Sanjeev Khagram
For proponents, dams symbolize temples of progress and modernity, from a life controlled by nature and tradition to one in which the environment is ruled by technology, and tradition by science. But a growing number of opponents see the same projects as destructive of nature and indigenous cultures, imposing unacceptable costs while rarely delivering on their ostensible benefits.
This chapter tells the story of the conflicts between a powerful set of interests (government agencies, international organizations, multinational corporations, and domestic industrial and agricultural lobbies) that favor dam construction and the affected peoples groups and civil society coalitions that oppose them. It explores what could prove to be an important model for global governance that incorporates all these stakeholders: the World Commission on Dams.
Today, big dams contribute 20 percent of global electricity generation. In sixty‐five countries, hydropower produces more than 50 percent of electricity; in twenty‐four more than 90 percent. Worldwide, agricultural crops currently get more than 30 percent of their water from irrigation, a lion’s share of which comes from big dams. Future increases in agricultural production to meet the needs of a growing global population will require greater numbers of irrigation dams. Moreover, nearly 1 billion people still do not have adequate supplies of drinking water, 2 billion people do not have access to electricity, and the need for better flood management seems undeniable (witness the massive and destructive floods that have engulfed various regions of the world over the past several years).
Given the seemingly tremendous need for the benefits generated by big dams, and the powerful groups and organizations promoting them, the dramatic decline in the construction of these projects globally over the past twenty‐five years is puzzling. The number of big dams built annually grew from virtually zero in 1900 to nearly 250 by midcentury. The rate exploded thereafter and peaked at around 1,000 big dams being finished annually from the mid‐1950s to the mid‐1970s. But the number fell precipitously to less than 200 by the 1990s – a 75 percent drop in just over a decade.
There are technical, financial, and economic factors behind this trend, but they do not tell the whole story. The technical argument highlights the decreasing availability of sites for big dams. However, as of 1986, 95 percent of big dams were concentrated in 25 countries that had built more than 100, while less than 2 percent were spread over the more than 150 other countries where sites were still available, even plentiful. In other words, sites remain plentiful in many countries. […]
Over the last two and a half decades, coalescing from a multitude of struggles and campaigns waged all around the world, domestic and transnational civil society organizations have dramatically altered the dynamics of big dam projects. Environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from the First World and at the international level, along with those working on human rights and the protection of indigenous peoples, increasingly focused on slowing or halting the global spread of big dams. Often independently and before this, directly affected local peoples, social movements, and domestic NGOs in other parts of the world began mobilizing to reform or block the completion of these projects in their own countries. Over time, coalitions were formed between these like‐minded domestic and foreign groups. Thus, transnational civil society coalitions were formed from the domestic successes and subsequent internationalization of environmental and human and indigenous rights organizations in the West and the linkages and coalitions forged with people’s groups and social movements struggling worldwide against big dam building.
Transnational civil society advocacy efforts are often criticized as being more Western than transnational, thus supposedly representing a narrow range of elite values and interests. This may be true for some issues, but it is not true of the historical dynamics around big dams. Domestic opposition has been independently organized in numerous countries outside the West, such as in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Hungary, the former Soviet Union, and South Africa, to name just a few. […]
In India, for example, domestic opposition began as far back as the 1940s, when authorities initiated one of the most prolific dam‐building programs in history. The Hirakud dam, one of independent India’s first multipurpose projects, provides a clear demonstration of this opposition. An anti‐Hirakud campaign involving the full range of lobbying and pressure tactics was waged immediately after independence. The campaigners were so strident that they disobeyed orders prohibiting further public opposition against the project; 30,000 villagers and townspeople even protested in front of the state governor. Such purely domestic campaigns were generally unsuccessful through the 1960s.
Nevertheless, domestic civil society opposition to big dam building in India mounted during the 1970s and 1980s. The campaign against the Silent Valley hydroelectric project in Kerala, one of the first to eventually draw support from international NGOs, was a harbinger of trends to come. Grassroots mobilization against the project emerged in 1976 when a group of local teachers began assisting villagers who feared the loss of their livelihoods from the destruction of forest resources. At the same time, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature began to highlight internationally the project’s negative environmental consequences on the pristine Silent Valley Forests and the endangered lion‐tailed monkey. […]
Cancellation of the Silent Valley project inspired big dam opponents throughout India and all over the world […] Within India, opposition mounted against such projects as the Tehri, Bodhghat, Subarnarekha, and, most visibly, Sardar Sarovar‐Narmada River Valley. By the end of the 1980s, a meeting of over eighty prominent social movement leaders, activists, scholars, and critics representing millions of Indians called for a moratorium on big dam building in an “assertion of collective will against big dams” until domestic decision‐making processes became more participatory and the results of projects more socially just and environmentally sustainable. […]
The two most well‐known campaigns in India, the first to reform and the second to halt completely the World Bank‐funded Sardar Sarovar‐Narmada project, were spearheaded not by foreign or international NGOs, but by local and domestic groups that eventually developed into the powerful social movement known as the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada Movement). Indeed, mobilization against the Sardar Sarovar in the form of rallies, mass protests, letter‐writing campaigns, political lobbying, and scientific critiques began as early as the late 1970s, half a decade prior to the active involvement of transnationally linked allies. The degree of opposition, symbolized by the willingness of local people to drown rather than be displaced by the Sardar Sarovar project, was not motivated by outsiders but actually strengthened the organizing efforts of nondomestic supporters (discussed later).
India was not unusual. The campaign of cordilleran peoples in the Philippines against the Chico River project in the mid‐1970s became known worldwide for the confrontations between opposition and government. As a result of the sustained and (atypical for antidam movements) violent grassroots opposition, the World Bank eventually withdrew its funding from the project. Similarly, from the 1970s on in Brazil, a nationwide movement of dam‐affected peoples grew in size and strength. Combining civil society campaigns against projects in various regions of the country, the movement contributed not only to domestic social and environmental policy reform but also to the broader democratization process in Brazil. […]
The more successful domestic antidam campaigns in the United States and Western Europe certainly contributed to the subsequent formation of transnational civil society coalitions. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, civil society groups critical of big dam building emerged in many European countries. New laws requiring public disclosure of information and mandating environmental impact assessments on large projects both resulted from and added to the success of these efforts. These successful campaigns contributed to the broader decline of big dam building in most European countries by the 1970s.
As in Western Europe, the earliest domestic campaigns to reform or halt big dam building in the United States were led primarily by nature conservationists. These early environmentalists, fighting to protect the natural beauty of the American West, achieved major victories by stopping construction of the Echo Park Dam in 1956 and two other big dams proposed for the Grand Canyon in 1967. The struggles against the Grand Canyon dams that began in the mid‐1950s heralded the end of the expansion years of big dam building and played a central role in fostering the growth of a national environmental movement in the United States. […]
By the 1970s, as civil society groups in the West succeeded in reforming and halting big dams domestically, they realized that similar projects were being formulated and implemented elsewhere. Not surprisingly, big dam proponents moved their activities to countries where demand for these projects was still high, international funding available, criticism of big dam building less organized, and democratic and environmental norms less institutionalized. In fact, more than two‐thirds of new big dam starts occurred in the Third World during the 1980s.
In response, European NGOs such as the Ecologist, Survival International, Berne Declaration, Urgewald, and European Rivers Network were formed or shifted their focus to big dam projects in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and its successor states, and the Third World. These indigenous peoples, human rights, environmental, and even sustainable development NGOs consciously built coalitions with allies all over the world. […]
The transnational coalition received a boost with the initiation of a new campaign that opposed many of the practices of multilateral development banks, including their support for dams. The connection began when Bruce Rich, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council who had been investigating the negative impacts of mega projects funded by the World Bank and other international development organizations, attended the dam fighters’ meeting. As the next section describes, the antibank campaign quickly gathered momentum.
Overlapping the initiation of the anti‐multilateral development bank campaign was the publication of the first volume of Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard’s The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams, which further strengthened emergent transnational connections. The study was the first to systematically integrate the main arguments against big dams and to insist that the problems caused were largely inherent to the technology.
The growing local, national, and transnational civil society organizing around specific dams, the anti–multilateral bank campaign, and the publication of the first Goldsmith and Hildyard volume all contributed to the establishment of the transnational NGO eventually known as the International Rivers Network (IRN). […]
The IRN organized a conference on the social and environmental effects of big dams in San Francisco in 1988, at which sixty‐three civil society activists and scholars from twenty‐three countries met. The participants drew up the San Francisco Declaration, demanding an independent assessment of big dam projects and a moratorium on all projects not having the participation of affected persons, free access to project information, environmental impact assessments, comprehensive resettlement plans, and full cost‐benefit analyses. They also endorsed a watershed management declaration recommending numerous alternatives to big dams.
The San Francisco Declaration […] articulated an evolving set of norms on indigenous peoples, human rights, the environment, and democratic governance for sustainable development that were being promoted by civil society organizations working specifically in those areas. The declarations applied the new standards directly to the issues of big dam projects, river basin management, and the provision of water and power services. Groups from very different societies found common ground by developing these norms. They also used these norms strategically, first as guidelines for appropriate policy prescriptions and subsequently as a means of holding authorities accountable when these norms became institutionalized into the procedures and structures of governmental agencies and intergovernmental organizations. […]
The IRN quickly became a lead NGO in the growing transnational civil society network around big dams and sustainable development, as well as in the continuing anti‐multilateral bank campaign. The IRN began publishing another newsletter, Bankcheck Quarterly, a precursor to the Fifty Years Is Enough campaign against the World Bank; established an office in Brazil; and significantly expanded its linkages with NGOs and social movements all over the world. […]
By the 1990s, virtually any big dam being built or proposed in the world became a potential target, a fact that big dam proponents bemoaned. In 1992, the president of the International Commission on Large Dams – the professional association of big dam engineers – warned that the big dam industry faced “a serious general counter‐movement that has already succeeded in reducing the prestige of dam engineering in the public eye, and it is starting to make work difficult for our profession.”
The World Bank has been the central international organization promoting big dam building around the world since its founding. The Bank’s initial loan to fifteen Third World countries was for big dam projects, starting with loans in 1949 and continuing through Lesotho’s first loan in 1986. The World Bank’s largest borrower through 1993, India, had received $8.38 billion for the construction of 104 big dams, far more than any other country. World Bank technical support is often critical to the initiation and management of big dam projects, and Bank‐arranged cofinancing generally increases the funds available for big dam projects between 50 and 70 percent. The Bank has also contributed to the creation of numerous dam‐building bureaucratic agencies in the Third World, such as Thailand’s Electricity Generating Authority and Colombia’s Interconexión Eléctrica SA. […]
The growing transnational efforts to halt big dam building overlapped with the emergent campaign against the World Bank and other multilateral development banks in the early 1980s. Transnational antidam coalitions linking groups in the West with those elsewhere were critical in broadening and strengthening what was initially conceived as primarily a Western‐based conservationists’ campaign against multilateral banks. As Paul Nelson suggests, “The agenda of the campaign was initially concerned with protecting river basins, preserving tropical forests and biodiversity, and promoting demand reduction and efficiency in energy lending. However, three related issues have come to equal, and sometimes eclipse, these conservationist themes: involuntary resettlement of communities from dam projects, protection of indigenous peoples’ lands, and accountability and transparency at the World Bank.” These were among the highest‐priority issues for domestic groups from the South fighting big dams.
As part of the broader anti‐multilateral development bank campaign, antidam opponents compelled the Bank not only to reduce its involvement in big dam projects but also to adopt new policies and mechanisms for resettlement, environmental management, indigenous peoples, information disclosure, monitoring, and appeals. The cumulative effect of transnationally allied civil society lobbying against World Bank support for dams over the last twenty‐five years is most clearly demonstrated by the more than 60 percent decline in Bank funding for these projects – from approximately $11 billion between 1978 and 1982 to an estimated $4 billion between 1993 and 1997. Under sustained pressure, the Bank finally conducted its first comprehensive review of the big dams in which it had been involved after being in the business for forty years. Civil society critiques of the Bank’s review, in turn, sparked the creation of an independent World Commission on Dams. […]
By nearly unanimous agreement, the transnationally allied opposition to India’s Sardar Sarovar‐Narmada River Valley projects – led by the powerful domestic Save the Narmada movement – produced the most visible change. The World Bank’s Operations Evaluation Department (OED) acknowledged this fact in 1995: “The Narmada Projects have had far‐reaching influence on the Bank’s understanding of the difficulties of achieving lasting development, on its approaches to portfolio management, and on its openness to dialogue on policies and projects. Several of the implications of the Narmada experience resonated with recommendations made by the Bank’s Portfolio Management Task Force … and have been incorporated into the ‘Next Steps’ action plan that the Bank is now implementing to improve the management of its portfolio.” The Bank’s subsequent reforms included initiatives in a range of areas, from resettlement and environment to procedural mechanisms that would increase the transparency and accountability of Bank activities. […]
[…] At a workshop in Gland, Switzerland, in April 1997, the World Bank and the World Conservation Union brought together thirty‐nine representatives of governments, international development agencies, the private sector, and transnational civil society. Representatives of governments and international development agencies participated because they were interested in finding means of achieving the various benefits generated by big dams while avoiding the tremendous social and environmental costs associated with building them. Participants from the private sector attended because of the reputational and financial risks they face from the continuous campaigns. […]
Representatives of transnational civil society seized the opportunity afforded by the Gland workshop to push for an independent and comprehensive review of big dams, a demand that they had been pursuing for several years and had recently articulated in the Curitiba Declaration. That declaration had been drafted and approved at the historic first International Conference of People Affected by Dams held in Curitiba, Brazil, between March 11 and 14, 1997, and attended by more than 100 dam‐affected people and dam critics from seventeen countries. The 1997 Declaration of Curitiba, which affirmed the right to life and livelihood of people affected by dams, built on the norms and goals espoused in the San Francisco Declaration of 1988 and the Manibeli Declaration of 1994. The primary principle espoused was opposition to the construction of any dam that had not been approved by the negatively affected people, especially those to be displaced, through an informed and participatory decision‐making process. The declaration demanded the establishment of an independent commission to conduct a comprehensive review of all large dams supported by international agencies, subject to the involvement of representatives of transnational civil society, and similar reviews for each national and regional agency that had supported the building of big dams.
At the Gland workshop, the thirty‐nine participants unanimously agreed to this demand, and the World Commission on Dams (WCD) was established shortly thereafter. The WCD is an independent international body composed of twelve commissioners known for their leadership roles in social movements, NGOs, academia, the private sector, and governments directly involved with dam building from all over the world. The unprecedented mandate of the WCD is to (1) conduct a global review of the development effectiveness of dams and assess alternatives for sustainable water resources and energy management, and (2) develop internationally accepted criteria and guidelines for decision making in the planning, design, appraisal, construction, monitoring, operation, and decommissioning of dams. Arguably, the WCD is the most innovative international institutional experiment in the area of democratic governance for sustainable development today, and if it is successful, the WCD could pave the way for a wave of novel multistakeholder global public policy processes in the twenty‐first century. […]