By Sanjeev Khagram

Mammoth dams outfitted for irrigation, strength, water offer, and different reasons have been one of the so much powerful symbols of financial improvement for a lot of the 20 th century. Of overdue they've got develop into a lightning rod for demanding situations to this imaginative and prescient of improvement as anything deliberate through elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences—especially for the populations which are displaced as their homelands are flooded. during this ebook, Sanjeev Khagram lines adjustments in our rules of what constitutes acceptable improvement throughout the transferring transnational dynamics of massive dam construction.

Khagram tells the tale of a transforming into, yet contentious, international society that includes novel and more and more efficacious norms of applicable habit in such parts as human rights and environmental security. The transnational coalitions and networks led through nongovernmental teams that espouse such norms could seem vulnerable compared to states, companies, and such overseas companies because the international financial institution. but they grew to become increasingly more potent at changing the guidelines and practices of those traditionally extra robust actors and firms from the Nineteen Seventies on.

Khagram develops those claims in an in depth ethnographic account of the transnational struggles round the Narmada River Valley Dam tasks in primary India, a massive complicated of thirty huge and greater than 3 thousand small dams. He deals extra substantiation via a comparative historic research of the political economic system of huge dam tasks in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China in addition to by way of interpreting the altering habit of overseas organizations and worldwide businesses. the writer concludes with a dialogue of the area fee on Dams, an leading edge try within the past due Nineteen Nineties to generate new norms between conflicting stakeholders.