SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Chinese investments in large hydropower dams have rapidly increased all over the world in the last 20 years. Some of these projects have been contested both from a technological and political point of view due to the ways in which decisions have been made, as well as in relation to the resulting social-ecological change and ecological distributional aspects. From an Environmental Justice perspective, this paper analyses the main drivers and contested aspects of Chinese hydropower investments in the global South. The paper builds on Chinese projects located in different regions of the world, by combining information from the literature and the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice – EJAtlas dataset. Based on the analysis of Chinese hydropower projects and environmental justice concerns, this paper sheds light on the current literature on drivers and multidimensional conflictive outcomes of these large hydropower dam investments.