Between water and warming: Developing desalination in colonial Curaçao

Presentation Between water and warming: Developing desalination in colonial Curaçao, Archana Ramanujam, MSc (Brown University). 

Scholars and activists have asserted that climate change and current environmental crises are legacies of colonial rule and extraction. However, little work has been done to understand how environmental governance has shifted from the colonial period to the ‘post’-colonial period.

My dissertation argues that the colonized polity of Curaçao was in fact able to exert agency to shape environmental outcomes, despite constraints posed by the imperial metropole and multinational capital, but the forms of agency changed over time. In this paper, I highlight how the colonial state and local bourgeoisie shaped water policy between 1915 and 1928 to build the world’s first on-land desalination plant.

Archana Ramanujam is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brown University in the United States. Her research interests sit at the nexus of colonialism, environment and development. Her dissertation traces how water policy in Curaçao from the formal colonial to the ‘post’-colonial period, to argue that a small, dependent and colonized state is still able to tackle problems of environment and development in these constrained circumstances, in specific ways. She has a background in grassroots climate and anti-racist organizing in the Netherlands, and currently does some advocacy for public transport where she lives, Providence, Rhode Island (US).