Dam them All: On the Failure of Dams and Dam Building Frameworks

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
My thesis research concerns the relationship between resource scarcity and conflict, with a particular focus on South Africa and Lesotho's international water agreement, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. The LHWP, as with many large dam projects, has been fraught with problems and the politics surrounding it have been contentious. My research details and analyzes the various factors that have hampered the LHWP, with particular emphasis on the role of private interests, financial incentives, poor infrastructure planning and water management. My findings ultimately argue that it is the framework through which we consider and approve dam projects that is flawed, and leads to pervasive flaws in their commissioning and construction. The known impacts of global climate change, including global warming and the increasing unpredictability of temperature and precipitation, both contribute to and compound these factors. As a result, the political repercussions of large dam projects like the LHWP will become increasingly salient and demand political responses.

Description

Type of resource text
Date created May 2017

Creators/Contributors

Author Cavallo, Christine
Primary advisor Samoff, Joel

Subjects

Subject thesis
Subject dams
Subject dam
Subject water
Subject resource conflict
Subject climate change
Subject global warming
Subject lesotho
Subject south africa
Subject International Relations
Subject IR
Subject History
Subject Cavallo
Genre Thesis

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User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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Preferred Citation
Cavallo, Christine. (2017). Dam them All: On the Failure of Dams and Dam Building Frameworks. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/tr821gh3406

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Stanford University, Program in International Relations, Honors Theses

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