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Preface - Kader Asmal, WCD Chair

Globalisation From Below

If politics is the art of the possible,this document is a work of art. It redefines what is possible to all of us, for all of us, at a time when water pressure on governments has never been more intense. Consider: on this blue planet, less than 2.5% of our water is fresh, less than 33% of fresh water is fluid, less than 1.7% of fluid water runs in streams. And we have been stopping even these. We dammed half our world´s rivers at unprecedented rates of one per hour, and at unprecedented scales of over 45 000 dams more than four storeys high.

As one who authorised the next stage of one of the largest dams in the Southern Hemisphere I can argue that nations build large dams for sound reasons. Dams store, use and divert water for consumption, irrigation, cooling, transportation, construction, mills, power and recreation. Dams remove water from the Ganges, Amazon, Danube, Nile or Columbia to sustain cities on their banks. For parting – or imparting – the waters, dams are our oldest tool. Yet are they our only tool, or our best option?

The World Commission on Dams has undertaken a rigorous, independent and inclusive global review, testing the waters to help you answer that question with authority. But just as water scarcity drove previous construction of dams, competition for water has underscored the Commission´s work. As we seek water we face an escalating crisis, even of biblical proportions. In Ecclesiastes, recall the passage:

One generation passeth away,
and another generation cometh:
but the earth abideth always...
All rivers runneth to the sea,
yet the sea is not full...

The words are beautiful, haunting and, suddenly, anachronistic. For they are not true due to demands and dams during our lives. Even degraded rivers seldom totally run, but loiter in a chain of reservoirs. In some years our mightiest rivers – Africa´s Nile, Asia´s Yellow, America´s Colorado, Australia´s Murray – do not reach the sea.

Compounding that shortage, one in five persons world-wide lacks access to safe drinking water. Half the world lacks sanitation; millions die from waterborne diseases. Farmers compete for water with booming but stressed cities. Towns drain aquifers that took centuries to fill. Saltwater pollutes groundwater miles from the sea. In China, Mexico and India water tables fall a metre a year. In a few decades, as we seek a fifth more water for 3 billion new people, one in three of us may struggle to drink or bathe.

Some see in our scarcity a harbinger of troubled waters to come. They believe water scarcity inevitably locks peoples, regions and nations in a fierce, competitive struggle in which restless millions race to the bottom in fear and self-interest. And thus, they maintain, when rivers cross borders within or between nations, water scarcity leads to water stress which leads to water wars.

Our Commission, and through it, this Final Report, contradicts that sentiment. We see water as an instrument, a catalyst for peace, that brings us together, neither to build dams nor tear them down but to carefully develop resources for the long term.

Easier said than done? Not necessarily. The hard part here may lie in what can be ‘said´ with intellectual honesty, vision and understanding. Surprisingly such a statement has rarely been attempted. Unlike every other aspect of our lives, large dams have long escaped deep and clear and impartial scrutiny into the process by which they emerge and are valued. This lapse is especially glaring when set against much smaller scale investments. We daily squeeze and weigh fruits and vegetables to ensure we get a fair return at the market. We rigorously test-drive and analyse the performance of motor cars before and after paying a few thousand dollars for one. We conduct thorough due-diligence before purchase of either house or business.

Yet this century we have collectively bought, on average, one large dam per day, and there have been precious few, if any, comprehensive, independent analyses as to why dams came about, how dams perform over time, and whether we are getting a fair return from our $2 trillion investment.

Until now.

Pioneer efforts are bound to be controversial. And while the World Commission on Dams is, by design, strictly advisory, make no mistake. Our genesis, work process and implications of this Final Report are by nature quite political. Our mandate involves the most precious element on earth, and that, of course, involves power: who wields it, how to share it, which ways the state may better balance it.

Some may feel this Report makes water use decisions even more difficult; by raising the bar higher, as we do, a government must exercise more energy and creativity to reach a sustainable result. But in truth we make those decisions easier; for we show clearly which, how, where and why decisions can either work well or fail to deliver.

For that reason I assert that we are much more than a ‘Dams Commission´. We are a Commission to heal the deep and self-inflicted wounds torn open wherever and whenever far too few determine for far too many how best to develop or use water and energy resources. That is often the nature of power, and the motivation of those who question it. Most recently governments, industry and aid agencies have been challenged around the world for deciding the destiny of millions without including the poor, or even popular majorities of countries they believe to be helping.

To confer legitimacy on such epochal decisions, real development must be people-centred, while respecting the role of the state as mediating, and often representing, their interests. In the following pages we do not endorse globalisation as led from above by a few men. We do endorse globalisation as led from below by all, a new approach to global water policy and development.

In this approach, we must deal with the past before we can chart a course for the future. The integrity of our process determines the integrity of this product, which raises a key point. I am proud to sign this work, and to guide this project, but the document you hold is not, as are some Commission Reports, authored by its chair.

It comes instead from many authors who were originally separated by the cultural and philosophical divides of the debate. That is its true strength. Indeed, the assumption that the number of people who write something is inversely related to how much it says only goes so far. Hundreds of eloquent books and publications inform the dams and development debate from one side or the other. Written by single authors, they say much but resolve little. The WCD Final Report is meaningful, and will be remembered, not just for what it says, but for the fact that several hundred diverse men and women were directly involved in saying it. It is sculpted by the expertise of members of the Commission, many of whom have devoted their entire lives to engineering, environmental, social and institutional concerns of rivers and dams. All of us were sensitive to the needs of human development as we listened to the aspirations, the pain and the anguish of individual people.

Slow to speak, our Commission was quick to listen. Both sides of the debate gave their perspectives: from dam officials with an obligation to govern to dam affected people with stories to tell. By airing facts we reached a rapprochement that began in Gland, Switzerland and continued, non-stop, through hearings, consultations, case studies, submissions and reviews covering roughly one thousand large dams.

Through this process a shared understanding and truth began to emerge, and with it the thin thread with which to sew the stitches of reconciliation. On this Commission, the first stitches came, perhaps, as a woman who risks her life opposing a large dam threads the eye of the needle with an engineer who built his career designing them. Or when the leader of one the world´s most powerful technology companies engaged with the leader of one of the world´s proud but dispossessed peoples. As Seattle, Toronto, Washington, London and Berlin came unravelled by turbulent protests over globalisation and development, we quietly continued to apply stitch after stitch to sew a stronger, more resilient and colourful tapestry.

Our work is now over. With this document, yours has begun. I wish it could be as simple or catchy as popular manuals that offer simplistic solutions for complex situations. We recognise all those arguments, and absorb them. But we push beyond Declarations, which urge: ‘Recognise human rights´ or ‘Sustain natural resources´.

Telling me, a harried public official who must answer to 48 million restless, hungry and thirsty people, to ‘Ensure development is sustainable and humane´ is like warning me, ‘Operate, but don´t inflict new wounds´. I know that. What I don´t know is how to do it. To explain how to develop water in ways that do not exhaust either my constituents or the resources we all depend on, we must go beyond platitudes. Our healing must emerge not through anecdotes, but through a complex, coherent and cohesive argument that shows clearly where we have been, what happened, why we´re in conflict, and how we can, with proper understanding, heal ourselves.

That involves first shedding misconceptions. Today´s demands are too complex, our technology too advanced, our constituency too diverse, our options too numerous to allow just one solution. For example, imagine a typical dam.

Perhaps you see a smooth, parabolic, concrete structure. It seems to generate cheap electricity through turbines at its base. Engineers worship it, ecologists curse it, indigenous tribes lose their culture to it. Native fisheries plunge after construction, but floods decline as well. It pollutes neither air nor water, provides water for nearby towns, turns arid soils into rich farmland. People and animals were relocated, but the economic returns made doing so cost-effective. The dam embodies ambitions of statesmen, but when politicians approach with their ambitious plans, apprehensive peoples hold signs that say ‘Save our beloved river´.

That image was my own. It was what I envisioned when I first took over the Ministry of Water Affairs and Forestry under Nelson Mandela. Five years of hands-on work tempered that vision. Chairing this Commission shattered it.

Instead of my archetype I saw: dams built of dirt and dams generating no electricity; dams praised by ecologists and dams despised by engineers; dams used for centuries by indigenous peoples, dams boosting fisheries, dams causing deadly floods; dams changing river chemistry or increasing net greenhouse gas emissions. I saw dam benefits by-pass thirsty adjacent communities en route to the city, dams exhaust and erode rich soils through water logging and salinity. I saw dams displace no one, dams create wetlands and work, dams cost thrice their budget, dams utterly abandoned and which had no symbolic value. Then I saw politicians approach rivers with ambitious, bureaucratic schemes, opposed by local activists shouting, ‘Save our beloved dam´.

No matter how much you know, or think you know, about dams, you cannot read the following report and keep your assumptions intact. No matter how sceptical, you will come away changed, I think, for the better. For the truth is no typical dams exist.

Yet the decisions that led to those dams share a great deal. Clear patterns have emerged, and all parties have met. We have all reached agreement, established a healing process that we hope will work, and set this manual before you. Read it carefully – though not in one sitting – with an eye to where it may apply to your own specific needs and agenda. It is rigorous, without being rigid; it sees the State as an instrument of development yet recognises the necessity for popular participation; it is dispassionate and advisory in tone, but authoritative in its practical application.

It is said that if we do not master technology, technology will master us. In the past, our unrestrained reliance upon large dam technology weighed down upon us in all its unexamined mystery. It stood, like solid, divisive walls, between our left and right banks, between the upstream and downstream reaches of our rivers. The Commission´s work is complete. And now, perhaps, technology can instead be kept under our united and democratic control, owned by all of us. In that way we can meet the coming water scarcity with confidence and assurance, knowing that water is not for fighting over. Water is for conserving. Water is for bathing. Water is for drinking. Water is for sharing. Water, through this report, can be our catalyst for peace.

Professor Kader Asmal
Chair, World Commission on Dams

I would like to express on behalf of the Commission our particular appreciation to the following individuals They have along with many other friends, partners and contributors to the WCD process, played a vital role in enabling the Commision to fulfil its mandate.

Bruce Babbitt, Sadi Baron, Ger Bergkamp, Richard Bissell, Robert Bos, Peter Bosshard, Rodney Bridle, John Briscoe, Ian Curtis, Shripad Dharmadhikary, Bert Diphoorn, Osmar Vieira de Filho, Luis Garcia, Raymundo José S. Garrido, Pham Hong Giang, Liane Greeff, George Green, Biksham Gujja, Geir Y. Hermansen, Kaare Hoeg, Ann Jennervik, Olav Kjorven, Jean-Etienne Klimpt, Manfred Konukiewitz, M.L Chanaphun Kridakorn, Maritta Koch-Weser, Nicholas Lapham, Donal O’Leary, Patrick McCully, David McDowell, Joseph Milewski, Reatile Mochebelele, Naoki Mori, Takehiro Nakamura, Peter van Niekerk, Raimundo Nonato do C. Silva, Tilak Ranaviraja, Frances Seymour, Aly Shady, Jaswant Singh, Jan Strömblad, Even Sund, Sardar Mohammed Tariq, Allan Taylor, Martin Ter Woort, Himanshu Thakkar, Klaus Töpfer, Dao Trong Tu, Mike J. Tumbare, Mumtaz Türfan, Michael Wiehen, James Wolfensohn, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, Tor Ziegler and Birgit Zimmerle.