Seeing through water: gender, anxiety and livelihoods in large-scale infrastructural development in the era of climate change.

Abstract A narrative approach is taken in this chapter to document and analyze the gendered social and socio-environmental consequences of globalized river basin development using water as the lens to understand the depth and breadth of these changes in people's lives. The chapter is based on primary multi-site ethnographic field research conducted in all three active dam areas of Lesotho in 1997 and 2000-2002, as well as ongoing documentary research. Water remains central within Lesotho's national development plans and to the stability of the region even amid changing climate conditions. More locally, as water becomes more precarious within the lives of highlands residents living near the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), this chapter reveals the multi-layered, complex, embodied experiences of infrastructure policy and its consequences, for the everyday lives and livelihoods of people directly affected by these projects.