets. This is particularly true in regions where hydropower infrastructure development is proceeding most rapidly, including South Asia's Third Pole region. We identify and describe serious quantitative and qualitative data dilemmas of existing databases. We divide these into location, size, type, and status. At the most basic level, these dilemmas mean that incorrect location and, more importantly, massive underrepresentation of existing and future projects generates incorrect conclusions. That underrepresentation results largely from uncritically equating absence of data with absence of infrastructure. We also argue that project function should be more reliably recorded (for both dams and hydropower projects), that project status should be clear (many existing projects are still passed off as future), and that smaller projects should be systematically recorded (their cumulative importance is often underestimated). These four dilemmas all have important implications for analyses based on existing datasets. The World Index of Hydropower, Dams, and Reservoirs (WIHDR) described here represents a major advance on all four points. For the first time, 652 existing hydropower plants (277 large and 375 small), 162 under construction, and 720 planned hydropower plants have been georeferenced and systematically recorded for the Indus-Ganga-Brahmaputra region.
China's west has long been framed as an undeveloped frontier, set apart by poverty and a resource-based economy. Since the 2000s, however, utility-scale renewable energy infrastructure has expanded rapidly in western China, promising local economic benefits tied to national low-carbon transition. This paper contends that these benefits have been precarious and unevenly distributed. I argue that utility-scale renewable energy has remade western China as a “low-carbon frontier,” a resource-rich region that generates low-carbon value for the national green economy. I highlight three features of low-carbon frontiers: they are constructed as spaces of exploitable low-carbon resources, creating an investment boom; they are enclosed through new land arrangements and infrastructure construction, rapidly and with little coordination; and they are reliant on external markets and policy decisions, entrenching dependency. These conditions make it difficult for frontier regions to capture sustained economic development benefits from the boom in the absence of persistent central state supports. I analyze these features by comparing two sets of technologies with similar, but ultimately diverging, trajectories: small and large hydropower in China's south-west, and solar and wind in the north-west.
2022
2022
Hydropower is booming in Asian river basins originating on the Tibetan Plateau and adjoining mountain ranges – often referred to as the “Third Pole.” These plants generate significant power for Asia’s megaregions; they also dramatically alter environments, economies, and livelihoods in mountainous regions. Yet, current understanding of these developments is limited to specific rivers or countries, obscuring the important relational drivers and characteristics of the boom. In this article, we deploy a novel powershed framework – defined as the material and socio-political infrastructure linking electricity supply and demand areas – to analyze and compare the regional power geographies that shape Third Pole hydropower development. Using this framework, we identify ten powersheds across China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia basins that incorporate the vast majority of new hydropower generation. Our analysis reveals a clear trend towards developing large-scale hydropower in the mountains for the purpose of exporting electricity to megaregions. These powersheds are complex and in flux, crossing political and basin boundaries in ways that defy traditional hydropower analyses. This article thus reveals power export to be the main driver of the boom and its characteristics; it also provides a framework for analyzing power geographies worldwide.
2022
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)—China’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure program across 145 countries and counting—is provoking concern among observers that China is exporting its polluting model of development. Yet, China’s leaders frame the BRI as a pathway for “green development,” pointing to China’s ambitious climate targets and leadership in green industries like renewable energy. To date, efforts to “green” the BRI have focused on mitigating impacts of large-scale infrastructure—but a “soft” approach to greening is emerging. In this essay, we trace the rapid rise of what we call green development cooperation: environmentally-focused activities that forge peopleto-people connections with host countries. Activities include training, dialogues, research, and development projects, some of which build on existing initiatives, and some which are entirely new. Our systematic review of these engagements finds that cooperation emphasizes technocratic approaches to environment and development problems that are based on China’s own experience. Cooperation thus offers a means to position China as an alternative environmental leader—a kind of green soft power—while also facilitating transfer of Chinese green technology and expertise to the Global South. At the same time, the green BRI is a fluid and malleable concept, shaped by diverse Chinese and host country actors who seek to advance their own objectives through cooperation. This carries the risk of ineffective or “greenwashed” cooperation interventions, but also creates opportunities for new forms of engagement and dimensions of coalition-building, and an important opening for improving the environmental performance of the BRI.
2022
Due to a rapid proliferation of small hydropower (SHP) in many parts of the world, a purported boom in SHP development globally has captured significant attention in recent research. While SHP is expanding rapidly in distinct places, the global landscape is more varied. Some regions are experiencing a plateau or even declines through decommissioning efforts. To date, research has predominantly drawn on national level data to interrogate empirical outcomes of the pronounced global boom in SHP development. National level data, however, can obscure spatiotemporal variations, which are critical for understanding empirical complexities. We argue, the notion of a boom, particularly when applied without spatial or temporal context, can be problematic for adequately understanding a range of dynamics inherent within SHP planning, development, distribution, and empirical outcomes. Given regional differences, there is a need to critically investigate spatiotemporal dimensions of SHP development. Accordingly, we offer a multi-regional comparative case study analysis of SHP in four distinct regions: West and Northeast United States, Southwestern China, Central and Southern Chile, and Central Nepal. Our research interrogates patterns of spatial distribution by focusing on concentrated hotspots and considers temporal dynamics through the lens of timepeaks. This approach allows for an effective capture of empirical complexities bound in ongoing SHP development (and decommissioning). We discover rates of growth and/or decline in SHP development vary substantially depending on both spatiotemporal criteria. Resulting spatial and temporal patterns and processes can be holistically analyzed to better understand empirical outcomes for policy makers, development practitioners, and environmental planners.
2021
Historically, China’s central government has promoted small hydropower (SHP) as a pro-poor technology for rural electrification in the mountainous southwest of the country. Since the early 2000s, when SHP construction began to boom, the government has also framed it as a green technology that replaces fuelwood with electricity. This chapter analyses whether the larger, grid-connected SHP plants built during the boom deliver on these claims, using data from a 2015 survey of 122 households in eight village clusters in Xinping County, Yunnan. We find that electricity use and fuelwood collection and use are correlated with the price of electricity—which SHP plants have no role in setting. Thus, most Xinping households report no benefits from SHP. However, a minority of households that receive electricity from the one subsidised plant in the county do report benefits from SHP, because their electricity is cheaper. These results reveal that it is only the few subsidised contemporary SHP plants in Yunnan that are green and pro-poor; the vast majority of unsubsidised plants are not.
2021
Small hydropower (SHP) is promoted as a pro-poor renewable energy source that does not have the negative social impacts of large dams. This article challenges these claims, using data from a household survey in China’s upper Red River Basin. We find that SHP can fragment river systems in ways that reduce irrigation water availability, provoke changes to agricultural practices, and negatively impact river health. These social impacts of river fragmentation mainly occur in villages situated between a plant’s intake and outflow. The frequency of plant water diversions due to continued generation in the dry season significantly predicts all social impacts; installed capacity of the plant and the quality of the village’s irrigation infrastructure predict some impacts. Villages with strong local governance can negotiate with the plant to temporarily halt generation when irrigation water is needed, lessening social impacts. Our findings reveal that SHP plants are not as benign as they are made out to be; they must be built and managed according to community needs.
2021
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – China’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure program across 138 countries and counting – has provoked concern among observers that China is exporting its polluting model of development. Others, however, claim that the BRI is well-positioned to drive “green development” through investments in low-carbon infrastructure and technologies. This review article argues that discussions about “greening” the BRI can overlook the politics that infuse how green development is conceptualized and implemented, and for whose benefit. Taking a political ecology approach, I distinguish between green BRI activities that invest in low-carbon infrastructure and those that mitigate environmental risk – the latter of which are often selectively enforced, leading to “greenwashing.” I then apply this distinction to three key sectors of the green BRI: green finance, green energy, and green cooperation mechanisms. I find that low-carbon investments are currently concentrated in higher-income countries and regions, while risk mitigation activities are currently concentrated in lower-income countries and regions. This article thus highlights the need for attention to how the green BRI is defined and implemented, with implications for efforts toward building an equitable and sustainable Belt and Road.
2020
The Chinese government promotes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as a global strategy for regional integration and infrastructure investment. With a projected US$1 trillion commitment from Chinese financial institutions, and at least 138 countries participating, the BRI is attracting intense debate. Yet most analysis to date focuses on broad drivers, risks, and opportunities, largely considered to be emanating from a coherent policy imposed by Beijing. In this special issue, we instead examine the BRI as a relational, contested process - a bundle of intertwined discourses, policies, and projects that sometimes align but are sometimes contradictory. We move beyond policy-level, macro-economic, and classic geopolitical analysis to study China's global investments “from the ground”. Our case studies reveal the BRI to be dynamic and unstable, rhetorically appropriated for different purposes that sometimes but do not always coalesce as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. The papers in this special issue provide one of the first collections of deep empirical work on the BRI and a useful approach for grounding China's role in globalization in the critical contexts of complex local realities.
2020
Abstract: Through an analysis of small hydropower (SHP) in China, I argue that logics of green development offer a framework for analyzing why, how, and to what intended effect the state pursues different green agendas over time and space. For decades, China’s central and provincial governments framed SHP as a model of green development, but in 2016 they instituted SHP restrictions due to ecological impacts and electricity waste, a situation blamed on local officials haphazardly approving too many plants. This interpretation, however, ignores a major shift in state logic for promoting SHP, first for conservation-based development in rural areas and then for low-carbon development in urban areas. These logics—which I abbreviate as conservation and decarbonization—are based on different political–economic problems that green development is meant to solve for the state, different places targeted for intervention, and different distributions of benefits and costs. Using this framework, I argue that a shift to decarbonization in the mid-2000s incentivized cash-strapped local governments in rural western China to build as many SHP plants as possible to export electricity and build local industries, leading to a subsequent “bust.” I illustrate this trajectory using case studies of three prefectures in Yunnan province. This article thus enriches scholarship on state–nature relations by theorizing the role of the state in shaping dominant discourses and practices of green development across space and their uneven outcomes.
2019
Introduction: You-tien Hsing’s The Great Urban Transformation offers a new framework for understanding China’s unprecedented experience of rapid urban expansion and rural land conversion. Since its publication in 2010, this work has invigorated theoretical debates about the nature of Chinese urbanism and inspired a number of empirical studies (Tomba, 2012; 2017; Rithmire, 2013; Yeh et al., 2013; Herrle et al., 2014; Tang, 2015; Wai Wong, 2015; Meyer-Clement, 2016). However, while Hsing’s theoretical contribution has received wide attention, few studies have considered her methodology (for exceptions see Chuang, 2014; Fu and Lin, 2014; Song et al., 2016). Moreover, those studies that do engage with Hsing’s methodology see her approach as a response to data constraints, rather than a conscious epistemological choice. The aim of this chapter, then, is to examine the thread that ties Hsing’s underlying epistemological stance and theoretical framework to her chosen research methodology. The thread, in this case, is Hsing’s spatial and territorial understanding of Polanyian political economy that she uses to unearth and map the complex nature of the urban land politics in China (indeed, the title of Hsing’s book is inspired by Polanyi’s masterwork The Great Transformation). We believe that Hsing’s theoretical and methodological contributions are highly instructive for those engaged in the field.
2019
Abstract: This essay reflects on the process of designing, conducting, and writing about fieldwork in China’s politically sensitive environment. I draw on my experience as a foreign scholar researching the hydropower industry from 2013-18, a period of growing authoritarianism in China. I describe attempts and strategies (both successful and unsuccessful) to navigate sensitivity in framing my project, accessing and conducting interviews, and sharing results. Overall, my aim is to provide a sense of cautious optimism for early-career scholars headed into the field: research in China is sensitive, and growing more so, but still possible, worthwhile, and important. Nonetheless, as China scholars, we need to be frank about the limitations to fieldwork, the moral dilemmas that we face when interacting with others, and the ways that we often internalise sensitivity in the research process itself.
2018
Abstract: Small-scale renewable energy systems supply electricity in many rural areas of the Global South, and contribute to both rural development and carbon mitigation goals. Yet, despite calls for scaling-up these systems, further expansion is limited by low profits and lack of financing. In China, however, small hydropower (SHP) has grown rapidly from remote plants producing electricity for villagers to one of China’s largest green energy industries. This paper analyzes this transformation from rural utility to green industry, and the profit motivations and political incentives that shape SHP construction and operation. Data were collected from interviews with government officials, SHP investors, plant operators, and farmers in Xinping county, located in Yunnan province in China’s southwest. This study finds that investors and officials are incentivized to build and operate large-scale SHP systems that have a high installed capacity, are situated in multiple-plant cascades, and that attempt to operate year-round, including during the dry season. This can reduce irrigation water access for local farmers and threaten the ecology of local streams. These findings highlight the risks of rapid industrialization of renewable energy in local communities in China and elsewhere. More broadly, this paper suggests that rural development and low-carbon power generation goals are not always mutually reinforcing, and that the aims of industrial renewable energy production should take rural peoples’ needs and contributions into account.
2018
Abstract: Small hydropower (SHP) has a global reputation as a ‘green’, low-carbon energy source that improves rural livelihoods and contributes to local economic development. In China, SHP has grown rapidly since the early 2000s, particularly in the water-rich provinces in the country’s southwest. However, because SHP plants in China are privately-operated and approved by local governments, there is an incentive to construct large, multiple-cascade systems to generate as much power as possible. In many areas, this has led to over-development of SHP and associated negative environmental and social impacts. In this paper, we identify the factors that shape geographies of SHP over-development, what we refer to as ‘shades’ of green energy. We then analyze the direct and indirect impacts of over-development. We draw on interviews and electricity generation data from six prefectures in Yunnan province, one of the world’s largest hydropower producing regions. We find that prefectures that operate in a semi-autonomous way in electricity management and industrial planning are most prone to over-develop SHP, since they depend on hydropower revenues from electricity generation and local energy-intensive industries. We also find that over-development of SHP causes streamflow reductions and unstable electricity generation, and in some areas, drives an increase in environmentally-destructive mineral processing and reduces irrigation water access. These findings suggest a need for coordinated river basin planning on small watersheds and a reassessment of the role of SHP in local economic development.
2017
Abstract: The expansion of Chinese overseas investment and aid over the past decade has triggered concern that China is ‘exporting’ an environmentally destructive development model to other countries. Yet China’s foreign aid also includes training programmes in ‘green’ technologies, such as small hydropower (SHP). This paper analyzes the policies, technologies and ideas around green development that these training programmes promote, and their political and commercial benefits for Chinese actors. It frames training courses and the technology transfer activities that follow as transnational model-making in that they situate SHP as a green model that is an aspect of China’s modernization. This helps to improve China’s developmental reputation and promote its SHP industry and water infrastructure.
2016
Introduction: In the summer of 2009, tensions between Han and Uyghur residents erupted into violence on the streets of Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Analyses of this outbreak have pointed to economic inequality as a root cause of the violence. In Xinjiang the cities of the industrialized North have experienced rapid urbanization in recent years as both Han and Uyghur migrants arrive seeking employment opportunities. But Uyghurs often find themselves unable to find jobs in the formal private sector and experience segregation in urban labor markets vis-à-vis Han workers. In Urumqi the urban economy is dominated by state owned enterprises and a growing private sector composed largely of Han firms, neither of which hire many Uyghurs. This has created a surplus of Uyghur labor and has exacerbated ethnic tensions, presenting a major impediment to the improvement of ethnic relations following the 2009 violence.
This chapter demonstrates that an Urumqi “ethnic enclave” of Uyghur businesses is a primary arena of interethnic interaction, tension, and cooperation in Xinjiang. Most Uyghur entrepreneurs, I suggest, cluster in fringe industries and markets where they have a cultural advantage, and they rely almost exclusively on networks with fellow Uyghurs to obtain resources and capital. This restricts their ability to compete with Han firms and stifles long-term growth. I show, however, that the few Uyghur entrepreneurs who have managed to expand their businesses—to “break out” of the ethnic enclave— have built relationships with Han firms and government officials. These entrepreneurs view interethnic cooperation and state support as crucial to the growth of their businesses and to the development of the Uyghur private sector as a whole. They also see themselves as a modernizing force in Uyghur society by challenging “backward” practices and traditions and by providing employment for Uyghur workers. In this way successful entrepreneurs promote business development and interethnic cooperation as a path to modernization, one that is not antagonistic toward the Chinese state.
Abstract: Although China's Uyghurs have progressively engaged in informal trade following economic reforms, in recent years a small group of corporate Uyghur entrepreneurs have positioned themselves in more formal industries where they hold a cultural advantage. However, we argue that the clustering of firms and a lack of experience and capital limits entrepreneurs' ability to compete with established Han businesses. This restricts Uyghur economic participation more generally, contributing to labour-market inequalities and ethnic tension in cities like Urumqi. The authors conclude that government support for Uyghur entrepreneurs is a crucial step to strengthen economic development and reduce ethnic tension in the region.
2012
Abstract: Private sector development has been sluggish in China’s west, where ethnic minorities make up a sizeable part of the population. In the northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the state maintains a steady presence in the small but growing private sector, largely populated by Han-owned firms and entrepreneurs. The Uyghurs, one of fourteen recognised ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, primarily reside in the poorer agricultural south where the private sector has made few inroads. Not surprisingly, Uyghurs have little presence in the private sector beyond informal trade. This has considerable implications for ethnic relations in a region already threatened by rising Uyghur-Han tensions. Massive ethnic riots in Urumqi in July 2009, sparked by protests by urban Uyghurs, exemplify the significant economic gap between ethnic groups. This paper addresses this disparity in the private sector by investigating two related issues : private sector concentration in Xinjiang’s urban north and levels of participation between Han and Uyghur. It concludes that growth and integration of Uyghur entrepreneurs into the urban private sector forms a crucial step in maintaining ethnic stability in the region.