Small hydropower, slow violence, and gendered struggles in Northwest Vietnam

Small hydropower has widely been considered a renewable energy source with minimum adverse social and environmental impacts. However, the expansion of small hydropower in the northwest uplands of Vietnam over the last two decades has created and even normalized persistent and multidimensional water injustice for ethnic minority groups in the region. For some, this expansion has meant persistent, but silent, generational, and cumulative experiences of marginalization and impoverishment as well as the erosion of a way of life. Extractive activities reconstruct identities and redistribute resources and decision-making power, but not without igniting resistance. Local ethnic minority households struggle in negotiating their everyday realities, which are occupied with livelihood maintenance, social interactions, and fights over their use and control of resources. This paper unravels the particular gendered workings in responding to slow violence, drawing on photovoice and over a decade of fieldwork in the northwest uplands where hundreds of small hydrodevelopment projects have been planned and implemented since the early 2000s. The paper argues that the seemingly mundane tasks that women carry out, including cooking, weaving and dyeing fabrics, and growing crops, which are revealed through a gendered perspective to be foundational in cultivating community resilience, self-help, solidarity, resistance, and reworking in the face of ongoing structural injustices and hardships brought about by small hydropower development in Vietnam’s northwest uplands.