Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics

Abstract

For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang-Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra and Nu-Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date - the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change - and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine-grained analyses of power, control and contestation.