New Water Policy and Practice Volume 1, Number 1 - Fall 2014 | Page 12

New Water Policy and Practice

cus has been to exclude dams for hydropower generation from sources of funding for
renewable energy. This has been based on
claims that hydropower dams emit methane
at a rate that exceeds (in terms of warming
impacts) the benefits in terms of emission
reductions from fossil fuels foregone (see
for instance Giles 2006). This hypothesis has
been used to support campaigns which have
significantly constrained finance for hydropower projects in developing countries that
are eligible for subsidies under the Clean
Development Mechanism (CDM). Yet, despite pressure from environmental organizations, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), the global forum
established to provide science-based advice
to guide climate policy formulation, had
long concluded that

gases. The effect of this has been limited in
countries such as China and Brazil, which
do not depend on external financing and its
conditionalities. The impact has been greatest on poorer countries in Africa and South
East Asia which have been denied access to
cheaper, “cleaner” energy by externally imposed preferences.

Example 3: River Basins, Regional
Institutions and State Sovereignty

T

he final example of the way in which
water management agendas have
been promoted through the mobilization of directed scholarship is that of the
approach to the governance and management of water of “transboundary” rivers that
flow through more than one country. In this
case, northern governments have aggressively promoted an agenda of cooperation
on transboundary water management in developing countries, with the encouragement
of northern environmental activists.

While this could be seen as a laudable contribution to development, I have argued elsewhere (Muller 2012; Muller 2011)
that the approaches taken are inimical to African interests and reflect primarily northern environmental protection goals rather
than the achievement of effective cooperation between countries to facilitate better
water management in support of sustainable
development. This has occurred, in part,
because Africa’s relatively weak regional institutions have been used as entry points to
promote policies and activities that would
not be adopted if individual governments
had fund them from their own budgetary
resources. Aside from the sub-optimal use
of Africa’s scarcest resource—trained technical human resources—negative outcomes
have included the failure of Southern Africa’s efforts at practical regional cooperation
in the important field of energy and serious

“While some GHG emissions from
new hydroelectric schemes are expected in the future, especially in tropical
settings, in the absence of more comprehensive field data, such schemes
are regarded as a lower source of CH4
emissions compared to those of other
energy sector or agricultural activities.
Hydroelectric power is therefore not
treated as a separate emission category…” (IPCC 2000)

The exclusion of hydropower from
CDM funding has continued even though
the IPCC later reported that more detailed
investigation simply confirmed that “for
most hydro projects, life-cycle assessments
have shown low overall net GHG emissions”(IPCC 2007), a position that has been
maintained in the IPCC’s 5th Assessment
Report in 2014.

In this case, anti-dam lobbies have
constrained the development of power
generation opportunities that would have
reduced the emissions of global warming
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