Narmada dams controversy -- case summary (original) (raw)

Theorising the political economy of dams: towards a research agenda

FutureDAMS Working Paper, 2019

The politics of dams has been analysed from a range of disciplinary perspectivesincluding comparative politics, international relations, political economy and political ecologyand at varying levelsinternational, national and local. This paper provides a critical review of this literature, highlighting key research themes and gaps in current analysis as a means of developing a broad framework and research agenda for the FutureDAMS project. This framework emphasises the importance of integrating material and ideational drivers of dams across multiple levels of analysis. Much valuable work has been done on the international politics of dams and the micro-politics of displacement and resistance to dam construction. However, a comparatively neglected area of studyparticularly where the recent dam boom in developing countries is concernedis to link these transnational and micro-political processes to national-level decision making. To this end, the paper proposes a central concern with such national-level processes, including process tracing decision making, the distributional politics of energy, the development of bureaucratic and technical capacity to carry out dam projects and the companies contracted to build, assess and design dams.

Strategies for Community Participation in Dam Development

2008

The World Commission on Dams has observed that there has been little or no meaningful participation of would-be dam affected people in the planning, implementation and maintenance of dam projects. As a result the full benefits of such projects are not realized. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has therefore, under the Dams and Development Project (DDP), stressed the need for an informed and all inclusive stakeholder dialogue as a new approach in planning and management of dams. Against this background, the Ghana Dams Forum was constituted in 2007 as a multistakeholder organisation to promote national dialogue on dam-related issues including community participation. This paper examines how communities have been involved in dams development in Ghana. Since her independence in 1957, Ghana has constructed large and small scale dams to generate electricity, supply water for domestic and industrial uses and to irrigate agricultural lands to boost food production. However, as in other parts of the world, the benefits of these projects have not gone without considerable social, economic and environmental costs. The paper notes that there is no formal institutional framework for ensuring community involvement in dam projects and that community participation has taken varied forms with respect to the scale of the project. As a result community concerns have not been adequately addressed resulting in lack of confidence in institutional structures and implementing agencies. Many people including displaced populations, host communities and downstream riverine communities have been adversely affected by these dams. Resettlement programmes have fallen short of expectations, payment of compensations have either not been effected or unduly delayed and reparations in general have been poorly managed. The paper stresses the need to deepen stakeholder consultations and greater community involvement during initiation, planning, design, implementation and maintenance of dams in order to realise the full benefits of dam construction and effectively mitigate the adverse social, economic and ecological impacts. The paper recommends that: • Would-be dam-affected communities should be adequately informed, sensitised and educated about the scope, benefits and implications of the project. i 2. Conceptual Definitions .

Gaining Public Acceptance: A Critical Strategic Priority of the World Commission on Dams

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), 2010

Gaining Public Acceptance (GPA) was a strategic priority recommended in the final report of the World Commission on Dams (WCD). GPA remains a central, thorny challenge for all parties interested in how society makes decisions about the development of water resources, the provision of energy, and the maintenance of ecosystems, whilst striving for social justice. The WCD's GPA is largely about issues of procedural justice (e.g. inclusion and access) and proposes process-related principles. Distributional justice is also important (e.g. equitable sharing of benefits; and, avoiding unfair and involuntary risk-bearing). Several key lessons are emerging from past initiatives to gain public acceptance through participatory exercises. Differences in development and sustainability orientations are obvious in debates on dams and need to be explicitly considered and not glossed over. Politics and power imbalances pervade participatory processes, and require much more attention than they receive. Ultimately, the accountability and legitimacy of state and nonstate actors are crucial but complex as there are many ways to build public trust. To earn legitimacy and more likely acceptance of important public decisions we suggest a comprehensive set of 'gold standard' state-society attributes for improving governance. Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) can help deliberation to become routine, enabling complex water issues to be more rigorously examined. The combination of increased public trust, earned by the state, and high-quality MSPs to assist more informed negotiations, we see as being key to the gaining of public acceptance.

The Democracy-Development Tension In Dam Projects:: The Long Hand of the Law

Political Geography, 2004

Democratic development' comprises two ideas: the idea of democracy that calls for devolution of power to communities and the idea of development that calls for conceding power to global institutions public and private. The post-war world has witnessed the simultaneous decentralisation of political power and the centralisation of economic power. Recent movements against large dams draw attention to developmental conflicts that embody this tension but do not theorise the underlying dynamic. Taking the award of the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal as a point of departure this paper examines the centralisation-decentralisation dynamic in water conflicts in the Krishna basin in Southern India. The paper argues that there is a hiatus in our understanding of legal and institutional relationships in the 'the economic' and 'the political', 'the national' and 'the international' and 'the colonial' and the 'post-colonial' in relation to problems of river basin development. It challenges some conceptual underpinnings of the development paradigm. Keywords: Democratic development; Dams; Law and society; Development planning; Krishna water dispute; Federalism

The Environmental and Social Impacts of Dams: Mapping the Issues

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

ABSTRACT In 2011, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“Guiding Principles”) for the first time established an authoritative global standard for preventing and addressing the risk of adverse human rights impacts linked to business activity. These were the product of many years’ research and extensive consultations by UN Special Representative John Ruggie involving government, companies, business associations and civil society around the world. The Guidelines described how states can better manage business and human rights challenges based on the three pillars “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework: 1) the state duty to protect human rights, 2) the corporate responsibility to respect human rights, and 3) the need for greater access to remedy for victims of business related abuse. This common paper analyzes the challenges faced as a result of large-scale infrastructure projects, in particular dams. The experiences of five countries are considered – Turkey, Spain, Brazil, India and South Africa – in light of national and international law and the UN Guiding Principles.Dams present particular challenges. They are long-term projects, unlike other businesses. Their impact on local communities is more enduring, ranging from environment to social issues, from national development policies to the resolution of the country’s energy and resource needs, and they have potential human rights impacts, arising from land expropriation, to forced eviction, and to the displacement and resettlement of local communities, and the compensation of victims. But most importantly, they fall beyond John Ruggie’s important UN Guidelines on Business and Human Rights, making this current study especially significant for that reason alone. As we will see, the interests of foreign investors, international treaty obligations, as well as the demands of global institutions such as the World Bank are in addition also further factors that complicate the state’s response – political and legislative – to the challenges raised by dams.The experience of the five countries highlights how legislative, judicial, and executive initiatives have an increasingly important role to play in navigating around these myriad interests. Sections II and III of this paper focus on the legislative experiences of South Africa and Spain, respectively, while section IV explores the various challenges faced by Brazil in the protection of the rights of local population during the two phases of dam development: planning and bidding, and construction and outsourcing. Sections V and VI examine the legislative, political and judicial responses to the issues raised by large scale dam development in Turkey and India.

Implementing the report of the World Commission on Dams: A case study of the Narmada Valley in India

Am. U. Int'l L. Rev., 2000

is an engineer by training, graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT) with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He worked for a year in developing and using computer models for analyzing development policy. In 1988, he joined as a full time activist the .\armadIa Bcwhao Andolan (NBA-"Struggled to Save the Narmada"), a grassroots movement of the people affected by the large dams on the river Narmada in India. His %%ork in the NBA has included grassroots mobilization, planning and participating in mass action and agitational programs, demonstrations, documentation, anal)sis and research work, media, national and international campaign and solidarity, networking, and legal work. Among his major involvement and responsibilities were: the international campaign of the NBA, NBA's Case in the Supreme Court. and the World Commission on Dams. He was involved in the WCD from its inception in Gland, was closely involved in the setting up of the Commission. and was a member of the WCD Forum. While he remains closelN associated %% ith the NBA, he is in the process of setting up a Center which % ill camry out independent research and analysis, and maintain extensive information on issues related to water, energy, and large dams. The author w ishes to thank the followving for providing critical inputs and comments on the writing of this article:

How Global Norms for Large Dams Reach Decision-Makers

Water Politics and Development Cooperation

Unlike the traditional path of international policy making for e.g. establishing international environmental regimes, with nation states being the decisive actors, the World Commission on Dams (WCD) has followed a different nonstate centered approach for developing global norms. The WCD process therefore has been welcomed by many as a prototypical example of how trisectoral networks can help to overcome stalemate in highly conflict-ridden policy arenas. Independent assessments, however, have pointed to the fact that the consensus achieved within the World Commission has not translated into a broader stakeholder consensus because nation states were not represented. The following article shows that the WCD's guidelines have gained ground and analyzes the paths and means of policy (norm) diffusion. A case study from Turkey (the Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River) shows that the Turkish Government, who was among those who rejected the WCD's guidelines, has come under severe pressure from diverse actors. However, this can not be attributed to the specific process character employed, but to the WCD's and NGOs' political influence on major finance institutions, governments of industrialized countries and their aid agencies. 5 The International Hydropower Association's (IHA) policy is not analyzed in this article since documents on its website (http://www.hydropower.org) are not accessible to non-members. 6 The first ever independent review of a World Bank-supported project under implementation. 7 World Bank website, "Learning from Narmada," http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/oed/ ... [Cited 17 August 2006]. 8 World Bank website, "Learning from Narmada," http://wbln0018.worldbank.org/oed/ ... [Cited 17 August 2006]. 9 Cf. Fox's 2000 analysis of the effects of external pressures on the World Bank's internal processes.

Interest groups and the proposed Epupa Dam: Towards a theory of water politics

2005

"The purpose of this article is to construct a theory of water politics by using the case study of the transnational role and involvement of interest groups in the debate surrounding the proposed Epupa Dam. Interest groups are defined as non-state entities ^ supported by a specific constituency and converging on an exact issue ^ which influence government policies and other non-state and inter-governmental institutions, in the national and international political domains. Nowhere is this influence more obvious than in the water politics of water resource management projects (WRMPs), such as hydropower installations. Since the Namibian government announced plans to construct another hydroelectric power plant on the Kunene River in the early 1990s, opposition from interest groups had a significant impact on the political debate regarding the pro- posed Epupa Dam. To be sure, interest groups did not only focus their lobbying campaign on the national political domain, but they also went transnational in their endeavours to have the project halted.By describing and analysing the role and involvement of interest groupsinthewater pol- itics of Epupa, a new theory ^ hydro-normative commensalism ^ and a definition of water politics are developed.The theory and definition place emphasis on the role of norms in water politics and the way in which norms are used by interest groups and states to advance their arguments in the debate over the proposed Epupa Dam. "