The Hydropolitics of Dams charts the troubled waters of 'heavy engineering' approaches to ecosystem management, exploring the history, benefits and problems of large dams. It then explores diverse ecosystem-based approaches to management of human interactions with the water cycle, concluding that a synthesis of approaches is needed in future. The book also addresses political, economic and legal dimensions of water management. Featuring case studies from China, India and South Africa, this insightful new book argues that there are more appropriate physical and social technologies that can help to sustainably provide access to clean water for all.
The Hydropolitics of Dams charts the troubled waters of 'heavy engineering' approaches to ecosystem management, exploring the history, benefits and problems of large dams. Featuring case studies from China, India and South Africa, this insightful new book argues that there are more appropriate physical and social technologies that can help to sustainably provide access to clean water for all.
An in-depth look at the people and institutions connected with the Itaipoe Dam, the world's biggest producer of renewable energy, Hydropolitics is a groundbreaking investigation of the world's largest power plant and the ways energy shapes politics and economics.ics.
An in-depth look at the people and institutions connected with the Itaipu Dam, the world’s biggest producer of renewable energy Hydropolitics is a groundbreaking investigation of the world’s largest power plant and the ways the energy we use shapes politics and economics. Itaipu Binational Hydroelectric Dam straddles the Paraná River border that divides the two countries that equally co-own the dam, Brazil and Paraguay. It generates the carbon-free electricity that powers industry in both the giant of South America and one of the smallest economies of the region. Based on unprecedented access to energy decision makers, Christine Folch reveals how Paraguayans harness the dam to engineer wealth, power, and sovereignty, demonstrating how energy capture influences social structures. During the dam’s construction under the right-wing military government of Alfredo Stroessner and later during the leftist presidency of liberation theologian Fernando Lugo, the dam became central to debates about development, governance, and prosperity. Dams not only change landscapes; Folch asserts that the properties of water, transmuted by dams, change states. She argues that the dam converts water into electricity and money to produce hydropolitics through its physical infrastructure, the financial liquidity of energy monies, and the international legal agreements managing transboundary water resources between Brazil and Paraguay, and their neighbors Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay. Looking at the fraught political discussions about the future of the world’s single largest producer of renewable energy, Hydropolitics explores how this massive public works project touches the lives of all who are linked to it.
Bringing contributions by a variety of authors together in one volume is part of an attempt to show that hydropolitics is a growing discipline in its own right. The prevailing definition of hydropolitics is widened to include the elements of scale and range. This is illustrated through a focus on theoretical and legal issues, case studies from Southern Africa and a proposed research agenda. The book is an important addition to the literature on hydropolitics.
Water is both an essential resource and a source of disease and conflict in contemporary Africa. And we begin to learn that far distant processes of consumption and pollution can have their impact on the water systems of Africa: global warming produced by the material culture of the first world threatens the weather systems and very survival of developing countries. In this context, this volume – the product of an expert meeting at Cornell University’s Institute for African Development – traces and tracks the dynamics of the contemporary hydropolitics of Africa. The volume contains a variety of approaches to the study of the organisation of water within Africa ranging from technical essays on water borne diseases, through institutional analyses of the legal and political arrangements around the distribution of water to social policy analyses of the unmet demand for water amongst Africa’s poor. Taken as a whole, the volume provides the reader with a useful reference work on the contemporary hydropolitics of Africa whilst simultaneously providing a lively introduction to a critical and much neglected area of African development policy.
This book investigates the role that interest groups have played over the years in influencing the government of Namibia, the World Bank, the European Union and project implementation authorities to not construct the proposed Epupa Hydroelectric Power Station on the Kunene River in the Baynes mountains, a region on the border between Namibia and Angola. Some of the issues brought forward by the interest groups are the socio-economic impact the dam would have on the OvaHimba, as well as negative consequences for the river’s aquatic and terrestrial environment. This book argues that interest groups and individuals have the ability to influence the above-mentioned institutions, and to such an extent that water politics and governance are not exclusively the domain of state institutions. As such, it argues that communal interest groups, living in remote parts of the world, can influence state institutions at various political scales.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. After more than a decade of construction, Ethiopia is filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a controversial dam with the potential to transform the hydrology and politics of the Nile Basin. The GERD is the culmination of a dam building boom carried out over three decades and a key pillar of the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front's (EPRDF) efforts to bring about an Ethiopian 'Renaissance'. Dams, Power, and the Politics of Ethiopia's Renaissance provides a detailed examination of the domestic and international political dynamics that shaped Ethiopia's dam building, drawing on extensive primary research including more than a hundred interviews with politicians, technocrats, consultants, and donors. The authors reflect on the implications of Ethiopia's dam building for broader debates about the role of the state in late development, the dynamics of twenty-first century dam building, and the political economy of renewable energy transitions. A central argument of the book is that Ethiopia's dam building is symbolic of the successes and failures of the EPRDF's 'developmental state'. On the one hand, this dams' boom enhanced electricity generation capacity, while constituting a key element of the state infrastructure investment that turned Ethiopia into one of the world's fastest growing economies. In contrast, a politically driven decision-making process undermined electricity planning, contributed to an unsustainable debt burden, and, ultimately, failed to provide reliable electricity access to key users. Following the EPRDF's collapse, the subsequent Prosperity Party government has taken steps away from the state-led development model of its predecessor, while labouring towards the final completion of the GERD. Oxford Studies in African Politics and International Relations is a series for scholars and students working on African politics and International Relations and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on contemporary developments in African political science, political economy, and International Relations, such as electoral politics, democratization, decentralization, gender and political representation, the political impact of natural resources, the dynamics and consequences of conflict, comparative political thought, and the nature of the continent's engagement with the East and West. Comparative and mixed methods work is particularly encouraged. Case studies are welcomed but should demonstrate the broader theoretical and empirical implications of the study and its wider relevance to contemporary debates. The focus of the series is on sub-Saharan Africa, although proposals that explain how the region engages with North Africa and other parts of the world are of interest. Series Editors: Nic Cheeseman (University of Birmingham), Peace Medie (University of Bristol), and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (University of Oxford)
