Yvonne A. Braun

Social impacts of large dam projects: A comparison of international case studies and implications for best practice

This paper applies the tool of social impact assessment (SIA) to understand the effects of large dam projects on human communities. We draw upon data from two recent SIA projects: the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in Southern Africa, and the Manwan Dam, located on the upper Mekong River in southwestern China. These two cases allow us to examine the social impacts of large dam projects through time and across various geographical scales. We focus on a range of social impacts common to many large-scale dam projects, including: the migration and resettlement of people near the dam sites; changes in the rural economy and employment structure; effects on infrastructure and housing; impacts on non-material or cultural aspects of life; and impacts on community health and gender relations. By identifying potential impacts in advance of a large dam project, agencies and policymakers can make better decisions about which interventions should be undertaken, and how. We conclude our analysis with an overview of lessons learned from the case studies and suggestions for best practice in assessing the social impacts of large dams. Conducting proper social impact assessments can help to promote development strategies that address the most important concerns for local populations, enhancing the long-term sustainability of dam projects.

Coal, Identity, and the Gendering of Environmental Justice Activism in Central Appalachia

Women generally initiate, lead, and constitute the rank and file of environmental justice activism. However, there is little research on why there are comparatively so few men involved in these movements. Using the environmental justice movement in the Central Appalachian coalfields as a case study, we examine the ways that environmental justice activism is gendered, with a focus on how women’s and men’s identities both shape and constrain their involvement in gendered ways. The analysis relies on 20 interviews with women and men grassroots activists working for environmental justice in the coalfields of Appalachia. We find that women draw on their identities as “mothers” and “Appalachians” to justify their activism, while the hegemonic masculinity of the region, which is tied to the coal industry, has the opposite effect on men, deterring their movement involvement. We explore the implications of these findings for understanding the relationship of gender to environmental justice activism.

From developmentalism to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Contrasting the socio-political contexts of large-scale development and the HIV/AIDS crisis in Lesotho, our analysis captures important historical conjunctures that expanded opportunities for the mobilization of womens rights as human rights. Local womens rights organizations, such as Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA), found greater support and resonance for womens rights claims amid the socio-political context of the AIDS crisis, in marked contrast to the stifling of those same claims during a period of neoliberal, nationalist development initiatives in Lesotho. The AIDS crisis in particular introduced new international actors that helped support a ‘frame bridging’ strategy whereby womens rights were characterized as health rights, rooted in a critique of the AIDS crisis that identified the role of gender inequality as an important driver of the epidemic. These links to transnational feminist networks as well as to international health agencies bolstered the critiques of gender inequality articulated by WLSA and other womens rights advocates, helping usher in a series of legal changes in Lesotho in 2003 and 2006.

Gender, large-scale development, and food insecurity in Lesotho: an analysis of the impact of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project

This article investigates the effects of development policy on gender and food security. It analyses how one policy instituted by a large-scale multi-dam development project, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), affected womens food security in the rural highlands of Lesotho, southern Africa. This was a mitigation policy, aiming to ensure that the LHWP did not negatively impact on the people living in the area where the dams were constructed. However, ethnographic research suggests that the policy itself reinforced and exacerbated gender inequalities that affected womens ability to secure food, and put women at risk of food insecurity within their households. Once again we see that gender issues must be central to the constitution and implementation of development projects.

Selling the River: Gendered Experiences of Resource Extraction and Development in Lesotho

As the small Southern African country of Lesotho grapples with implementing one of the five largest dam-development projects in the world today, the local people impacted confront the challenges of resettlement, loss of means of production, and changed access to natural resources. This chapter reveals the ways in which the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) serves to reorganize and commodify rural resources for the benefit of the nation-state in gendered ways. Based on interviews of rural households conducted during 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lesotho, this chapter analyzes impacted peoples experiences of the gendered implications of the extraction and sale of water from the rural highlands of Lesotho to South Africa. This case study documents the gendered environmental and social impacts of the LHWP on local communities, and illuminates the everyday lived experiences of the affected people as they effectively subsidize this international project with their environmental resources, labor, money, and, in some cases, their nutritional status.

Left High and Dry

A ‘curious feminist’ analysis, according to Enloe, starts in the lives of women and values all womens lives regardless of their status, identity, location or access to power. In this article I use this perspective to highlight the intersections of international development and patriarchy in the lives of three women of different generations and class status as they are affected by dislocations resulting from the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) in the remote highland communities in rural Lesotho. I employ an intersectionality framework to demonstrate how their shared and divergent experiences, presented only partially and in my narrative form, tell a tale of the intertwining consequences of this multi-billion dollar international development project in the lives of rural poor women. Womens lived experiences of the LHWP reveal the contradictions of international development, exposing the masculinist imperatives that focus on generating national revenues to the exclusion of other development options, while organizing practices that dislocate the rural poor from their lands and livelihoods and implementing policies that reinforce patriarchy locally and globally. This article demonstrates the importance of bringing feminist scholarship to bear on development practice and argues specifically for the utility of intersectionality, narrative and curious feminist analyses.

Plastic Bags, Pollution, and Identity Women and the Gendering of Globalization and Environmental Responsibility in Mali

Research and policy interest in questions of environmental waste is growing, especially plastic bag pollution. Where trash disposal and recycling are not highly regulated, the proliferation of plastic bags has created dramatic social and environmental consequences. In this article, we draw on 30 interviews with women who sell goods in markets in Mali as an entry point into investigating this issue through the interrelated dimensions of identity, gender, globalization, and the environment. We find the choices of women become suspect and blamed for this environmental issue despite their having few socio-political options, while global and local political and economic elites have largely been responsible for implementing a series of policies and programs that have heightened the local effects of globalization while diminishing the services available to deal with the environmental and cultural dimensions of these changes. The issue of plastic bag pollution demonstrates the environmental consequences of development strategies that have emphasized economic growth with seemingly little concern or value for local cultures and environments, let alone the experiences and lives of poor women.

Gender, development, and sex work in Lesotho

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersections of gender, development and globalization through an investigation of the ways in which a large‐scale, internationally financed multi‐dam development project, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP), impacts gender relations through its physical presence in the highlands of Lesotho, Southern Africa.Design/methodology/approach – Field research including interviews with men and women impacted by the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) in Lesotho in 1997 and 2000‐2001.Findings – The paper finds that, by positioning themselves as sex workers for foreign development workers, non‐elite women are able to access development monies indirectly. The devaluation of womens labor on farms and in the household excludes them as legitimate receivers of “development”, reproducing male ownership and patriarchal authority, and ultimately pushing some women into work that is precarious, low wage, risky, and often demeaning.Research limitations/implicati...

Resettlement and Risk: Women's Community Work in Lesotho

This paper explores some gendered impacts of resettlement in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Lesotho, Southern Africa, I use a feminist political ecology framework to analyze the ways host and settler communities negotiate development-induced resettlement and how resettlement conditions (re)produce gendered social interests in the context of the LHWP. While material losses are typically compensated during resettlement, the non-material, psycho-social aspects of loss do not get compensated. After resettlement, however, it is the unpaid, uncompensated community work of women that offers opportunities for adjustment into the new communities.

Networking for women’s rights: academic centers, regional information networks, and feminist advocacy in southern Africa

ABSTRACT Women’s rights advocates, in southern Africa as elsewhere, have challenged gender inequality to advance the status of women in society and as a means to also address related, cumulative issues of disadvantage. As communication technologies and neoliberal globalization alter forms of communication, the potential for organizing, coalitions, and advocacy work across time and space, such as through transnational feminist networks (TFNs), has grown. Understanding the rise of TFNs has largely relied on historical narratives and case studies, and the literature has tended to emphasize transnational over regional dimensions. Our approach, however, finds that regional connections not only play an important role in linking TFNs to local women’s rights initiatives in southern Africa, but that information-rich academic institutes focusing on gender studies bring structure to local and regional information networks in the region and act as bridges between the local, regional and global. Methodologically, we employ an innovative approach to visibly capture the work of regional and local activists by taking a meso-level snapshot of website links among 70 women’s rights organizations operating in southern Africa. We pair the network visualization with a case study of our central academic center, the African Gender Institute, to demonstrate the work of this critical hub in the local and regional communication network.