Thematic Review II.2: Dams, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities

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Dams, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities 15 blurred. With the era of State planning coming to an end, it may no longer be publicly acceptable for State agencies to expropriate the properties of private citizens to make way for developments by private corporations. Leading dam-building enterprises such as Hydro-Quebec – a for-profit parastatal company - already accept the principle that dam-building should not go ahead without the consent of those directly affected. 57 This principle has also been publicly endorsed by the International Hydropower Association. 58 This is a draft working paper of the World Commission on Dams. It was prepared for the Commission as part of its information-gathering activity. The views, conclusions, and recommendations are not intended to represent the views of the Commission.
Dams, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities 16 2. Indigenous Peoples, Ethnic Minorities and Dams: 2.1 The Impacts of Large Dams Although on paper, indigenous peoples (and to a far lesser extent ethnic minorities) have a range of internationally agreed rights that offer considerable legal protection from the abuses of state and private sector power, these rights are rarely observed in projects involving dam development. Overall, the available literature indicates that the experience of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities with regard to dam projects has been one of: ! cultural alienation ! dispossession, both from their land and other resources; ! lack of consultation; ! lack of compensation or inadequate compensation; ! human rights abuses; ! lowering of living standards. This section reviews the overall experience of indigenous groups and ethnic minorities with regard to dams, before analysing some of the structural, institutional and political reasons that underlie the ongoing failure of governments and international agencies to observe the internationally-agreed rights of such peoples. The aim of this part of the review is not just to illustrate some of the typical consequences of large dams for the futures of Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities but also to identify the particular conceptual and procedural failures in project planning and in resettlement and rehabilitation which result in serious impacts on the peoples concerned. 2.1.1 Disproportionate impact: As the World Bank acknowledges in its 1994 Bank-wide Review of Projects Involving Involuntary Resettlement, those resettled as a result of dam projects are generally from the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society. 59 Such vulnerability reflects not only their exclusion from the decisionmaking process and economic and political institutions that would enable them to exercise genuine control over their lives and livelihoods but also, in many instances, from racism and from discriminations of class, caste and ethnicity. Worldwide, indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities make up a disproportionately large percentage of those who lose their livelihoods to dams, either because their communities are directly affected by dam projects or because of the ‘knock-on’ effects of such projects. 60 In some instances – the Nubians of Sudan, for example – communities have been shifted several times to make way for dams or the development projects associated with them. 61 In Africa, numerous dam projects have involved the forced relocation of indigenous groups or ethnic minorities: in many cases, such as the Volta Dam, the projects have impacted several different ethnic groups at once. 62 In the USA, it was poor black sharecroppers who bore the brunt of the impacts of the massive dam building programme undertaken in the Tennessee Valley from 1933 to 1946, 63 whilst native Americans have suffered disproportionately from the dams built by state and federal authorities in the arid West, both through the direct loss of their reservation lands and through the illegal abstraction of their water. 64 In the Philippines, almost all of the larger dam schemes that have been built or proposed have been on the land of the country’s 6-7million indigenous people. 65 In India, according to government figures from the mid-1980s, between 40-50 per cent of those displaced by development projects have been adivasis: 66 credible estimates for the numbers moved to make way for dams alone have been placed between 14 to 40 million, of which 60 per cent are adivasis or Dalits (“untouchables”). 67 Future planned dams development also disproportionately threatens Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic This is a draft working paper of the World Commission on Dams. It was prepared for the Commission as part of its information-gathering activity. The views, conclusions, and recommendations are not intended to represent the views of the Commission.
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Thematic Review II.2: Dams, Indigenous Peoples and Ethnic Minorities

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