Unintended Effects of Technology on Climate Change Adaptation: an Historical Analysis of Water Conflicts Below Andean Glaciers
Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2012) 1e11 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg Unintended effects of technology on climate change adaptation: an historical analysis of water conflicts below Andean Glaciers Mark Carey a,*, Adam French b and Elliott O’Brien c a Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA b Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA c Department of Politics, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA 24450, USA Abstract Climate change adaptation measures can generate long-term unintended consequences, as this paper demonstrates through an empirical case study of water conflicts at Lake Parón in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca mountain range. This decade-long struggle culminated in 2008 when a coalition of local groups (stakeholders) from the Cruz de Mayo and Caraz communities in the Callejón de Huaylas seized control of the Lake Parón reservoir from a private multinational corporation, Duke Energy. This clash over Parón’s water in the Llullán and Santa River watersheds emerged much earlier than climatic- hydrologic models had predicted, and it occurred, this paper argues, largely because of previously successful climate adaptation measures. The drainage tunnel and floodgates originally installed at Parón in the 1980s to prevent a climate-related outburst flood led to unintended or perverse outcomes because these technological artifacts subsequently allowed a diversity of stakeholdersdincluding rural subsistence farmers, urban residents, national park officials, tourism promoters, the state energy company Electroperú, and Duke Energydto manage water differently depending on their priorities and the existing governance structures.
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