Abstract
Large numbers of dams for hydroelectric power production are currently planned or under construction in many areas around the world. While positive and negative social and environmental impacts of dams are increasingly well understood, little is known about attitudes of the general public towards dams, even though benefits to wider society are often cited to legitimise their construction. In Brazil’s Upper Paraguay River Basin, more than 100 mostly small-scale hydropower dams are planned or under construction in what can be considered a regional dam construction boom. Here we analyse public preferences for strategies to manage dam impacts in the area by investigating the value base that underpins such preferences, drawing on the recently proposed Value Landscapes Approach as our theoretical framework and data from a large representative household survey (N = 1067). We find that contrasting attitudes towards dams, expressed in preferences for economically or ecologically oriented water policies are informed by opposing underlying value landscapes, that is, groups of closely related fundamental, governance-related, and assigned (water) values. While such tensions between opposing values can never be fully eliminated, our research nevertheless gives insights to policy-makers seeking to minimise value conflict and to improve the political legitimacy of public decision-making on dam construction. Moreover, we find that a majority of members of the general public would prefer concentrating dam construction on some rivers while keeping others free-flowing, with direct implications for ecosystems and inland fisheries. This finding may guide policy-makers wishing to develop publicly supported water resources management strategies.
Highlights
Thousands of dams are currently being planned and built in various regions across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Balkans (Zarfl et al 2015)
28.3% favoured the first option listed in Box 1, i.e. helping local fishers to adopt fish farming techniques and fish tanks, whereas 70.29% of respondents favoured the second option, i.e. keeping some rivers free of hydroelectric power-producing dams
We find that people’s water policy preferences are rooted in their value landscapes, as evidenced by the statistical analysis presented above
Summary
Thousands of dams are currently being planned and built in various regions across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Balkans (Zarfl et al 2015). While decision-makers may often prefer to emphasise their economic benefits or technocratic nature, the development of large infrastructure always has a strong political dimension (Meitzner Yoder 2018; Thurston 2018), i.e. views on its desirability may differ widely among different members of society and relevant stakeholder groups Besides their uses for hydroelectric power production and storage of water for irrigation and domestic water supply, dams in particular have a diverse range of social and environmental impacts (WCD 2000). For the case of the Upper Paraguay River Basin, previous qualitative research has shown how such conflicting views may be grounded in preferences for cultural-ecological water policies, whereas others may prefer approaches with a primary focus on economic aspects (Schulz et al 2017b) These contrasting preferences may have implications for understanding preferred strategies to deal with the impacts of dams. We hypothesise that people’s preferences for one of the two strategies are related to their value landscapes (see Section 4)
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