Spaces of development: the historical interaction between colonial and pre-colonial territoriality in everyday community based ecological practices

Scholars of development discourses and practices assume that states are bounded geographic spaces, whose territorial sovereignty can be mathematically represented on a map. On the other hand, postcolonial historians and political geographers have demonstrated that this conception of state sovereignty is not ‘natural’ but has been normalized through a combination of practices, technologies, and discourses, which spread across the world from the early seventeenth century onwards as a result of European imperialism. 
However, postcolonial historians and development scholars do not  adequately consider how this colonial way of defining and controlling territory, interacted with pre-colonial territorialities embedded in the everyday ecological practices of communities; and how the negotiation of these overlapping territorialities, influences the outcomes of development projects today.
The proposed study analyses two cases of state led water management projects from the internationally disputed border region of Ladakh in the Indian Himalaya: one from the colonial period, and the other from the post-colonial period. It uses a multidisciplinary, bottom-up approach, combining ethnographic and historical methods, to capture how the everyday ecological practices of Ladakhi communities have interacted, over time, with the technologies and discourses of colonial territoriality, and post-colonial development projects. 
GENERAL