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Cost-benefit analysis at the floodgates : governing democratic futures through the reassembling of Iran’s waterway
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Shafiee, Katayoun (2020) Cost-benefit analysis at the floodgates : governing democratic futures through the reassembling of Iran’s waterway. Social Studies of Science, 50 (1). pp. 94-120. doi:10.1177/0306312719891564 ISSN 0306-3127.
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WRAP-risky-measures-governing-democratic-futures-through-assembling-Iran's-waterways-infrastructure-international-development-Shafiee-2019.pdf - Accepted Version Embargoed item. Restricted access to Repository staff only - Requires a PDF viewer. Download (691Kb) |
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719891564
Abstract
A burgeoning scholarship has taken seriously the use and management of the world’s freshwater as a site of critical investigation while highlighting the contribution of science and technology studies in making the infrastructural life of water visible. However, studies say little about the calculative terms of the decision-making process involved in infrastructural appraisal and are often taken for granted as something inevitable. This article examines the unexpected and remarkable role that cost-benefit analysis played in governing Iran’s democratic future through the assembling of a dam in the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, cost-benefit analysis traveled the world by flows of water. I investigate the ways in which the calculation of risk generated by the device of cost-benefit analysis of neoclassical economics became over several decades the most influential language for explaining and organizing the relationship between humans and nature in southwest Iran. The waters of the Dez River and other major rivers of the world shaped the building of large-scale infrastructural projects around dams, but they were simultaneously entangled with the production of economic information about the costs and benefits to the local, making possible the development of new methods of governing democracies in terms of risk. US-based government aid agencies, institutions of global economic governance, private American investors, engineers, and agricultural scientists converged in a small corner of Iran to transform the region, its water, and its farmers into a laboratory of grass-roots democracy for a profit.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions T Technology > TC Hydraulic engineering. Ocean engineering |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Dams -- Dez River (Iran) -- Economic aspects, Dams -- Dez River (Iran) -- Political aspects, Cost effectiveness, Infrastructure (Economics) -- Iran, Development economics -- Iran | ||||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Social Studies of Science | ||||||||||
Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd. | ||||||||||
ISSN: | 0306-3127 | ||||||||||
Official Date: | 1 February 2020 | ||||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 50 | ||||||||||
Number: | 1 | ||||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 94-120 | ||||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/0306312719891564 | ||||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | Shafiee, K. (2020). Cost-benefit analysis at the floodgates: Governing democratic futures through the reassembly of Iran’s waterways. Social Studies of Science, 50(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719891564 Copyright © 2019 by SAGE Publications. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719891564. | ||||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 21 March 2019 | ||||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 27 March 2019 | ||||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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