Development or Justice? The (De-)Construction of a Political Conflict around a Hydroelectric Powerplant in San Pablo de Amalí, Ecuador.

My paper focuses on the construction of a supposable trade-off between development – as the
dream of material prosperity and economic progress – versus the preservation of an intact
environment. According to common development discourse, natural resources are intrinsically
finite, and any society is forced to choose between a developed living standard or an intact
environment. Political ecologists reframe and partly reject this dilemma because environmental
conflict is often not about (the lack of) natural resources per se, but starts already with the
definition of the sense, use, and materiality of the parts of nature that later are seen as the
‘natural resources’ at stake.
I argue based on my case study of a hydroelectric powerplant in rural Ecuador that for
locally affected communities living within contexts of infrastructural exclusion, environmental
conflicts may not be about the environment as a scarce resource; they often are not even about
the collective decision-making of how to manage the environment. They convert into the choice
between allowing private and statal companies to exploit the natural resources around them
with the hope that they would provide basic infrastructure in change (e.g., the mainstream
understanding of development); or claiming sovereignty over their resources, environment, and
livelihood, and keep on hoping for other statal actors to fulfil their infrastructural duties without
exploiting the environment (e.g., what is called environmental justice in political ecology). Like
this, private and statal actors in development projects not only base their power on imagined
better futures, but above all on the vulnerability of local communities in real need for
infrastructure to achieve decent livelihoods in remote areas.