Dams and Development

"Dams and Development could just as accurately be titled 'Dams and Democracy.' In recounting a richly detailed story of the rise and fall of the era of 'big dams' first in the United States and other developed countries and then in the developing world, Sanjeev Khagram tells us a great deal about both domestic democracy and an emerging transnational democracy. Today the effort to build a big dam anywhere in the world will unleash a flood of opposition from social and environmental groups on site and from around the world, groups that can mobilize the tools of democratic advocacy in their own countries and can often become forces for democratization in the country affected. Dams as instruments of democratization? Read on!" -- Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
"Powerful development agencies, such as the World Bank, multinational corporations, and states once built big dams in the name of development progress. Since the 1980s, this became less and less possible as critics around the world mounted unprecedented challenges to the claim that big dams promote development. Sanjeev Khagram explicates the conditions under which this massive paradigm shift occurred and why the innovative World Commission on Dams emerged. This unique book is essential reading for all scholars and practitioners interested in the political economy of sustainable development." -- Robert Goodland, formerly of The World Bank Environment Program
"Sanjeev Khagram brilliantly navigates the complex histories of mega-project development and never loses the plot: the changeable trajectories of these efforts across the decades and the capacity of the powerless to contest this kind of development. The analysis shows that 'history' can be undone, no matter how powerful those who script it." -- Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and Its Discontents
"Sanjeev Khagram has written an illuminating account of how a series of world movements have undercut the established world pattern celebrating large dams as a path to progress, and have greatly reduced the numbers of such dams that are built. World mobilizations around the human rights of displaced people, and then the environment, and then the rights of indigenous peoples have supported surprising levels of power for the formerly powerless, particularly under democratic conditions that facilitate local mobilization. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with the world environmental movement, but also to political scientists and sociologists attentive to the new supra-national structures of the modern world polity. For all these scholars, this book provides a most dramatic and convincing case, emphasizing India but with much comparative material." -- John W. Meyer, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
"The sustained advocacy of the anti-dam network, an affiliation of conservationists, environmentalists, and other civil society groups, was directly responsible for the formation of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), which published a report assessing the social impacts of dams. It found in many instances that these dams had an overwhelmingly negative effect that was rarely 'adequately addressed or accounted for' and were directly responsible for a range of human rights violations including: forced displacement without compensation of between 40-80 million people around the world, loss of livelihood, loss of cultural heritage, loss of development capacity, and so on. A new book, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power, by Sanjeev Khagram, tells the detailed story." -- Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and U.N. high commissioner for human rights, and currently the executive director of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, in a speech to the American Sociological Association, August 2004