The World Commission on Dams' recommendations all the way down to implementation

The more than 45,000 large dams that exist worldwide, not to count those of smaller size, are important infrastructural means for realizing a country’s social and economic development objectives: they are built to provide water for agricultural, domestic and industrial uses, to generate hydropower, to control floods and their reservoirs serve as buffers in drought periods.
However, dam projects - more than other infrastructure projects - are blamed for their negative environmental and social impacts, leading multilateral banks and bilateral donors to refrain from financing them. The contested issue between proponents and opponents is, however, not about dams per se but about governance and perceptions of the appropriate way in which societies / governments should decide concerning their water and energy projects.

In November 2000, the World Commission on Dams’ report “Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making” (published in 2001) has set a land mark in the highly contested controversy over large dams. The report is perceived as a statement of the norms that should govern dam-related decision-making and as an outcome of a process dialogue between dam proponents and critics. The process that led to the report does not resemble the traditional pattern of interstate negotiations and policy making which has led to many international environmental regimes in the 1980s and 1990s: The individual members of the Commission have been selected on the basis of their personal capacities and were chosen to reflect regional diversity, expertise and stakeholder perspectives. Consequently, the WCD recommendations are non-binding in nature.

Early independent assessments and analyses pointed to the fact that the consensus achieved within the Commission had not translated into a broader stakeholder consensus. It remained an open question whether the WCD consensus could be extended beyond the WCD in the absence of official governmental representation - especially, since it had not established an institutionalized mechanism for implementation. However, after more than seven years since the launching of the report, one has to acknowledge that the WCD norms concerning dam-related decision-making are gaining importance. The WCD norms matter in many respects – even in the absence of official state representation and although they are not prescriptive for national policy making. 

Still, their real chance of getting implemented relies on whether their core values and strategic priorities are accepted and internalized into national policies by governments of countries with major dam-building programs such as Brazil, China, India and Turkey. Dams and in particular dams for generating hydropower are regarded as key to national development; further they form core elements of national climate mitigation strategy.

For all the countries the project will investigate, it is a matter of crucial relevance whether they can develop their (hydropower) potential in a sustainable way. What we would like to find out is whether the WCD norms are considered as a global point of reference in these countries.
The overall objectives of the DIE project are to investigate how the WCD norms find their way into domestic political arenas; it wants to analyze the kind of impact the WCD norms have on the countries’ actual dam-related policies and institutions, and it intends to identify – by comparison of four country studies (Brazil, China, India and Turkey) – the factors that explain variations in national impact which might be:

Differences in domestic political-administrative structures (e.g. degree of democratization)

• A countries’ embeddedness in international regimes and institutions
• The vulnerability of governments to external pressure and influence.
• Research components could cover the following topics:
• Analysis of the role multipurpose dams play in the countries’ sector-related development strategies
• Analysis of the planning and decision-making procedures in multi-level domestic administrative settings and of their participatory elements
• Analyses of dam-related and associated policies (either environmental or resettlement), and their changes over times
• Investigating on policy changes and on the factors that influences them
• Analysis of country-specific conditions that constraint the full implementation of the WCD norms
• The main objectives of the country studies are to understand how the WCD norms, or more generally, international environmental and social standards, have been diffusing and being implemented into national policies and practices.