The Human Security Dimensions of Dam Development: The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

Jennifer C. Veilleux is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.

Large-scale dam development provokes strong emotions because of costs and benefits, whether potential or actual, to political, socio-cultural, economic, and environmental systems. Countries currently developing water resources through dam projects are doing so in response to poverty issues, coupled with pressures from population growth and changes to the climate, specifically, changes to water resources. The question of human security, a loosely defined term that covers the stability, safety, and access to opportunity of an individual and a related community now and in the future, as well as the environment upon which that individual or community depends, is a way of describing the scope of changes dam development causes in different sectors and at multiple geographic and temporal scales. Dam development has far-reaching diverse impacts that may include altering economic and social systems, providing a buffer against increasingly unknown challenges due to climate change, and potentially destroying ecosystems and traditional lifestyles. Dams may also be political symbols of national modernity, power, and identity.

Traditionally, dams have been assessed for immediate national economic and political benefits, excluding costs to local-level, often traditional, long-term river-dependent communities and environmental systems. Studies in recent decades, including the World Commission on Dams report, have considered the local-scale socio-cultural and environmental costs of dam development and found that these are often overlooked.¹ Subsequent studies have found that social and environmental costs extend well beyond the accepted impact area currently assessed by international standards.² Dam development dominates landscapes and excludes many other uses of land and water resources. This indicates that dams are in conflict with the use of water resources in other sectors. Despite the conflicts and costs, in this century hydropower dams have re-emerged as a cornerstone of economic development plans, especially in China and Brazil, and most recently, on the African continent.³

Often, national-level modernisation needs outweigh the local desire to maintain traditional subsistence lifestyles, and in fact dam development is seen as an opportunity to bring general development benefits, such as formal education and health care, to otherwise underdeveloped or remote communities. Similarly, the exploitation of water resources is often more important for developing economies than the use and needs of environmental systems. Studies indicate that such priorities are determined by power inequities, differences of perception in different communities, and competing socio-cultural needs and water-resources uses.⁴ The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam currently being developed on the Blue Nile River in Ethiopia is one example of controversial dam development. The human security dimensions of this development include impacts of varying magnitudes in the economic, political, environmental, and socio-cultural spheres.

This paper examines the human security dimensions of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam development to determine whether this project is a mechanism for stabilising human security. During five months in 2012, I collected over fifty-seven field interviews with national and local community members in Ethiopia and subsequently analysed the data into four sectors of economic, political, socio-cultural, and environmental importance. I conducted empirical investigations at the Renaissance Dam site and in villages in the Blue Nile Valley affected by the dam. Results indicate that questions of social and development needs, perception, water-resources use, access to economic opportunities, and time-scale are dependent on the geographic scale and sector considered. These dependent issues may be visible to policymakers only when considering a specific scale and specific sector. However, hopes of and interest in development and change in the general areas of economics, education, environmental resources use, and health are common factors at national and local scales. The resulting differences in human security dimensions according to scale and sector highlight the need for a systemic approach to developing shared water resources, especially when the resource is shared across cultural and national borders.

Background

Changes in water resource access, quality, and quantity have been noted as a key challenge to economic, political, environmental, and societal stability by several studies.⁵ Collectively, timely access to, and safe quality and right quantity of, water resources are one definition of water security.⁶ Water security models sometimes include human security components, and water resources security is arguably a necessary component of stable human systems. Systems related to individual, national, and international levels of scale are employed to describe and understand interactions concerning water resources security, while water resources management naturally lends itself to multi-scale consideration. Human security scholarship by the Copenhagen School states that the inclusion of different scales and sectors is important to understanding security of water resources and climate change.⁷ Human security and water security may be seen as interrelated concepts.

At the start of the twenty-first century, human consumption constituted 54 per cent of all available renewable water resources and, with population growth, this percentage is projected to increase to 70 per cent by 2025 and to 90 per cent by 2030.⁸ These consumption figures do not represent total potential demand as more than 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water.⁹ Before 1950 there were five thousand large-scale dams worldwide, by 2000 this number stood at more than forty-five thousand, and by 2006, five thousand more had been constructed to bring the total to over fifty thousand large-scale dams.¹⁰ The use of water resources is divided between ecosystem, domestic, subsistence, municipal, agricultural, industrial, energy, cultural, and commercial demands, and is often allocated according to political interests. But these water resource allocations are threatened by contamination, climate change, groundwater exhaustion, uncoordinated and unsustainable development, imbalances of political power, lack of stewardship, and aging or inadequate delivery and treatment infrastructure. Moreover, rising demand is coupled with an estimated 2.4 billion people who lack access to proper sanitation.¹¹ Adding to this existing complexity, climate change may further stress water resource systems. Given current conditions, we are approaching a scenario where available water resources will not meet projected demands.

Countries that are not well-developed or industrialised have untapped natural resources in the form of water, minerals, forests, plants, animals, and land. The global market has room to exploit any