Resurgent dams: shifting power formations, persistent harms, and obscured responsibilities.

This article explores continuities and changes in the damming of rivers in the global South. By the 2000s, the infrastructural promises of large dams seemed exhausted. Yet, currently dams are making a strong comeback with new justifications highlighting their capacity to produce low-carbon energy and climate-proofed waterscapes, while the harms they generate are being presented as fixable. Through cases from the Mekong (Laos and Cambodia), and the Grijalva (Mexico) River Basins, we problematize these claims. Despite changes in the aspirations and agencies that foster damming, obdurate dam materialities and the new profit-maximizing operation modes provoke violent continuities of infrastructural harms and hinder the repurposing of dams to serve climate combat. Neoliberalised dams even augment climate vulnerabilities, as the more volatile rivers increasingly exceed their ordering capacities. We also show how the new dam assemblages continue dispossessing riverine residents while divergently strengthening corporate and state powers and obscuring relations of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]