This original and insightful book explores and examines the impact that building mega-dams has on the human rights of those living in surrounding areas, and in particular those of indigenous peoples who are often most affected. Compiling case studies from around the world, Itzchak Kornfeld provides clear examples of how human rights violations are perpetrated and compounded, with chapters examining historical, recent and ongoing dam projects.
This collection addresses human rights and development for researchers, policymakers and activists at a time of major challenges. ÔCritical issuesÕ in the title signifies both the urgency of the issues and the need for critical rethinking. After exploring the overarching issues of development and economic theory, gender, climate change and disability, the book focuses on issues of technology and trade, education and information, water and sanitation, and work, health, housing and food.
Corporations have become powerful actors exerting increasing influence on society and the living conditions of individuals worldwide, including indigenous peoples. While it is recognized that corporations have a responsibility to respect indigenous peoples’ rights and the important safeguard concept of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), it is rather unclear what such a corporate responsibility entails from a legal perspective. This doctoral thesis thoroughly analyses the regulatory framework pertaining to indigenous peoples and corporations as well as the ‘case law’ of the OECD National Contact Points (NCPs). Based on this analysis, the thesis identifies currently applied features of indigenous peoples’ rights and FPIC in relation to corporate actors, determines shortcomings in the regulatory framework and the ‘jurisprudence’ of the NCPs, and makes suggestions for possible improvements.
Water acquisition, storage, allocation and distribution are intensely contested in our society, whether, for instance, such issues pertain to a conflict between upstream and downstream farmers located on a small stream or to a large dam located on the border of two nations. Water conflicts are mostly studied as disputes around access to water resources or the formulation of water laws and governance rules. However, explicitly or not, water conflicts nearly always also involve disputes among different philosophical views. The contributions to this edited volume have looked at the politics of contested knowledge as manifested in the conceptualisation, design, development, implementation and governance of large dams and mega-hydraulic infrastructure projects in various parts of the world. The special issue has explored the following core questions: Which philosophies and claims on mega-hydraulic projects are encountered, and how are they shaped, validated, negotiated and contested in concrete contexts? Whose knowledge counts and whose knowledge is downplayed in water development conflict situations, and how have different epistemic communities and cultural-political identities shaped practices of design, planning and construction of dams and mega-hydraulic projects? The contributions have also scrutinised how these epistemic communities interactively shape norms, rules, beliefs and values about water problems and solutions, including notions of justice, citizenship and progress that are subsequently to become embedded in material artefacts.
Contrary to how it is often portrayed, the concept of human rights is not homogeneous. Instead it appears fragmented, differing in scope, focus, legal force and level of governance. Using the lens of key case studies, this insightful book contemplates human rights integration and fragmentation from the perspective of its users. The fragmentation of human rights law has resulted in an uncoordinated legal architecture that can create obstacles for effective human rights protection. Against this background, expert contributors examine how to make sense - in both theoretical and practical terms - of these multiple layers of human rights law through which human rights users have to navigate. They consider whether there is a need for more integration and the potential ways in which this might be achieved. The research presented illustrates the pivotal role that users play in shaping, implementing, interpreting and further developing human rights law. Offering an innovative perspective to the debate, this book will appeal to both students and academics interested in human rights and the methodological approaches that can be used in furthering its research. Practitioners and policy makers will also benefit from the forward thinking insights into how an integrated approach to human rights could look. Contributors include: E. Brems, E. Bribosia, P. De Hert, E. Desmet, E.K. Dorneles de Andrade, M. Holvoet, D. Inman, B. Oomen, S. Ouald-Chaib, I. Rorive, S. Smis, O. Van der Noot, S. Van Drooghenbroeck
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Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences—especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction. Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on. Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects in central India, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.
This handbook will be a comprehensive interdisciplinary overview of indigenous peoples’ rights. Chapters by experts in the field will examine legal, philosophical, sociological and political issues, addressing a wide range of themes at the heart of debates on the rights of indigenous peoples. The book will address not only the major questions, such as ‘who are indigenous peoples? What is distinctive about their rights? How are their rights constructed and protected? What is the relationship between national indigenous rights regimes and international norms? but also themes such as culture, identity, genocide, globalization and development, rights institutionalization and the environment.
