Throughout much of the Cold War period, prominent United States dam-building agencies promoted the idea that river basin planning and the construction of large-scale hydroelectric dams were the most effective ways for so-called third-world nations to develop their water resources. Guided by the U.S. State Department as part of a broad program of foreign assistance and technology transfer to regions labeled as "underdeveloped", large dams and river basin planning also became important parts of the United States' geopolitical agenda during the Cold War era. For the architects of foreign policy in the United States in the post-WWII era, the transfer of technological and development expertise via river basin development was an important part of solidifying geopolitical alliances between US national security interests and newly independent states in Asia, the Middle East and Africa in order to establish a bulwark against what U.S. officials perceived as the global expansion of communism. This research investigates how the numerous seemingly isolated projects planned and constructed throughout third-world in the mid- to late-twentieth century were inspired and in many cases actively promoted by successive United States' administrations through the activities of America's preeminent dam-building agencies -- the Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The investigator will conduct archival research in the United States and select regions (e.g., the Mekong River basin) to examine and analyze: the geographical extent of the dissemination of both the technology of large dams and the notion of river basin planning throughout the third world during the middle 20th century. The study will also analyze the tools -- geopolitical, technological and discursive -- through which the diffusion of large dams and river basin planning was planned and carried out. In addition to determining the geographical extent of the international activities of U.S. water resource development agencies, case studies of river basin approaches in Asia and Africa will investigate the historically and geographically specific responses to the global circulation of large dams and river basin planning on the part of both human and nonhuman actors in those regions and rivers targeted for transformation.
This project will expand our understanding of the globalization of water resource infrastructure and its links to the global geopolitical ideologies and strategies of the United States during the Cold War. At one level, the study will offer insights into a critical yet largely obscured part of the history of one of the most far-reaching and substantial ways that humans have intervened in natural systems: the damming of rivers. At another level, the research will contribute to a more refined understanding of conceptual debates over the interconnections among social power, technological knowledge and biophysical processes. By emphasizing that large dams and river basin planning approaches do not reside in a technological vacuum, immune from other social and biophysical forces, the research will offer a firmer historical foundation for assessing the continuing efficacy of river basin development -- as traditionally conceived -- in the face of multiple economic, political and environmental interests.
