Development dreams and riparian realities in Nepal: hydropower expansion, local lifeways, and the politics of river futures

Hydropower is widely framed as a clean pathway to energy security, economic growth, and climate adaptation. Yet its governance remains dominated by technical and economic approaches that prioritize measurable outputs and market-oriented outcomes while marginalizing local communities' needs, concerns, and ways of knowing and relating to rivers. Nepal offers a particularly revealing case for examining these dynamics. Drawing on interviews with policy and sectoral elites alongside ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous and other riparian communities, this paper juxtaposes top-down governance framings of hydropower development with lived experiences of livelihood disruption, cultural loss, and ecological displacement. We argue that hydropower development in Nepal operates through an “epistemic regime” that shapes what counts as valid knowledge and how rivers are perceived and managed. This regime renders rivers, risks, and impacts legible in technical and financial terms while marginalizing relational and place-based understandings of river systems, livelihoods, and stewardship. Across policy and planning discourse, we identify four recurring themes: treatment of water as a strategic techno-economic asset; technocratic governance and hollowing of participation; unequal distributions of benefits and burdens; and compensation regimes that normalize loss. Our findings show that local perspectives are excluded not simply because of consultation or implementation failures, but because the institutions governing hydropower systematically limit whose knowledge and experiences count in decision-making. The infrastructure that follows (dams, diversions, tunnels, roads, etc.) reshapes river ecosystems while reducing socio-ecological impacts to measurable forms of loss. These changes undermine subsistence livelihoods and long-standing river-care practices, pushing households toward precarious wage labor and migration. We conceptualize these processes as a structural “triple bind” for riparian communities: normalization of dispossession, constrained livelihood recovery, and weakening of cultural-ecological stewardship. The paper concludes that just and resilient energy futures require reworking the epistemic foundations of hydropower development under climate change.