On July 14, 2002, I almost got kicked out of Naminya village, a resettlement colony for several hundred refugees displaced by the Bujagali Dam in Uganda. The village lies near Lake Victoria on a barren hill overlooking the Nile. The villagers mistook me for a manager of the dam builder, AES Nile Power, with whom they had a few scores to settle. Their new plots were less fertile than the lands they had given up, dam construction prevented them from fishing in the Nile, and they had to walk for miles to find firewood and sell their produce on the markets. Their tempers flared and fists were clenched until they realized that I only happened to share my first name with the project manager. “We often sleep with empty stomachs,” the villagers told me once the dust had settled. A few weeks after my visit, the Bujagali project collapsed in a corruption scandal. The main civil engineering contractor, Norway’s Veidekke Group, admitted to bribing the former Ugandan energy minister, who had meanwhile joined the board of the World Bank. The Bank suspended its funding for the Bujagali Dam. The private developer withdrew, and the project remained in limbo for several years. The government insisted the dam would still be built, but in the meantime, displaced villagers had to fend for themselves in resolving their problems. Hydropower dams generate about one-fifth of the world’s electricity, and low-carbon electricity sources are in high demand in an age of climate change. Yet at the time of my visit to Naminya, dam building looked like a sunset industry. Conflicts over large dams on the Yangtze River, in India’s Narmada Valley, in Southeast Anatolia, and in the Mekong Basin had paralyzed governments and financial institutions throughout the 1990s. The independent World Commission on Dams found that most projects did not live up to their expectations in terms of power generation, irrigation, and flood control, and often had unacceptable social and environmental costs. Dams have displaced 40–80 million people, and impoverished most of them in the process. Leading companies such as ABB and Sulzer withdrew from the sector, and the World Bank sharply reduced its lending for dams. “Big dams account for 10 percent of our portfolio but 95 percent of our headaches,” John Briscoe, the World Bank’s senior water advisor, confessed in 2003. The Merowe Dam in Northern Sudan illustrates the changing fate of the dam industry. Starting in the 1970s, a string of Western engineering companies had pro-