Third WCD Forum Meeting
25-27 February 2001 - Cape Town, South Africa

Winrock International
Bikash Pandey

What should the report achieve?

Worst outcome - Recommendations are followed to the letter - resulting in bureaucratization, and in more expensive projects, delays, or long lead times for all projects - good or bad.

And in a few years, if another audit were done, these new projects would come out the same or worse in terms of development effectiveness of dams.

2nd part of WCD report takes precedence over the first part.
Implementation becomes strong on the red tape but weak on outcomes.
Governments continue taking on much more ambitious projects than they have capability for, relying on assistance of multilateral and bilateral aid.

Aid organizations continue to use conditionalities as a substitute for capability building.
Governance not fundamentally improved - corruption, inefficiency, and high-handedness continue.
Pseudo-participation and little accountability results. Government fakes participation and private sector buys it in the process of building projects.

No reduction in conflicts associated with project development. Few additional benefits to affected people.
Net additional transfer of resources to consultants and substantially increased paperwork.
Continuation of the past but with even more bureaucracy.

Best outcome - Recommendations and guidelines are internalized to country specific situations.
But fundamentally to achieve much better and measurable development outcomes.

Can not expect perfect projects immediately but evolution towards much better projects and marked improvement over the past.
Gaining public trust, transparent decision making, efficient use of existing projects. Clean support and ownership of projects from local and affected people.

Good governance practices in dam building transfer to other development sectors.

In Nepal, the WCD report has been divisive - by and large officials of HMG/N have opposed the report and have warned the main financiers of dams in the country - the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank not to adopt the recommendations.
The main concern has been that future projects will be not be financed or will be expensive as a result of the report and that activist NGOs will use the report to oppose hydropower projects even more fiercely.

NGOs on the other hand have broadly supported the WCD report and some have even gone to the extent of asking that recommendations must be adopted by national law and be binding upon dam builders through the adoption of an international treaty enforced by the UN.

Nepal needs water projects, badly. Small power and irrigation projects for community consumption, larger district level projects, and even possibly the very large projects for exporting power and irrigation to downstream India. Government and civil society agree on this. However, past project choices and execution have been far from ideal -

Large irrigation projects continue to dominate government expenditure even when forty years of experience and study after study have shown that these projects have had very poor outcomes - large cost over runs and achievement of a fraction of the projected benefits.

Most projects do not generate sufficient revenue to cover operation and maintenance costs, forget any returns on investment.
Individual farmer owned and operated shallow tube wells and traditional community managed hill irrigation systems have been proven to be 10 times more cost-effective. Yet over 95% of the government budget (supported by aid) continues to be spent on large agency constructed and managed projects.

Micro-hydro projects for isolated use, managed by the community, and small hydropower projects being built by the local private companies for supplying the grid are being carried out at half to one third the per unit construction cost of large aid-funded government hydropower projects.
Bureaucratization, incompetence, and corruption have put 'economy of scale' on its head!

Yet certain government officials claim that the comprehensive options assessment proposed by WCD is a waste of time since everyone knows Nepal needs dams!

Despite the agreement between civil society and the government on the need of water projects in Nepal covering a range of sizes, the most contentious issues have to do with governance. Large projects in general, dams being of particular importance to Nepal, are eroding social capital in the country. They have created substantial mistrust between government and civil society.

The WCD report has given expression to this mistrust. But it also gives an opening to both sides to begin to heal this mistrust. Government officials support the core values. They agree in principle with most of the seven strategic priorities.
On the seventh, they feel the report fails to safeguard the rights and interests of the upper riparian country, which in the case of Nepal, is the poorer and weaker of the neighbors. On this last issue, government and civil society in Nepal are in agreement.
Government insists that despite their support of the core values and most of the strategic priorities, the guidelines of the report are not implementable.

This is where the challenge is - how to get the core values and strategic priorities adopted in decision making and execution of dams and other development enterprises in our countries, without undue bureaucratization?

The process of incorporating the WCD Guidelines into existing water development policies in the country, itself through a participatory process, is a long-term project that I and my organization Winrock International look forward to playing an important role in.