Megaprojects as instruments of landscape transformation: a framework for understanding the dialectics of biophysical process, development politics, and social change

This article stresses that despite claims about the increasing dematerialisaton of the global economy, economic development continues to entail the consumption of land and natural resources on a massive scale throughout the world. Indeed the article indicates that megaprojects (dams, roads, ports, urban development, pipelines and petrochemical plants, mines, and vast industrial plantations) have been central to post-war development dreams and policies and a focal point for environmental movements in the global South.

This paper finds that a sociological focus on the megaproject can illuminate on-going debates in political ecology and development studies about the agency of nature, about modernization as a liberating or destructive process, and about the constructivist-realist divide.

The article asks three basic questions:

• where, when and why landscapes are transformed by megaprojects
• how landscapes are transformed materially and socially by megaprojects
• what sorts of resistance, negotiation and compromise megaprojects engender