Wet, Wild and Wonky

Peter at the Berne Declaration

One of my favorite movies is The Big Lebowski. In this film by the Coen brothers, Jeff “the Dude” Lebowski gets into serious trouble because some mobsters confuse him with a namesake. Little did I suspect that I would one day face namesake troubles of my own.

You have to hand it to the European governments. They really try to avoid open conflicts with their friends. Even as it becomes clear that Turkey will not fulfill the social and environmental conditions under which it accepted export credits for the Ilisu Dam from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, the funders are looking for an exit strategy which allows all parties to save face. Yet the Turkish authorities do not seem to be interested in a diplomatic solution. They have started a campaign of repression and expropriation against the affected communities. If the conflict over Ilisu continues at this pace, the funders may soon be beyond face-saving.

We live in times of unprecedented economic and environmental crisis, and historic opportunity. A Green New Deal can rebalance our economy and address the looming environmental collapse at the same time. An editorial in the latest issue of World Rivers Review, our flagship publication, presents a few concrete suggestions.

The ancient town of Hasankeyf would be flooded by the Ilisu Dam (peevishsoul)

The Austrian foreign minister just announced that his country will pull out of the Ilisu Dam in Turkey. Even though the foreign minister is not in charge of his country’s export credit agency, this most likely spells the end of the European funding for the ill-fated project. The Austrian, German and Swiss export credit agencies will meet in Vienna tomorrow to coordinate their positions. If they follow through on the minister’s announcement, it will be the first time export credit agencies are abandoning a destructive dam project for social and environmental reasons. We hope the Ilisu experience will cause international dam financiers to be more cautious in the future. At the same time, we will try to ensure that other funders do not take up the tab.

Until recently life in Jagatsukh, a village nestled in the Beas Valley among Himalayan peaks, followed its traditional course. Apple plantations and local tourism brought modest prosperity to many inhabitants. The irrigation channels were well maintained, and the sturdy houses withstood the region’s harsh climate. When we visited, the local farmers were happy to share their stories over glasses of hot chai with us.

Jagatsukh’s culture and economic development are now being sacrificed for the glitzy middle class consumption which is on display in the nearby holiday resort of Manali. With support from the World Bank Group, the Norwegian government and the CDM, private investors are currently building the Allain Duhangan Hydropower Project on village lands. The project has brought 2,000 workers, illegal logging, serious accidents and conflict to Jagatsukh. The dam will divert the creeks on which the farmers have so far depended for their livelihoods. But since the villagers will not be physically displaced, they are falling through the cracks of the World Bank’s safeguard policies.

Bujagali Affected Community

The World Bank has presented the Bujagali Dam on the Nile in Uganda as a model of its promotion of hydropower in Africa for almost ten years. The communities affected by the project don’t share the Bank’s optimism. When I visited their resettlement sites six years ago, affected people almost beat me up because they mistook me for the project’s manager, with whom I share my first name.

A new report by the Inspection Panel finds that the World Bank has still not learned from its past mistakes in the Bujagali Project. Because of wishful thinking regarding the dam’s risks and benefits, the Bank’s investigative body finds, the project may well fail to fulfill the “broad objective of sustainable development and poverty reduction embodied in Bank policy”. The report will be discussed by the Bank’s Board of Directors tomorrow.

The indigenous Ixcan communities are strongly opposing the proposed Xalala Dam in Guatemala. Partly due to their opposition, private funding for the dam has now dried up. Will the World Bank and the IDB bail the project out, or will they realize that the time for change has also come for them?

So Barack Obama picked Timothy Geithner as his future Treasury Secretary today. What is the new secretary’s track record, and what does his appointment tell us about the emerging course of the Obama administration?

Barack Obama is considering appointing Larry Summers as his Treasury Secretary. Summers, a former World Bank chief economist and Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, shot to fame with his suggestions that Africa is under-polluted, and that women are genetically less qualified to become scientists. A debate is raging in the blogosphere whether these cynical memos disqualify Summers from becoming Treasury Secretary. The real question is what policies Summers has promoted in his long career.

Protest against submergence in the Narmada Valley

For decades, the Sardar Sarovar Dam on India’s Narmada River has been a powerful symbol of what is going wrong with large dam projects. A new independent review by a prestigious research institute shows that the project’s benefits have not been realized, while the social, environmental and financial costs are even more serious than expected. The dam authorities and the World Bank have a responsibility to clean up the mess which they have created.