Imagining like the state: Seductive imaginaries, dam promises and state-ness in the Agno River Basin

Adopting a longue durée perspective, this article interrogates how the Agno Dam Complex in Northern Luzon, the Philippines served as a site of changing state imaginaries. Through the successive construction of the Ambuklao, Binga, and San Roque dams from 1946 to 2003, I trace the shifting imaginaries of state actors who actively pursued and marketed these projects to corporate and foreign funders and local communities through hydraulic (pur)chase —a process of chasing and (pur)chasing support and patronage of these dam projects. I describe these shape-shifting imaginaries as protean —politically persuasive and seductive yet elusive promises of the future. I argue that the ability of the state to mobilize these imaginaries constitutes an enactment of ‘state-ness,’ even when their outcomes are fragmented, contested, and exclusionary. This paper advances debates in critical state and infrastructure studies by foregrounding the material and political dimensions through which dam projects are pursued over the course of their infrastructural lives.