POLLEN 2026: ENGAGE and ResEaux and jointly organise the panel « Rivers, Power, and Resistance: Political Ecology and Transformative Water Governance in South Asia »

Format/Structure

This panel will be based on paper presentations and discussions led by panel conveners, followed by Q&A with the audience.

Long Abstract

Rivers in South Asia are not just ecological systems—they are sites of power, identity, and resistance. This panel, grounded in political ecology, examines how infrastructures and discourses of river management—dams, river-linking projects, sacralized waterways—become instruments of state-making, ideological control, and contested visions of development. Hydrosocial interventions often reinforce caste, class, and religious hierarchies while eroding vernacular knowledge and undermining local ecological autonomy.

Environmental governance across the region is increasingly ideological. Nationalist and authoritarian regimes deploy rivers to craft homogenised narratives of nationhood, while civil society actors face mounting surveillance, repression, and financial barriers such as India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. Yet alongside these pressures, subaltern actors—indigenous communities, women, Dalit groups, and environmental activists—mobilize alternative practices that challenge dominant hydrosocial regimes and open space for more inclusive and ecologically just futures.

This panel invites contributions from across the social sciences and humanities that engage the politics of rivers and water governance in South Asia. Topics include: river management and state formation; purity, cleanliness, and security discourses; subaltern strategies of resistance; the analytical contributions of political ecology; and the geopolitical dimensions of transboundary river governance. We particularly welcome work exploring how local knowledge and participatory approaches can reconfigure hydrosocial territories to confront climate change, address inequalities, and restore degraded aquatic ecosystems.