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.

‘We locate it both in the growth of local struggles against the adverse social, economic, and ecological impacts of dams and in the growing pressure to define global norms for harnessing and managing water.‘

Setting aside the claimed ‘growing pressure’ (which no-one ever heard about) we run into an ecological/social/economics issue being at the core of the matter.

‘These developments compelled the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the World Bank to organise a meeting of representatives from different sides of the dams debate, where participants decided to set up the Commission. 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 what this is all about - a multi-stakeholder institutional response. In fact, this very instance was the genesis moment of the contemporary ‘stakeholder approach’ that we’ve all come to love - and isn’t it reassuring that of all organisations, it stems from the IUCN and the World Bank?

‘Participants at the Gland meeting articulated the terms of reference of the World Commission on Dams as follows:

• To develop decision-making criteria and policy and regulatory frameworks for assessing alternatives for energy and water resources development;

• To identify the implications for institutional, policy, and financial arrangements so that benefits, costs, and risks are equitably shared at the global, national, and local levels.‘

I removed the bullet points which weren’t of importance. The genuine objective here was to establish ‘stakeholder approach’ best practices, and naturally, this applies at local, national, and global levels - because ‘Management should be decentralized to the lowest appropriate level‘ per principle 2 of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Ecosystem Approach².

The Ecosystem Approach

‘The workshop agreed on a tripartite institutional structure for the WCD. Apart from the Commission, there would be a consultative group composed of participants who attended the workshop, plus others invited by the Commission from NGOs, multilateral institutions, governments, and the private sector‘.

The latter simply means ‘public, private, civil society’³, and it’s all the rage these days. Of course, ‘civil society’ frequently means ‘NGO’, which also tend to be funded by those very same private parties. But the trick here of course is… exactly who gets to invite said CSOs, or even set the criteria of inclusion?

‘The setting up of the Commission was a major step forward for multi-stakeholder processes. It was a step with the potential to influence and perhaps even define global norms for the building and functioning of large infrastructure projects and other development processes.’

Genesis moment, in fact.

’The principle of using transparent and inclusive multi-stakeholder consultations to define a commission is a relevant pre-condition, but the precise process and outcome may vary. The formation of such processes calls for continuing innovation and creativity on the part of all those seeking to democratise global and national policy arenas.‘

This process, of course, seeks to eventually replace democratic principles is anything but democratic, transparent, and inclusive - and that was always the intent.

‘…the Gland meeting took place in April 1997. Convened by the World Bank and the IUCN, the two-day workshop brought together 39 participants representing the diverse interests in the large dams’ debate‘

… but who exactly were those 39 participants?

‘The objectives were also to more clearly define the scope of the Phase II study, including basic guidelines for involvement by governments, private sector, and non-governmental organisations as well as public participation, information disclosure, and subsequent dissemination of results‘

Genesis moment.

So which ‘stakeholders’ were present, exactly? Fortunately, the conference proceedings are available⁴, and they… are fairly revelatory.

Of 39 participants, 18 were organisers (46%), 10 were corporate representatives (26%)… 5 were civil society reps with an equivalent amount coming from academia (13%) but that hardly matters as the World Bank, IUCN, and corporations represented 72% of participants at the conference. Consequently, what they wanted, they would have forced through, regardless.

The efforts led to a report by the catchy name ‘Dams and Development - A New Framework for Decision-Making‘⁵. See, the ‘dams’ aspect could have been virtually anything. It was merely the vehicle, the objective was to establish the new procedure for - ultimately - global governance frameworks. That is what they were doing in Gland, Switzerland, back in April, 1997.

Let’s skip to page 36 of the report, spanning an incredible 356 pages (!) -

‘Beyond the Commission – An Agenda for Change‘

Followed by -

‘It elaborates the development framework within which the controversies and underlying issues can be understood and addressed and proposes a decision-making process anchored in a rights-and-risks approach and based on negotiated outcomes‘

It’s an agenda for change, and that change relates to the decision-making process.

‘The report is not intended as a blueprint. We recommend that it be used as the starting point for discussions, debates, internal reviews and reassessments of what may be established procedures and for an assessment of how these can evolve to address a changed reality‘

… and that decision-making process could replace existing procedures.

‘Specific proposals are included for:

• national governments and line ministries;

• civil society organisations;

• the private sector;

• bilateral aid agencies and multilateral development banks;

• export credit agencies;

• inter-governmental organisations;

• professional associations; and

• academic and research bodies’

… in other words, it’s the ‘stakeholder approach’. Well, except - of course - that said ‘approach’ in more contemporary days does pay lip service to those ‘indigenous peoples’ who they cared sufficiently about to establish ‘grievance mechanisms’, which will become useful when said ‘indigenous peoples’ ultimately are evicted from their ancestral lands, as those Debt-for-Nature Swaps with said lands pledged as colleteral predictable collapse - as was always the intent.

Collateral

Finally, we have -

‘… shifted the centre of gravity in the dams debate to one focused on investing in options assessment, evaluating opportunities to improve performance and address legacies of existing dams, and achieving an equitable sharing of benefits in sustainable water resources development‘

… and that’s essentially the Nagoya Protocol - again, courtesy of the Convention on Biological Diversity⁶. And this very same protocol also comes up in Article 12 of WHO’s Pandemic Agreement April, 2024 draft.

WHO Pandemic Agreement [April, 2024]

‘… demonstrated that the future for water and energy resources development lies with participatory decision-making, using a rights-and-risks approach that will raise the importance of the social and environmental dimensions of dams to a level once reserved for the economic dimension‘

Yeah, there’s that E/S/E focus we talked about.

A third party conveniently summed up the report in 2001⁷. There’s nothing revolutionary here, but it does throw in bonus ‘equity, governance, justice, and power‘ as well as ‘international recognition of human rights, the right to development and the right to a healthy environment‘, not forgetting to highlight ‘Understanding, protecting, and restoring ecosystems at river basin level is essential to foster equitable human development and the welfare of all species‘.

There’s that continuous goalpost move we’ve grown to love so much.

It further outline the five steps in the process, and continues -

‘Social, environmental, governance, and compliance aspects have been undervalued in decision-making in the past. It is here that the Commission has developed criteria and guidelines to innovate and improve on the body of knowledge on good practices and add value to guidelines already in common use‘.

Reordering the first three words slightly make it ‘environmental, social, governance‘, and the report then outlines what’s entailed by ‘bringing about this change’, a section which consenses it all in very little text

• planners to identify stakeholders through a process that recognizes rights and assesses risks;

• States to invest more at an earlier stage to screen out inappropriate projects and facilitate integration across sectors within the context of the river basin;

• consultants and agencies to ensure outcomes from feasibility studies are socially and environmentally acceptable;

• the promotion of open and meaningful participation at all stages of planning and implementation, leading to negotiated outcomes;

• developers to accept accountability through contractual commitments for effectively mitigating social and environmental impacts;

• improving compliance through independent review; and

• dam owners to apply lessons learned from past experiences through regular monitoring and adapting to changing needs and contexts.

‘Adopting this framework will allow states to take informed and appropriate decisions, thereby raising the level of public acceptance and improving development outcomes.‘

It would do none of that. In fact, it’d work to undermine democratic legitimacy.

It’s at this stage we could benefit from a brief outline of chronology.

• 1997 WCD (World Commission on Dams) conference held at IUCN.

• 1999 WCD - Development of the decision-making framework, guiding future dam projects in drive to become more ‘equitable’ and ‘sustainable’.

• 2000 WCD - Final Report; A New Framework for Decision-Making.

So did anyone pay attention? Well, yes, you might say they did. Here’s press release out of the United Nations - ‘REPORT ON WORLD DAMS RECOMMENDS GLOBAL ACTION‘⁸ from November, 2000, further revealing that it was funded by the UN Foundation.

And from the press release above followed recognition by the German government⁹ -

‘Speaking at the opening of the Forum attended by 150 representatives of Germany's government departments, the private sector and NGOs as well as UNEP, IFC IISD and the Governments of the UK and Netherlands, Ms. Wieczoreck Zeul announced that her Government will establish a new 'platform for dialogue' with German industry and NGOs to identify how best Germany can respond to the report‘

And these events are then contextually and chronologically detailed in the report ‘World Politics and Organizational Fields: The Case of Transnational Sustainability Governance‘¹⁰, penned in 2009.

‘… in the early 1990s, an organizational field of transnational rule-making has gradually developed in the field of environmental politics. Responding to a broader social discourse about global governance that stressed a need for innovative forms of cooperation among different societal sectors‘

… an increase in global governance in the field of environmental politics…

‘The proliferation of private organizations whose primary goal is to devise transnational rules is a pervasive trend in contemporary world politics... They also exemplify a strategic shift of transnational non-governmental organizations from lobbying rulemakers to making and implementing the rules themselves‘

… and it’s private enterprise, who not only write but also implement new rules…

‘First, transnational rule-making organizations not only proliferate, they are also remarkably similar in their organizational design, processes and rhetoric, even where such similarities are costly. Second, their almost simultaneous appearance — nine of the 13 organizations listed in the Appendix were created between 1997 and 1999 — extends across several policy fields ranging from environment to human rights, trade, finance and security‘

… oh, and it’s not just in environmental politics, but also human rights, trade, finance, and security - and said enterprises all work in almost identical ways. That’s quite interesting in itself, because is that by intent, and if so - who pulls the strings?

The article goes on to identify the Coalition of Environmentally Responsible Economies (1989) and the Forest Stewartship Council (1993) being early examples - but the organisational model didn’t yet exist. The latter established itself, using the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements as blueprint, and the former intended to establish itself as an environmental equivalent of the FASB, while using stakeholder petitions to change corporate behaviour, an idea stemming from the Sullivan Principles, and South Africa, 1977. But even through to the mid-1990s, organisation was lacking.

In 1997, the Global Reporting Initiative was founded with UN Foundation funding (them again), and in the same year, the Tellus Institute launched as well.

Other organisations followed, and they all had one thing in common -

‘… many transnational rule-making organizations receive funding from similar sources, most notably government agencies and a handful of private foundations predominantly based in North America. For example, the FSC generated over US$14.3 million in the period between 1996 and 2003, but only 17% was generated through membership fees and ac creditation billings, while roughly 77% came from donations by, among others, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund. A similar pattern is characteristic for most of the organizations listed in the Appendix...‘

More than three quarters of funding came from govenments and foundations! We’ve seen this pattern before, no?

‘Mimesis seems at least equally relevant. In cases like the MMSD, elements of a successful organizational model — in this case the World Commission on Dams — was simply copied by others… the explicit comparison of transnational organizations by think tanks, consultancies or academics helps to bring about a consensus on what constitutes best practice in this new field. Examples include the UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks that draws practical conclusions from a comparison of several transnational governance processes, a report by the Meridian Institute that compares the governance systems…‘

And there we have a mention of the World Commission on Dams, as well as the UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks to which we will return.

‘Beyond these private organizations, public intergovernmental organizations experience a similar pressure induced by the (perceived) success of the ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of transnational rule-making. As a result intergovernmental organizations increasingly open up their decision-making processes to non-state actors‘

‘With its tripartite structure that — at least rhetorically — gave equal weight to governments, civil society and business, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005) exemplifies this new global governance norm (Dany, 2006). The emergence of this norm can essentially be traced to the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro‘

Yet again we encounter Rio, 1992, and…

‘… the first implementation of the stakeholder participation norm at the international level did not occur until 1997 when the World Commission on Dams was initiated as a tripartite body. This international precedent served as a reference point for many other initiatives. It thereby strengthened the stakeholder participation norm and contributed to its diffusion into other thematic areas of inter- and transnational governance‘

… the World Commission on Dams, and…

‘In our case, transnational rule-making organizations can, for instance, be seen as elements of a broader organizational field, namely that of global governance‘

… cut. All of this leads to Global Governance, and the blueprint for the pivotal trisectoral ‘stakeholder approach’ model was set by the World Commission on Dams.

The appendix then sheds more light on chronological developments, but also reveals that not only is the WWF actively involved with several of these organisations, but we also discover that the ‘Ethos Institute of Business & Social Responsibility‘, was established by the GRI.

And in 2007, the Ethos Institute penned a report titled ‘Ethos Indicators on Corporate Social Responsibility‘¹¹. And their first ‘indicator’? Ethics. And in that regard, that institute has a very similar namesake¹² through none other but Hans Kung.

Incidentally, the Ethos Institute in 2009 embraced the Earth Charter¹³…

… which, incidentally, is at a time, where they partnered with large enterprise¹⁴. In fact, if you ask me, it starts to smell a little bit as though those corporations took control of writing the arbitrary ESG regulations in an effort to squeeze small and medium sized enterprise down the road. But that’s for another day.

Anyway, we left a few unanswered questions. First, we have the matter of the UN Foundation funding relating to the World Commission on Dams¹⁵.

And the UN Foundation has somewhat of an interesting story - though that’s for another day. However, what isn’t is the composition of their board back when the above commission was given its grant¹⁶. And though there are other people of interest here, let me just outline three -

Ted Turner, Emma Rothschild, and Maurice Strong.

… and yes, she’s a legit Rothschild. Here she is, next to her husband - Mr Collegium International man-of-action; Amartya Sen (though I do need to update that article).

The Collegium International

And - remarkably - this was at the precise time where Maurice Strong also worked to establish the IETA, the top administrator on carbon emission trading.

The Carbon Currency

… and do you know what Maurice Strong also was up to around the same time¹⁷?

‘Strong also helped to launch a major campaign for the U.N. to entwine its murky and graft-prone bureaucracy with big business, via so-called public-private partnerships. Strong introduced this process in his 1997 reform proposal as the bland notion of “consultation between the United Nations and the business community.”‘

That’s right - fusing business into the United Nations bureaucracy. And he naturally was also involved in the launch of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation -

‘Strong also had a hand around 1997-1998 in creating the Byzantine structure of Ted Turner’s ground-breaking $1 billion gift to the U.N., which Turner since 1998 has been doling out in installments from his Washington-based U.N. Foundation‘

… oh but that’s not quite all - Strong at the time also served as a director of the World Economic Forum Foundation¹⁸.

… and that’s a perfect cue for my final link. See, the other cliffhanger left above relates to the ‘UN Vision Project on Global Public Policy Networks‘¹⁹. And this refers to ‘trisectoral networks’ in the context of the UN Global Compact - and the advisory board for drafting said report included none other but Klaus Schwab, and Jimmy Carter.

Finally - the report, ‘Critical Choices‘, was released in June, 2000. Ie, the exact same month where we saw the released of the ‘UN Global Compact’.

I would claim it’s a coincidence, but we all know it isn’t.

1. http://pdf.wri.org/wcd_chapter_3.pdf

2. https://hunt.nina.no/Portals/HUNT/Malawi%20Principles%20for%20the%20Ecosystem%20Approach.pdf

3. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Strengthening_Public_Private_Cooperation_with_Civil_Society_2022.pdf

4. https://web.archive.org/web/20030313142201/http://www.dams.org:80/docs/largedams.pdf

5. https://web.archive.org/web/20030425211958/http://www.damsreport.org/docs/report/wcdreport.pdf

6. https://www.cbd.int/abs

7. https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1253&context=auilr

8. https://press.un.org/en/2000/20001116.envdev553.doc.html

9. https://web.archive.org/web/20010203151600/http://www.dams.org/press/pressrelease_82.htm

10. https://transparencylab.org/Documentation/Additional%20resources/Literature/Dingwerth%20et%20al_World%20Politics%20and%20Organizational%20Fields-%20The%20Case%20of%20Transnational%20Sustainability%20Governance_2009.pdf

11. https://www3.ethos.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Ethos-Indicators-on-Corporate-Social-Responsibility-2007.pdf

12. https://karl-schlecht.de/fileadmin/daten/Download/Buecher/Keir/From_Global_Ethic_Gesamt_PDF_Keir.pdf

13. https://web.archive.org/web/20200923061939/https://earthcharter.org/the-ethos-institute-a-leading-organization-in-the-field-of-corporate-social-responsibility-in-brazil-embraces-the-earth-charter/

14. https://web.archive.org/web/20200923044155/https://www.ethos.org.br/

15. https://web.archive.org/web/19991023045902/http://www.unfoundation.org/grants/4_4_dams.cfm

16. https://web.archive.org/web/19991008085635/http://www.unfoundation.org/about/board.cfm

17. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2007/02/06/at-the-united-nations-the-curious-career-of-maurice-strong/

18. https://web.archive.org/web/19991008025402/http://www.unfoundation.org/about/bio_mstrong.cfm

19. https://web.archive.org/web/20000815210713/http://www.globalpublicpolicy.net/Critical%20Choices%20Final.pdf