Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power

by Sanjeev Khagram

Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences―especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction. Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on. Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects in central India, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.

Genres: Politics

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[anique · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over the last half century, an increasing number of national governments and international organizations have legislated for and successfully implemented large-scale water and energy plans. In order to successfully complete these initiatives—articulated as national and economic development—governing bodies have fulfilled these plans by commonly ignoring the rights, desires, and lives of communities dramatically affected by their realization. Water rights have emerged as a key issue in this debate regarding development, capitalism, and international politics and India is one country in which these issues have generated national and international attention. In his book, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, Sanjeev Khagram investigates the growing struggle of local and transnational resistance and how their involvement in (anti)dam development has transformed the dynamics, processes, and language of the political economy of development.

The book focuses on big dam projects, specifically India’s Narmada Projects, because they are commonly thought of as the ultimate symbols of development: leviathan structures, visions of economic progress, modernization embodied. Khagram constructs an intense historical analysis that marks the trajectory of big dam development and illustrates how its proponents and opponents have both shaped and been shaped by it. While his analysis focuses broadly on social actors—local and transnationally—that rally against the destruction of dams, Khagram is essentially interested in the larger structural machinations that contribute to the successes and downfalls of these so-called development projects.