Political economy of Amazon development and hydropower construction

Abstract

The Amazon region is one of the most active frontiers of infrastructure expansion, resource extraction and socio-ecological exploitation in the world today. The Brazilian section of the region was dramatically inserted into the wider agenda of national development and global trade in the 1960s and, since then, negative socio-ecological impacts continue to increase, despite the introduction of comprehensive water and environmental legislation at the federal and state levels. An important process of politico-economic change is the construction of large-scale water projects, especially for hydroelectricity generation and river navigation (associated with export-oriented agribusiness). In that broad context, the chapter examines polices and strategies that encouraged resource grabbing and environmental injustices through an expanded political economy framework that integrates the politics of redistribution and recognition with the politics of resignification. Investments in water projects in the main eastern and southern tributaries of the Amazon River are discussed, particularly to assess the contradictory advance of modernity, the ramifications of corrupted practices and the narrow basis of a prevailing technocratic and reductionist rationality. Following such a trend of modernisation and socio-natural reductionism, several river basins have been again incorporated in the agenda of dam construction as critical elements of regional development and intensive water management.