Coleen Fox

Struggles Over Dams as Struggles for Justice: The World Commission on Dams (WCD) and Anti-Dam Campaigns in Thailand and Mozambique

Publication of the World Commissions on Dams (WCD) final report in November 2000 prompted a series of divergent responses. The global anti-dam movement applauded the reports call for fastidious screening of large dam projects and increased levels of transparency and participation in dam-related decisions, while the dam industry argued the document was irrevocably biased against large dams. Several anti-dam campaigns in specific localities almost immediately employed the WCD recommendations as a means of arguing against contentious projects. This article examines two of these struggles, one in northeast Thailand and one in the lower Zambezi Valley of Mozambique, to shed light on the impacts of the transnational WCD process and the variegated ways it intersects with conflicts in specific locales.

Water, Geopolitics, and Economic Development in the Conceptualization of a Region

Two U.S.-based geographers outline three dimensions (geopolitical, economical, and biophysical) used to define the basin of the Mekong River as a region, which reveal multi-scalar water governance policies and discourses that lie at the core of current challenges and tensions within the basin. Drawing on their extensive knowledge and fieldwork, the authors demonstrate that processes integral to the framing of the Mekong as a region of economic integration and international cooperation (water resource development through construction of large dams) conflict sharply with the functioning of the Mekong as a region of highly connected biophysical processes. The approach utilized in the paper can be applied to the study of other transboundary river-basin regions in Eurasia and elsewhere facing similar contradictions among the geopolitical, economic, and biophysical dimensions used to define them. By focusing on a region as constructed simultaneously through multiple social and biophysical processes, the authors contribute to current debates within geography and related fields on the nature of regions.

The Social, Historical, and Institutional Contingencies of Dam Removal

Environmental managers in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly perceiving dam removal as a critical tool for river restoration and enhancing watershed resilience. In New England, over 125 dams have been dismantled for ecological and economic rationales. A surprising number of these removals, including many that are ongoing, have generated heated conflicts between restoration proponents and local communities who value their dammed landscapes. Using a comparative case study approach, we examine the environmental conflict around efforts to remove six dams in New England. Each of these removal efforts followed quite different paths and resultant outcomes: successful removal, stalled removal, and failure despite seemingly favorable institutional conditions. Lengthy conflicts often transpired in instances where removals occurred, but these were successfully arbitrated by paying attention to local historical–geographical conditions conducive to removal and by brokering effective compromises between dam owners and the various local actors and stakeholders involved in the removal process. Yet our results across all cases suggest that these are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for restoration through dam removal since a similar set of conditions typified cases where removals are continuously stalled or completely halted. Scholars examining the intersection between ecological restoration and environmental politics should remain vigilant in seeking patterns and generalities across cases of environmental conflict in order to promote important biophysical goals, but must also remain open to the ways in which those goals are thwarted and shaped by conflicts that are deeply contingent on historical–geographical conditions and broader institutional networks of power and influence.

The river is us; the river is in our veins: re-defining river restoration in three Indigenous communities

Indigenous communities are increasingly taking the lead in river restoration, using the process as an opportunity to re-engage deeply with their rivers, while revealing socio-cultural and political dimensions of restoration underreported in ecological and social science literatures. We engaged in collaborative research with representatives from three Indigenous nations in the United States, New Zealand, and Canada to explore the relationship between Indigenous ways of knowing and being (i.e., “Indigenous knowledges”) and their restoration efforts. Our research project asks the following: how are Indigenous knowledges enacted through river restoration and how do they affect outcomes? How do the experiences of these Indigenous communities broaden our understanding of the social dimensions of river restoration? Our research reveals how socio-cultural protocols and spiritual practices are intertwined with restoration methodologies, showing why cultural approaches to restoration matter. We found that in many cases, a changing political or legal context helps create space for assertion of Indigenous spiritual and cultural values, while the restoration efforts themselves have the potential to both repair community relationships with water and empower communities vis-à-vis the wider society. We show that restoration has the potential to not only restore ecosystem processes and services, but to repair and transform human relationships with rivers and create space politically for decolonizing river governance.

River Basin Development

While river basins have been important sites of human activity for thousands of years, it was not until the early twentieth century that development began to transform basin ecosystems and spur regional development. Supported by technological and engineering advances and underpinned by an unquestioned faith in humankinds right to control nature for its own benefit, river basin development was carried forth with little recognition of the ecological, social, economic, and cultural benefits of free-flowing rivers. As a consequence, river basins around the world suffer from significant environmental degradation. Large-scale, multipurpose basin development was pioneered in the Global North (in the US in particular), where, in the 1930s, basins such the Tennessee, Columbia, and Colorado underwent massive transformations. In the post-World War II era, this model was imposed on and adopted by the countries of the Global South. In both cases, river basin development facilitated commercialization of agriculture, settlement in floodplains, and industrialization. In other words, basin development promoted modernization and regional development. In the latter decades of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century, concern for the ecological and social impacts of river basin development have grown. As a result, basin development schemes and management plans – and the narrow vision of modernization upon which they are often based – tend to be more politicized and contested than was the case in the early and mid-twentieth century. Today, in response to critiques, sustainable development and integrated river basin management are key concepts guiding river basin–society relations. While advances in sustainable management have been significant, many challenges remain. This is especially the case in transboundary river basins, where the disjunction between sovereign states and ecosystems complicates the sharing and management of natural resources.