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Over the past decade funding and aid institutions like the World Bank and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) have faced growing criticisms that projects have ridden roughshot over the property rights and economic interests of local communities and often end up doing great environmental harm. Women and children, in particular, are seen as vulnerable to the upheavals wrought on their land and social structures by development such as mines, forestry, road building, power plants and hydroelectric dams. In all of these projects, of course, engineering plays a large role.

Canadian non-governmental organizations have been raising the alarm. Ottawa’s North-South Institute issued a report in 1998, that said, “Traditionally, social and environmental impacts have not been adequately addressed in engineering feasibility, studies, nor in the design process itself.”¹ Toronto’s Probe International is more acerbic. “The World Bank causes environmental havoc, financial ruin, and social harm throughout the Third World,” says their web site. “The World Bank has financed dozens of disastrous dam projects, has supported road-building projects through the heart of the Amazon rainforest leading to massive deforestation, and has helped support toxic mining operations. Through it all, the Bank has shown a blatant disregard for the rights of the people most affected by its projects.” …

… According to Probe International, Canadian engineering firms backed by Canadian government financing have been involved in several controversial large dams. These include the Manatali Power Project in the Senegal River Basin, the Dai Ninh Hydro Project in Vietnam, and the troubled Chamera I dam in India. More recent dam projects that are raising activist hackles are the Urra Dam in Colombia where paramilitary forces are believed to have kidnapped a local tribesman opposing the dam, and the Three Gorges Dam, the largest construction project in the world, under way in China – a project so controversial the World Bank has declined to fund it, and one in which 1.2 million people are being forced to move from their traditional land and homes….

… Sometimes, though, even after a new dam or power plant is built, the lights stay off for the poorest people. Gráinne Ryder is … the author of a 1990 book, Damming the Three Gorges: What Dam Builders Don’t Want You to Know. She earned a B.Sc. in water resource engineering at the University of Guelph in 1983 and afterwards spent seven years working in Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries with CUSO. It was there that she came to distrust the promises made for large infrastructure.

“I’ve been in communities,” she says, “where 20 years later they are still trying to get electricity, or basic water supply – not to mention that they have already been devastated by a dam that has destroyed their fisheries or their best farmland.” She found that the compensation they received from the government didn’t amount to much: “The government would come in, give orders for people to move – this happened for dams and for forestry schemes as well. People were told they would get new land somewhere else, that they would get new livelihoods, and those didn’t materialize. So I saw that the people who were being displaced for development projects were among the poorest of the poor in that region.”

… Ryder insists that Probe International is not against development in itself. What they and citizens’ groups in places like Southeast Asia would like to see is a much more equitable and transparent planning and decision-making process. “That would help ensure that developments are environmentally and socially acceptable, not just economically sound.”

… To Ryder, consulting engineers skew the decision-making process because even when they are supposedly doing “feasibility studies,” they carry an inherrent bias to promote large infrastructure works. In 15 years, she doesn’t recall seeing one study that concluded a project was too environmentally damaging to proceed. She says that because clients – usually central governments or corporations – set the scope of consultant studies, they do not pay enough attention to the local people’s needs. She explains: “I’ve spoken to fishermen along the Mekong River and asked them, ‘Did you know a Canadian company is planning a series of dams on your river?’ And they are astounded – ‘Where do these companies come from?’ they ask. ‘What right do they have to come and propose this on our river? It would have been nice if they had come and asked us first.’ People there consider themselves to be the rightful decision-makers, not some foreign company that is backed by foreign aid.”

“The starting point for decisions has to be with the local people whose resources are in question,” she says. She also wants to see peer reviews of consultants’ recommendations done in Canada: “We’re talking about checks and balances,” she says.

¹Canadian Corporations and Social Responsibility, p. 100. Canadian Development Report 1998. North-South Institute.

The full article appears in the October/November 2001 issue of Canadian Consulting Engineer.