The Future of Large Dams

Dealing with Social, Environmental, Institutional and Political Costs

Thayer Ted Scudder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781844071555
• eBook ISBN: 9781136547751
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Ecología

Viewed by some as symbols of progress and by others as inherently flawed, large dams remain one of the most contentious development issues on Earth. Building on the work of the now defunct World Commission on Dams, Thayer Scudder wades into the debate with unprecedented authority.

Employing the Commission's Seven Strategic priorities, Scudder charts the 'middle way' forward by examining the impacts of large dams on ecosystems, societies and political economies. He also analyses the structure of the decision-making process for water resource development and tackles the highly contentious issue of dam-induced resettlement, illuminated by a statistical analysis of 50 cases.

1

The Large Dams Dispute and the Future of Large Dams

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INTRODUCTION

I analyse large dams in this book as a flawed yet still necessary development option. That was also the conclusion of the World Commission on Dams (WCD) on which I was one of 12 commissioners. For that reason this study is, in a number of respects, a follow-on volume to the Commission’s Final Report. On the one hand, it endorses the analysis and conclusions in the Final Report and uses the Commission’s seven strategic priorities¹ to examine how the decision-making process for water resource and energy development should be structured and, should a large dam be selected as the preferred development option, on how planning, implementation, operations and maintenance, and handing over of assets should proceed.

On the other hand, it extends and updates the Commission’s Final Report. Extension is needed since the Commission had neither the time nor the authority to explore some issues in detail, examples being multiplier effects associated with dam construction, impacts on deltas, institutional issues, resolution of conflicts among stakeholders and, especially, how to deal at the international level with project authorities and national governments that violate human rights and other international declarations and covenants relevant to the planning and implementation of large dams. Updating is important because five years have passed since the Commission’s Final Report was produced – five years during which the report has influenced not just the dams debate, but also the planning process for specific dams. Yet the debate continues about the future role of dams and the utility of the WCD report.

Large dams are flawed for many reasons. Benefits are overstated and costs understated. Especially serious are the adverse environmental impacts on the world’s river basins, impacts that tend to be irreversible where dams are built on mainstreams and large tributaries. Implementation continues to impoverish the majority of those who must be resettled from reservoir basins and project works, and to adversely affect millions of people who live below dams and whose living standards are dependent on natural flood regimes.

The scale of large dams, and the uncertainties and risks associated with manipulation of such important life support systems as river basins, raise important questions as to whether governments and project authorities have the institutional capacity to deal with the complexity associated with such large infrastructure projects. Then there is what is apt to be a long planning and implementation process during which changes in priorities and policies, and the not infrequent occurrence of unexpected events, need be addressed but often are not. There are also the problems of corruption associated with the large financial requirements of such projects, as well as the lack of political will to follow state-of-the-art procedures, especially those associated with environmental and social issues. Finally there are legitimate questions as to the continued appropriateness of the development paradigm that large dams epitomize.

Yet, in spite of such flaws, large dams remain a necessary development option to deal with the needs of a human population that is expanding beyond the carrying capacity of the world’s life support systems. That is the tragedy. A development strategy that over the longer term is degrading critical natural resources remains necessary, at least over the short term, to supply water resources in those late-industrializing countries where the large majority of future dams will be built as a means of addressing the poverty and rising expectations of billions of poor people. Large dams will be needed to store and transfer water to rapidly expanding urban populations; to provide electricity to those populations and to the industries that must employ them if poverty is to be alleviated; to increase irrigation in countries such as India where small reservoirs dry up during periods of drought; and, in countries such as Laos and Nepal with few other natural resources, to provide foreign exchange for development purposes by exporting hydropower.

The number of new large dams, however, should be reduced by weeding out those for which better alternatives exist and by better management of existing dams. One WCD approach was to emphasize an improved options assessment process that actively involved all concerned stakeholders. That is important, but the WCD approach should also be complemented by an international adjudication and compliance process, perhaps modelled on the World Trade Organization (which has the capacity to impose sanctions), when the disadvantages of large dams are such that they should not be built or, if built, could be redesigned to expand benefits and reduce costs.

Large dams are the focus of this book. The International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD) defines large dams as those rising 15m or more from their foundation or, if between 5 and 15m in height, as having a storage capacity of over 3,000,000m³. Over the past 50 years, their number has increased from 5700 in 1950 to approximately 50,000 today. Although large dams are present in over 140 countries, nearly 80 per cent are in five countries – China, the US, India, Spain and Japan. Before 1949, China had less than 100 large dams; today it has approximately 22,000, or nearly half of the global total. The US has over 6000 large dams, India over 4000 and Spain and Japan over 1000 (WCD, 2000, p9). Looking to the future, construction emphasis has shifted to late-industrializing countries, with Brazil, China, India, Turkey and countries in Africa expected to be the dominant dam builders.

While the WCD’s terms of reference were to address all large dams as a category, my emphasis is more on those of 60m or more in height. They comprise 78 per cent of the 50 dams surveyed in Chapter 3, whereas dams 60m and higher comprise only 11 per cent of those in ICOLD’s 1998 register of 22,748 large dams. Forty-four per cent of those in Chapter 3 are at least 100m high as opposed to less than 3 per cent of those on ICOLD’s list. It is these larger dams, and especially those on mainstreams and larger tributaries, that have dominated the large dams dispute and whose future is at risk because of unacceptable environmental and social costs. They are the ones that heads of state support and for which international firms compete for feasibility, design and construction contracts.

The future of large dams is dealt with in two ways. One way, the more general, is to chart the way forward by relating WCD’s strategic priorities to key issues that must be addressed. The emphasis is on environmental, social, institutional and political issues, WCD having dealt in detail with economic and financial issues, including cost overruns. The other way is to focus in greater detail on what analysts have emphasized as large dams’ most unsatisfactory features. These are environmental impacts on river basins and social impacts on riverine communities.² Large dams continue to impoverish tens of millions of poor people as well as to degrade the river basin ecosystems on which they are dependent. Those impacts need to be documented and explained, for such a situation is unacceptable; indeed outrageous. It is also unnecessary and counterproductive to impoverish affected people since there are known opportunities for helping them become project beneficiaries (for more details see Chapter 4).³ Dealing with adverse environmental impacts, on the other hand, is more difficult since some, such as those found in deltas, are irreversible.

A focus on resettlement in a number of chapters provides an important mechanism for assessing when dams are an acceptable water resource and energy development option and when they are not; for assessing how the decision-making process should be structured; and, should a dam be selected as the preferred option, for working out a planning, implementation and asset handing over process that enables the majority of resettlers to become project beneficiaries. Used in this way, resettlement becomes an optic for examining the entire large-dam-building process. The sustainability of that process, for example, requires attention to be paid to environmental impacts within each river basin, as well as to impacts on tens of millions of people in downstream communities. It also requires a detailed examination of the institutional structures that are required for an acceptable development process to proceed.

ORGANIZATION

Two-thirds of this book deals with issues and one-third with case histories. The case histories are important because they detail the complexities, the difficulties and the unexpected events that so often keep large dams from realizing their expected benefits. The remainder of Chapter 1 deals first with the large dams dispute, including what I refer to as the WCD process and, after the Commission’s ‘termination’ in November 2000, the origin and initial years of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Dams Development Project (DDP). Next, I outline my own career to illustrate how and where I obtained the information on which this comparative analysis is based, and to make explicit my current position as it relates to large dams as a development option. The chapter ends with a brief consideration of categories of affected people and a longer section introducing resettlement as a major issue. Chapter 2 deals in detail with our current understanding of the dynamics of the resettlement process by integrating into a single theory the previous analytical frameworks of a number of scholars.

Chapter 3 shows that impoverishment is a well-documented fact. It includes the results of the first statistical analysis of resettlement outcomes in connection with large dams and ten short case studies. According to a recent survey, violation of human rights is another major risk of all types of development-induced displacement.⁴ But, ‘The resettlement issues surrounding dam projects are inherently more difficult than those of nondam projects’ (Picciotto et al, 2001, p2), since both the homes and livelihoods of large numbers of people are affected.

Chapter 4 analyses the types of opportunities that must be implemented if a majority of future resettlers and other project-affected people are to improve their living standards. In addition to incorporating affected communities as project owners and such project-specific opportunities as irrigation and reservoir fisheries, opportunities include the multiplier effects that can characterize well-planned and well-implemented water resource development projects, but which are usually ignored by those planning and implementing large dams.

Chapters 5 and 6 include case studies of five projects in which I have been involved as adviser, consultant and/or researcher from the 1950s to the present. These are Zambia–Zimbabwe’s Kariba Project, Sri Lanka’s Accelerated Mahaweli Project, India’s Sardar Sarovar Project, Botswana’s Southern Okavango Integrated Water Development Project and Canada’s Grande Baleine (Great Whale) Project. Four of the five cases were the largest single project within the country or countries in which they were constructed or were being planned, while the fifth, Hydro-Quebec’s Grande Baleine Project may well have been the largest being planned in Canada prior to its cancellation. These projects illustrate a number of important points that are dealt with in detail in the text. These points include the inability or unwillingness of countries to follow their own policies and guidelines, Sri Lanka’s Accelerated Mahaweli Project and India’s Sardar Sarovar Project being examples. They also illustrate the important adverse effect that unexpected events can have on outcomes, and the impoverishing effect of the resettlement that resulted.

Chapter 7 deals with the impact of large dams on downstream communities and habitat, and on catchment management. The importance of environmental flows for mitigating adverse impacts on people formerly dependent on a river’s natural flood regime and on riverine wetlands and deltas is emphasized. In Chapter 8, the wide range of institutions are assessed that need to be involved in planning, implementation, management, monitoring and evaluation if favourable outcomes are to be realized. The final chapter sums up circumstances under which large dams warrant or do not warrant consideration as a legitimate development option. The way forward with existing dams and with dams as a future development option is illustrated by ways in which WCD’s seven strategic priorities can be implemented.

THE LARGE DAMS DISPUTE

Introduction

Pushed as a development strategy by a powerful coalition of politicians and civil servants, multilateral and bilateral financial institutions, and parastatal agencies and private sector engineering firms, the construction of large dams has been justified on economic, social and political grounds. A pioneering example, subsequently emulated by India with its Damodar Development Authority and by other countries, was the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Established in the 1930s as a major component of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, TVA was intended to raise the living standards of residents in one of the US’s least developed areas.

During their construction, the biggest dams tend to be the largest project in countries where they are being built. Drawing on cases where I have been involved, a 1950s example was Kariba, which was the first mainstream dam in Central Africa on the Zambezi. Examples from the 1960s are the Volta Dam in Ghana and the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. On filling, the Kariba, Volta and the High Dam reservoirs became the largest man-made lakes in the world, each having approximately four times the storage capacity behind the Hoover Dam in the US. A South Asian example from the 1970s is Sri Lanka’s multibillion dollar and multi-dam Accelerated Mahaweli Project, followed by India’s Sardar Sarovar Project in the 1980s. China’s Three Gorges Dam is the largest current example today.

In each of these cases, as in many others, no less a person than the president of the country pushed the project forward. President Nkrumah saw the Volta Dam not just as a pilot project for the industrialization of Ghana, but as a symbol of that industrialization, with a commemorative issue of postage stamps that showed him with the dam in the background (communication from David Brokensha). Egypt’s President Nasser stated ‘In antiquity we built pyramids for the dead. Now we build new pyramids for the living’ (Fahim, 1981, p14 after Heikel, 1973, p62), while President Nehru eulogized large dams as ‘the temples of modern India’.

Benefits can be major. They include hydropower generation that pays the bills, as well as irrigation, urban water supply, navigation, flood management, and recreation and tourism. Today generation of hydropower provides nearly 20 per cent of global electricity, with the figure closer to 100 per cent in Norway and 80 per cent in Brazil. Although accurate statistics are not available, WCD estimated that approximately 15 per cent of world food production is based on large dam-supplied irrigation, while Los Angeles – the second largest city in the US – and much of Southern California; Gauteng, the industrial hub of South Africa; and Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, are all dependent on dam-supplied water for residential, commercial and industrial use. Governments also claim strategic and political justification. During the apartheid years, the Nationalist Government built the Gariep Dam on the Orange River during its efforts to convince the world that South Africa was a modern industrial nation worthy of respect, while it has been argued that Argentina’s advocacy for the Yacyretá Dam, built in partnership with Paraguay, was in good part a response to Brazil’s construction of the Itaipu Dam, also built with Paraguay, further up the Parana River.

Initiation of the debate

Given such benefits and justifications, why has an increasingly adversarial dispute arisen over the construction of large dams? Although the history of the large dams debate has yet to be written, it is important to emphasize that by the mid-1960s researchers, myself included, and practitioners already had begun to criticize undesirable and unnecessary environmental and social impacts. They were also emphasizing the need for considering dams as only one of a number of possible options. At a 1965 symposium on man-made lakes at London’s Royal Geographical Society, six papers dealt with environmental, public health and socio-economic ‘Problems Arising from the Making of Man-made Lakes in the Tropics’ (Lowe-McConnell, 1966, p51). In 1966, the Committee on Water of the US National Academy of Sciences – National Research Council, with Gilbert F. White in the chair, produced a report titled Alternatives in Water Management that noted ‘the possibility that there may be many alternatives to water development for promoting regional growth’ (NAS-NRC, 1966, p60).

In 1972, the International Council of Scientific Unions’ Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) Report on Man-Made Lakes as Modified Ecosystems began with a section on ‘Alternatives to Man-made Lakes’. Key statements noted: ‘Unfortunately, with reservoirs as with other major modifications, only a few careful assessments have been made of the full range of impacts of their construction’ and ‘whatever the circumstances, reservoir construction never is warranted without prior examination of the other possibilities’ (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, 1972, pp11–12). That same year, Farvar and Milton edited the Natural History Press’ influential The Careless Technology: Ecology and International Development, in which over 50 prominent scholars and practitioners wrote critical chapters including ten dealing with irrigation and water resource development.

Drawing on such sources, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) subsequently linked adverse environmental impacts with adverse health, socio-economic and human rights impacts in a telling critique of large dams not just in the tropics but worldwide. Leading the way were articles in The Ecologist followed by Goldsmith and Hildyard’s edited two volumes on the Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams (1984, 1986). Subsequent books, including Pearce’s The Dammed: Rivers, Dams, and the Coming World Water Crisis (1992) and McCully’s Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams (1996, 2001), also questioned the extent to which justifying benefits forecast in feasibility studies were being realized.

The World Commission on Dams (WCD) and the WCD process

In April 1997, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and the World Bank invited 38 participants to a workshop in Gland, Switzerland, to discuss what had become an increasingly adversarial debate. Representing the range of interests involved, 35 delegates were able to attend the two-day workshop. In addition to IUCN and World Bank Group officials, participants included three from academic, government and non-profit research institutions; eight from major firms and consulting agencies involved in dam feasibility studies, construction and operation; and three from river basin authorities and government ministries.

Also present were the presidents of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage (ICID) and ICOLD. NGOs, including such strong dam critics as the Berne Declaration (Switzerland), International Rivers Network (US), Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Brazil) and Narmada Bachao Andolan (India) sent six representatives. After lengthy discussions that included evaluating several background documents, including one by the author (Scudder, 1997a), the participants unanimously recommended the formation of an independent WCD. Terms of reference included reviewing the development effectiveness of large dams; assessing alternatives for water resources and energy development; and, where dams were the selected option, developing internationally acceptable crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Boxes
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Large Dams Dispute and the Future of Large Dams
• 2. Theories of the Resettlement Process
• 3. A Comparative Survey of Dam-induced Resettlement in 50 Cases, with the Statistical Assistance of John Gay1
• 4. How River Basin Communities Can Benefit From Resettlement
• 5. Sri Lanka’s Mahaweli Development Project
• 6. Further Case Studies
• 7. Addressing Downstream and Upper Catchments: Social and Environmental Impacts
• 8. Institutional Arrangements
• 9. The Future of Large Dams and the Way Forward
• Notes
• References
• Index