Date: Thursday, September 12th
Time: 11am
Location: Asia Pacific Feminist Forum, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Hydropower continues to be promoted as part of the energy transition, backed by vested interests across the region, including energy, construction and consultancy companies, bankrolled increasingly in the context of ‘climate finance’ schemes. However, damming our rivers creates sacrifice zones, causing loss of livelihoods and ecological havoc upstream, downstream and around project sites, with further devastating consequences when dam walls leak, burst or overtop.
The implications can be even worse in transboundary rivers, as there are even fewer ways to hold companies or financiers (including international financial institutions like the World Bank Group/ Asian Development Bank) accountable, given the lack of grievance mechanisms that extend across borders to encompass addressing transnational harms, damages and losses.
Despite the increasing militarisation and clampdowns on civil society organizing, creating fear and intimidation in our communities, most especially in border regions (including for example, Myanmar, Vietnam/Thailand/Cambodia/Lao, North East India, Kashmir, India-Nepal Border areas, Chittagong Hill Tract region in Bangladesh), womxn in all their diversities are at front lines of defence to push back, organizing in their own ways for energy, climate, environmental, resource and development justice.
Building broader transformative movements not only against the damming of rivers but also against energy transitions that simply replicate flaws of the past, but also targeted, incarcerated/silenced through SLAPP charges and other legal cases Three/ four examples of rivers that will be featured in our workshop session include: Teesta, Siang, Salween and Mekong.
The Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (APFF) is a three day feminist convening organised by APWLD, and is a tri-annual event which brings together feminists, activists, and Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) from all subregions of Asia and the Pacific. In those three days, feminists come together to celebrate our collective achievements, deepen feminist knowledge, and strengthen our linkages and solidarities with each other.
Under the theme of ‘Feminist World-Building: Creative Energies, Collective Journeys’, feminists across the region will come together at the fourth APFF to share our journeys, and build a roadmap that leads us to the feminist world we have dreamed of for decades.
Learn more about the workshop and forum.
Feature photo: Women leaders from South Asia attending the Asia Women and Rivers Congress in 2024: Credit: Bonnie Barclay, International Rivers