World Commission on Dams

A New Framework for Decision-Making

When faced with the above title, I’m sure that most parents - fathers - will think ‘frankly my dear, I dont give a damn’ and chuckle to themselves - but that would be a mistake their part. Because when addressing the participants of one of the regional consultations of the World Commission on Dams, South African Minister of Education and WCD Chair Kader Asmal (cited in WCD, 1999: 3) noted that:

‘The Commission is a prototype for what I like to think of as the real New World Order, It is not dominated by any one agency or by one government, or by the UN or the World Bank. The Commissioners are eminent persons from the forefront of the dams debate and as a group they represent all the worlds that intersect therein: international business, NGOs involved in environmental and social activism, academia, government, and the engineering profession.’

I bet you never realised how contentious the topic of dams proved in the 1990s. Neither did I. But - apparently - it was the cause of much teeth-gnashing, and thus a problem which called for a solution. Fortunately, one was found through the establishment of a commission, for which our first link details - ‘We trace the many difficult steps necessary to create a body and a process that would satisfy all the stakeholders. This narrative illustrates the process and the challenges of constituting a multi-stakeholder institutional response to a highly contentious national and international issue.‘

And that’s a direct quote from ‘The Originl of the World Commission on Dams’¹, which was released in April, 1997.