Big Dams, Environmental Justice and Resistance In the Global South

Across the Global South, big dams are increasingly promoted under the banner of development, energy security, and climate change mitigation. These megaprojects are fundamentally reshaping rivers, wetlands, and lakes, transforming the hydro-social waterscapes that sustain subaltern livelihoods, ecosystems, and cultural heritages. While states and development agencies celebrate large-scale water infrastructure as a symbol of progress and modernity, these interventions routinely produce deeply uneven and contested outcomes—characterised by displacement, ecological degradation, dispossession, and exacerbated social inequalities. This session approaches hydroelectric infrastructures not as neutral technical assets, but as deeply political projects embedded within wider struggles over territory, resource sovereignty, and the global climate crisis. It seeks to examine how dominant developmental and ‘green energy’ narratives are deployed to legitimise hydropower expansion, and how these processes systematically marginalise vulnerable communities, Indigenous and ethnic groups, fisherfolk, and agrarian societies. Concurrently, it explores the structural drivers, defensive strategies, and scalar dynamics behind the emergence of grassroots environmental movements in the global peripheries. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship in environmental sociology, political ecology, and development studies, this session invites theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions on dam politics, environmental justice, and socio-ecological resistance. While engaging closely with the complex hydro-politics of South Asia, the session strongly welcomes comparative dialogues and papers drawing on diverse geographies across the Global South to critically rethink dominant paradigms of water governance and articulate alternative, community-centric models of development.