Power, Technocracy and Neoliberalism: the Political Ecology the Middle Route of China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project

Abstract

The South-to-North Water Diversion (SNWD) project is an ambitious inter-basin water transfer scheme which plans to construct three diversion routes across the east, middle and west of China. With a 220 billion yuan (approximately 36 billion USD) investment, the middle route of the SNWD aims to mitigate water shortage problems in north China by annually reallocating 9.5 billion m3 of water from the Danjiangkou reservoir on the Han River to Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Henan province. In previous literature, extensive attention has been paid on the economic and technical feasibility of, and social-ecological impacts from the SNWD. However, little research has employed a political ecology perspective to interrogate the decision-making process of the SNWD. This study aims to examine how asymmetric political power, technocracy and neoliberalization of water governance have jointly facilitated the implementation of SNWD. Moreover, it intends to elucidate the politics, economics and power relations bound up in patterns of water allocation and use, water diversion infrastructure constructions, water governance paradigms and their implications for the change of discourse, landscapes and livelihoods. It argues that the SNWD ultimately diverts water from underdeveloped rural areas in central China towards more politically powerful stakeholders (i.e. Beijing). This process is driven by technocratic water governance agencies and state owned enterprises, both of which receive huge benefits from large-scale engineering construction. Against this backdrop, various constraints on economic development have been imposed on source water regions, leading to enlarging social-economic inequalities, increasing pressure on ecological conservation and intensifying trans-boundary water conflicts.