DAMS AND TECHNOPOLITICS

Abstract

The paper aims to help the reader to see in a different manner large infrastructure projects, and especially those which are aimed at controlling water. And dams are such a category of large projects which facilitate man’s control over water. In most cases one’s first visit to a large dam is only a touristic activity. And a lot of dams in the world are in fact touristic magnets; Hoover Dam alone, in US, brings yearly roughly one million tourists which are attracted and impressed by it. But as one is enmeshed in more and more studies connected to dams, and especially large dams, the touristic character of looking at dams’ changes steady, and for good. In this moment one starts to see them as being living things, placed in the middle of a network which is influenced by them. It becomes an actor which assembles around it global politics, regional interactions, national desires, local communities, and all what is connected to that peculiar river basin in environmental area. As such, even large dams are about mathematic, numbers and calculations they are full of high politics influences, strong financial and technical interests and competing economic doctrines targeting economic development and social modernization. Both these processes are directly determined by electricity production, and the way it is produced. Dams work in this way globally, helping humankind to cover roughly 17% of its electricity needs. But dams connected to a newer concept – that of a whole river basin development – is more connected to modern vision of dams as means for controlling water and manipulating society. Big dams favour political centralization because of the special role electrical grids play in each state, while promoting in the same time modern farming methods using irrigation systems, stocking water for high demand periods which props up urbanization, and facilitating (in a lot of cases) modern transportation on dammed rivers. And they “travel” from different technological advanced centers towards less accomplished societies, with little care about environment, but with great care about political and financial interests. That it’s better to see dams not only as touristic attractions, but as nodes in a very complex techno-political network

Keywords

• dams; development; technology; water