Contesting Instrumental Knowledge With Communicative Action: Why Kalabagh Dam (Pakistan) Remains Unbuilt

Abstract

The building of Kalabagh Dam—Pakistan’s largest hydropower development project—has been stalled for decades. This article interrogates why and how this project has been grounded for so long. It shows that the state and its administrative agencies that support dam building rest their case on “expert” knowledge, while dismissing the counterknowledge produced by the anti-dam coalition of environmentalists, nationalists, and spiritualists as “inexpert.” Consequently, the dam has become a proxy for contending knowledge claims between the dam’s supporters and anti-dam activists. Deploying Habermas’s communicative action theory that critiques expert knowledge as “instrumental rationality,” this article demonstrates that the Pakistani anti-dam movement’s communicative action played the pivotal role in stalling the dam’s building. It typologizes actors, defending and opposing the dam, and documents their knowledge claims. The article contributes to the environmental movement literature by illuminating the ways in which anti-dam activists structure communicative claims, and deploy them for the public contestation of instrumental knowledge and interests.