Gaining Public Acceptance: A Critical Strategic Priority of the World Commission on Dams (original) (raw)
Related papers
The World Commission on Dams+ 10: Revisiting the large dam controversy
Water Alternatives, 2010
The World Commission on Dams (WCD) was an experiment in multi-stakeholder dialogue and global governance concerned with a subject area -large dams -that was fraught with conflict and controversy. The WCD Report, Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making, was published in 2000 and accompanied by hopes that broad-based agreements would be forged on how to better manage water and energy development. Ten years later, this special issue of Water Alternatives revisits the WCD and its impacts, exploring the question: Is the WCD still relevant? The editorial team and the Guest Editors of this special issue of Water Alternatives have selected a range of 20 papers, 6 viewpoints, and 4 book reviews that help to illustrate the evolution in the dams debate. The goal of this special issue is to examine the influence and the impacts of the WCD on the dam enterprise, in general, and on the policies and practices of key stakeholders and institutions, and on the development outcomes for affected communities and environments, in particular. In this introduction, the Guest Editors provide an overview of the special issue, exploring the new drivers of dam development that have emerged during the last decade, including climate change and new financiers of dams, and describing the themes emerging from this diverse set of papers and viewpoints. This special issue demonstrates the need for a renewed multi-stakeholder dialogue at multiple levels. This would not be a redo of the WCD, but rather a rekindling and redesigning of processes and forums where mutual understanding, information-sharing, and norm-setting can occur. One of the most promising developments of the last decade is the further demonstration, in case studies described here, that true partnership amongst key stakeholders can produce transformative resource-sharing agreements, showing that many of the WCD recommendations around negotiated decision making are working in practice. We hope that this special issue sparks a dialogue to recommit ourselves to finding effective, just, and lasting solutions for water, energy and ecosystem management. It is a testament to the continued relevance of the WCD Report that ten years later it is still a topic of intense interest and debate, as illustrated by the papers presented in this special issue.
Voice, power, and history: ensuring social justice for all stakeholders in water decision-making
Local Environment, 2014
Public participation in water decision-making is an accepted and expected practice. It is expected to lead to better decisions and ensure fairness by satisfying peoples' understanding of democracy and their "right" to participate in decisions that affect them. However, despite years of experience and "best practices", governing bodies at all levels struggle to implement successful, genuine participation that leads to fair decisions. Ultimately, decision-making about natural resources such as water is a process that takes place in a wider power context where some groups have greater access to sources of power and entitlements. This research applies a "Social Justice Framework" (SJF) to examine the experiences of different stakeholder groups in making their voices heard during water reform processes in the Murray -Darling Basin in Australia. The experiences of croppers and graziers in two different floodplains show how historical advantages and disadvantages affect the power balance between different stakeholder groups and their ability to participate in and influence water decision-making. Applying the three components of the SJF, distributive, procedural and interactive justice, in water decision-making should lead to greater equity in distribution and underline the importance of good governance in decision-making processes.
Global Public Policy, Partnership, and the Case of the World Commission on Dams
Public Administration Review, 2002
This article examines the potential for partnership to address two major challenges in public service: (1) the evolving sociopolitical context of public service, that is, the increasing incidence and intensity of conflict among diverse stakeholders; and (2) the formulation of acceptable and feasible global public policy. The partnership approach, its value added, and its operationalization are examined through the World Commission on Dams, a partnership designed to resolve conflicts over large dam projects. The analysis identifies lessons that are specific to conflict-based partnerships for global public policy making and regarding partnership work more generally. The importance of converging interests, policy champions, democratic processes, and perception are highlighted. Intense conflict provides incentives for joint solution, but process agreement is paramount, and conflict resolution is not a one-time effort for all. The World Commission on Dams demonstrates that partnership is an effective and efficient approach to addressing conflictive policy issues.
This article attempts to provide answers to one specific and one general question: How should we evaluate the performance of the World Commission on Dams in terms of its democratic legitimacy? And what does the evaluation of the commission's performance tell us about the legitimacy of global rule making in more general terms? Based on these questions, the article comes to two main conclusions. First (measured in terms of its inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability), the democratic legitimacy of the World Commission on Dams' standardsetting process can be challenged in several ways. Second, the difficulties in determining the commission's legitimacy in relation to other mechanisms of rule making demonstrate that we still lack a theoretical understanding of what the idea of democratic governance beyond the nation-state would entail in practice. Achieving a better understanding of this normative aspect of world politics will remain a major task for contemporary political theory.
Water and democracy: new roles for civil society in water governance
International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2013
In most democratic countries, government officials make water allocation decisions. Citizens depend on these officials and their technical advisors to take account of both technical and political considerations in determining which water uses get priority, what infrastructure investments to make and what water quality standards to apply. In many parts of the world, water users and stakeholders have additional opportunities to comment on such decisions before they are implemented. Under some circumstances, citizens can challenge water management decisions in court. This is not enough. More direct democracy-involving stakeholders before such decisions are made-can produce fairer and increasingly sustainable results. The steps in collaborative adaptive management-a form of stakeholder engagement particularly appropriate to managing complex water networks-are described in this article along with the reasons that traditional forms of representative democracy are inadequate when it comes to water policy.
International Journal of Water Resources Development, 2018
In this day and age, it is widely argued that stakeholder engagement in water-related decision-making processes yields many benefits, including legitimacy, acceptance, and trust. Key legal frameworks, such as the European Water Framework Directive and the Aarhus Convention have spurred the emergence of formal forms of stakeholder engagement. Conjunctively, many engagement processes are spontaneous and selforganised. This article investigates the strategies used in formal (i.e. government-led) and informal (i.e. bottom-up) engagement processes in search of a middle ground. To this end, case studies in the Netherlands, the United States, Uganda and Ethiopia are analysed using the OECD Checklist of stakeholder engagement. We conclude with a reflexion on the ways forward to make formal and informal stakeholder engagement complementary.