Asserting Rights to Rivers, Territories and Life in the Face of Authoritarian Crack-Downs: Lessons from Cross Border Organizing

Day 1 11am 2 hours English

Hydropower continues to be promoted as part of the energy transition, backed by vested interests across the region, including energy, construction and consultancy companies, bankrolled increasingly in the context of ‘climate finance’ schemes. However, damming our rivers creates sacrifice zones, causing loss of livelihoods and ecological havoc upstream, downstream and around project sites, with further devastating consequences when dam walls leak, burst or overtop.

The implications can be even worse in transboundary rivers, as there are even fewer ways to hold companies or financiers (including international financial institutions like the World Bank Group/ Asian Development Bank) accountable, given the lack of grievance mechanisms that extend across borders to encompass addressing transnational harms, damages and losses.

Despite the increasing militarisation and clampdowns on civil society organizing, creating fear and intimidation in our communities, most especially in border regions (including for example, Myanmar, Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia/Lao, North East India, Kashmir, India-Nepal Border areas, Chittagong Hill Tract region in Bangladesh), womxn in all their diversities are at front lines of defence to push back, organizing in their own ways for energy, climate, environmental, resource and development justice.

Building broader transformative movements not only against the damming of rivers but also against energy transitions that simply replicate flaws of the past, but also targeted, incarcerated/silenced through SLAPP charges and other legal cases Three/ four examples of rivers that will be featured in our workshop session include: Teesta, Siang, Salween and Mekong.