Author Bryan Tilt offers engaging look at the costs and benefits of hydroelectric power using two areas of Southwest China as case studies
Beneath its academic-sounding and seemingly esoteric title, Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power is a practical look at some of the most interesting challenges of our time. Water use in Asia is set to become one of the most pressing issues of the next decade. Inefficient and unequal water use is already at the heart of food and energy security conflicts across the region and the wider world.
Dams and Development uses hydroelectric dams in China to approach a globally relevant question: how high a cost is it acceptable to pay for development? In a style that retains detail and substantiation without feeling like a dissertation, the book explores the benefits and costs of hydroelectric power – economic, environmental, and social – using two areas of Southwest China as case studies. By studying hydropower installations at two different stages of development on the Nu and Lancang rivers, author Bryan Tilt is able to assess past and present Chinese policies, drawing on domestic and international expertise.
The inclusion of the word “moral” in the title is slightly misleading, as the book is decidedly not an attempt to pass judgment on the morality of dam-building.
Dams and Development is more concerned with the decision-making process than with advocating for a particular outcome, focusing on stakeholders and the various ways that their relationships have been negotiated at different times.
“Moral economy” to Tilt means incorporating the social and environmental costs of dam building into the assessment of projects, and ensuring that those costs are paid primarily by those who benefit most from the project, as is the case with the financial costs. Tilt takes care to paint this as a practical, rather than an ethical, consideration for China’s leaders.
Dams and Development draws on Tilt’s experience interviewing policymakers, industry, scientists, NGOs, and villagers as an anthropologist in an interdisciplinary team researching hydro development.
One theme that stands out is the improvement over the last few decades of the Chinese government’s dam-building policy framework; another is the continuing unreliability of that policy’s implementation.
Since the era of the Three Gorges Dam, Environmental Impact Assessments have been enshrined in law and compensation for displaced citizens has increased dramatically.
In practice, however, responsibility for enforcing environmental laws is split between so many agencies that it is impossible to stop projects, sometimes enormous ones, falling through the cracks. Similarly, the amounts of compensation that displaced villagers actually receive often vary according to social connections and luck, with the complex state of land ownership meaning many subsistence activities go entirely uncompensated.
Tilt identifies where international, in particular U.S., experiences can be applied to China’s hydropower projects, as well as identifying points of difference. China’s unique political system and distinctive developmental path lead to unique challenges when attempting to create accountability for the social and environmental damage that dams cause.
In addition, Yunnan, where much of the research takes place, is one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse provinces of China. Development is particularly complex here because its history is intertwined with the politics of identity and statemaking. China’s economic miracle of the past four decades comes in part from the extraction of resources, including electricity and labor, from peripheries like Yunnan to drive development and prosperity on the east coast.
Hydropower developments in the Southwest are explicitly intended to bind China’s economic and cultural peripheries more tightly to the administrative centre, incorporating them into the mainstream nation. This goal is in itself controversial in many regions, even without the social and environmental risks peculiar to damming.
Dams and Development in China highlights a central issue: China has reached a point on its developmental trajectory where economic gain is not the only thing its leaders must maximize.
Social unrest and environmental degradation are as much threats to the stability of the country – and to the CCP’s hold on power – as slowing economic growth.
Dams and Development advocates a policy framework that balances these competing priorities. By examining the issue from multiple perspectives, Tilt manages to avoid oversimplification and illuminate the competing rationalities of various stakeholders.
Particularly impressive is the nuanced treatment of ideas that are usually sensationalized and used as fodder for a particular agenda. Hydrodevelopment is frequently presented by its proponents as an ideal source of vital low-carbon energy, or by its detractors as a destructive scam that ruins rivers and communities to line the pockets of big business.
This polarization of the debate prevents useful cooperation and distorts the decision-making process, as Tilt’s case studies demonstrate. Hopefully, Dams and Development in China is the start of a more complex and effective conversation about hydropower.
Sinead Ferris is a Junior Policy Associate at the University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre and Editor of Emerging Scholars, the Australian Institute of International Affairs’s peer-reviewed journal for young researchers.
