| Over thirteen months of fieldwork funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Student Fellowship, and University of California, Irvine, I conducted two waves of surveys and in-depth ethnographic interviewing involving two hundred sixty-three (263) households. My study builds a quantitative and qualitative model to understand how those impacted in various ways (land loss, loss of means of production), as well as resettlers and hosts, are affected over time. My research explicitly aims to address the ways in which the social impacts of 'development' are gendered, and to render visible the ways in which gender and power are critically linked in the development context, and the ways in which development itself might (re)produce gendered social interests and reconfigure access to various natural resources in gendered ways. I find that there are significant gendered impacts that result from the implementation and presence of the project itself. I also analyze the effects of uncompensated losses on households in impacted areas, and examine how these are gendered in particular ways. Lastly, I argue that the impacted people subsidize this international dam-development project with their environmental resources, their land, their labor, sometimes their bodies and their nutritional status. In particular, women are disproportionately burdened with the effects of these subsidies. My research is significant in that it contributes a feminist political ecology perspective to the study of river basin development that is significant in its potential for illuminating the experiences of local actors as part of a contextually negotiated order in the development context. |
