Beyond binaries: negotiating resource futures in the Himalayas

This article re-examines hydropower politics in Nepal’s Himalayas through the lens of affective governance and financialised subjectivities, arguing that civic engagement around dams is shaped not only by material stakes but also by emotion, memory, and strategic calculation. Drawing on fieldwork from August 2019 to February 2022, supported by archival and policy analysis, it foregrounds how benefit-sharing mechanisms, national energy narratives, and lived experiences, spanning hope to trauma, co-produce the legitimacy and contestation of hydropower. Rather than viewing dams as straightforward impositions, the paper presents a contingent and historically grounded account of how rural communities navigate, negotiate, and actively influence energy development in the face of uneven power relations and development pressures. The paper makes three core contributions. First, it shows how benefit-sharing schemes function not only as distributive mechanisms, but as affective tools of governance, generating conditional forms of alignment with state-led projects. Second, it traces how narratives of energy autonomy and national pride are strategically mobilised to justify large-scale infrastructure projects. Third, it examines how land speculation, ambivalence, and uneven consent emerge through shifting valuations of land, risk, and opportunity. In doing so, the article contributes to wider debates on infrastructure, energy justice, and the affective politics of development in the Anthropocene.