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In the early 1960s, thousands of construction workers and their families came to Oroville, in Northern California, to help build the largest earth-fill dam in the world. Located nine miles northeast of town, the Oroville Dam would be the cornerstone of the California State Water Project, which would provide flood control, electric power, recreation, and water to California residents. The project was so massive that it would reinvent the look of much of the area; require the building of roads, bridges, and railroads; inundate much of the area's history under hundreds of feet of water; and greatly effect the lives of the residents of Oroville. The successful completion of the project came at a price--34 construction workers died.
Locally and globally, mega-hydraulic projects have become deeply controversial. Recently, despite widespread critique, they have regained a new impetus worldwide. The developmentand operation of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects are manifestations of contested knowledge regimes. In this special issue we present, analyze and critically engage with situations where multiple knowledge regimes interact and conflict with each other, and where different grounds for claiming the truth are used to construct hydrosocial realities. In this introductory paper, we outline the conceptual groundwork. We discuss ‘the dark legend of UnGovernance’ as an epistemological mainstay underlying the mega-hydraulic knowledge regimes, involving a deep, often subconscious, neglect of the multiplicity of hydrosocial territories and water cultures. Accordingly, modernist epistemic regimes tend to subjugate other knowledge systems and dichotomize ‘civilized Self’ versus ‘backward Other’; they depend upon depersonalized planning models that manufacture ignorance. Romanticizing and reifying the ‘othered’ hydrosocial territories and vernacular / indigenous knowledge, however, may pose a serious danger to dam-affected communities. Instead, we show how multiple forms of power challenge mega-hydraulic rationality thereby repoliticizing large dam regimes. This happens often through complex, multi-actor, multi-scalar coalitions that make that knowledge is co-created in informal arenas and battlefields.