This section advances themes behind human involvement in water management, beyond governing bodies, and creates a basis for social reactions to river development. Although I discuss these ideas broadly here, their value in this analysis becomes apparent through the resistance motivations and strategies depicted further on.
Water spans across various social dimensions from a direct dependence upon the substance to sustain human life, to more ambiguous and diverse cultural relationships. In terms of water management, river basins must not only be analyzed as entire systems reliant upon the health of ecological functions and technical flow regimes, but also as entities which are intertwined with “human values, behavior and organization” (Linton 2013, 170). Importantly, the notion that “hydrological data and knowledge are socially constructed and politically mobilized” emphasizes how incentive shapes water management decisions (Budds 2014, 167). Furthermore, the “material and symbolic characteristics of water also…shap[e] relations and forms of governance” (Budds 2014, 167). These nuanced ideas present ways in which water’s various roles in society have come to display complex social reactions to river management and alteration. Profit driven misevaluations of social connection to basin preservation often seem to be the epicenters of social resistance to development decisions.
The hydrosocial cycle is an applicable theory through which to analyze the implications of anthropogenic river alterations and subsequent human responses. As the hydrosocial cycle depicts, water is eternally intertwined within social and power relations on a multitude of scales (Linton 2013). “[H]uman civilization was born on a river bank,” and by harnessing its services in different ways this bond has reshaped itself into varying degrees and forms of dependency (Harvey 2016, under “People & Freshwater”). As these relationships are strained through increased demands upon water resources, those who have gained legal control of rivers’ flows, and thus energy production potential, have the ability to generate powerful social inequities. The hydrosocial cycle’s relevance to injustices generated by inadequate water management is well represented through various hydro developments (india). As “space and identity has fused struggles over material control of water use systems and territories,” conflicts “over the right to culturally define and politically organize these socionatural systems” come to fruition (Boelens 2013, 234). Hydropower resistance movements have and continue to display various layers of these conflicts.