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Creating counter-narratives with local riverine communities in Thailand, Laos,and India: Disentangling Multiple Realities

In this webinar session, Diana Suhardiman will build on the concept of institutional bricolage and place it in the context of hydropower development planning. Her presentation will focus on: 1) local community responses in Thailand and Laos, including how these are influenced by social movements; 2) how these responses are translated into collective action (or lack thereof); and 3) how local community strategies are embedded in the wider political context and different manifestations of state-citizen relations. Following these reflections, Sarita Bhagat will look at how neoliberal ways of managing rivers often result in marginalised riverine communities moving away from, or adapting to, new livelihoods. Drawing on ongoing work in the Warna river basin, the talk will focus on the changing relationship of fishing communities and farmers in relation to the development of dams and regulated river flows. The researcher uses counter-mapping and art-based methods to explore these relationships.

Speakers

Sarita Bhagat is a PhD researcher in the River Commons Project at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and a Fellow at the Society for Promoting Participatory Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM), Pune. Her research focuses on exploring different knowledges, imaginaries, values and practices that animate existing socio-political ways of governing rivers.

Diana Suhardiman is Director of KITLV and Professor of Natural Resource Governance, Climate and Equity at Leiden University. Putting power and politics central in the contemporary struggles of natural resource and climate governance in Southeast Asia, she looks at how state-citizens relations manifest in ever changing dynamic of livelihood and institutional (re)making.