Abstract
This paper will examine the intersections between big infrastructures and nature conservation projects in the age of “green governance.” In other words, I will trace the expert practices through which the “infrastructural” becomes imbued with the “ecological.” In the northeastern corner of Turkey, the Çoruh River, one of the fastest running rivers in the world, has recently been transformed into a hydropower resource with ten large dams built in rapid succession. Huge concrete dam walls, several kilometers long reservoirs, numerous tunnels, and transmission lines have conquered the landscape. Behind this overpowering conquest of nature, however, lie novel practices of environmental governance. In the Çoruh River Watershed, new projects have been designed to relocate and preserve endemic plants endangered by large dams through the collaboration between the scientific community and state officials. Displacement and resettlement due to large dams, which was once only a concern for “local communities,” has now expanded to encompass plant life. By paying a sustained anthropological attention to this project, in this paper, I will shed light on the ways in which discourses of green governance travel across space, unfolding through diverse interests and concerns of and relations among the governmental actors involved. Moreover, building on anthropologist Tania Li’s (2007) inquiry of the “politics as provocation”, I will approach the “greening” of large dams as a governmental attempt to absorb and contain a critical scrutiny: an attempt that is not a fait accompli but one that has its own flaws and limits. I will show that the attempts of containing the environmental critique against dams, in fact, pave the way for the articulation of further conflicts about what counts as “nature” and what constitutes “conservation practices.” Furthermore, my ethnographic gaze will reveal the emerging challenges and disputes about questions of knowledge, expertise, and responsibility among project implementers, as well as the spaces of collaboration emerging from within such “greening” projects.
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