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East Asia & Pacific is facing some great development challenges today: urbanization, protection of the environment, the need to find renewable energy sources and many others. This site wants to create a conversation around those important issues. More »

Nam Theun 2

Laos: How the Nam Theun 2 dam is managed during flood events

Submitted by William Rex on Sun, 2011-10-16 17:31

William RexIt’s been an unusually severe rainy season in some parts of Lao PDR, with several typhoons passing over after making landfall in

Vietnam.  Thailand is also severely hit, with Bangkok bracing itself for floods as I write this. Floods are a regular part of life in this part of the world, but they can nevertheless be devastating for people impacted by them:  people may lose their entire rice crop if flood waters don’t recede in time; remote communities may lose access to the outside world as parts of their only road are washed away; and public health problems can multiply water and sanitation facilities are overwhelmed.

A large hydropower project like Nam Theun 2 (NT2) has a significant effect on water flows around the project, and so inevitably people begin to question whether NT2 is somehow making the local floods worse.  Questions around project’s role in exacerbating natural floods started even before Nam Theun 2 started operating (see a blog post on this back in 2009), and it has sporadically been blamed during this wet season as well.  A lot of these arguments stem from some pretty basic misunderstandings of how NT2 works, so although this information is already in the public domain, I thought I’d produce a simple summary here with reference to the attached map.

Intervention management of wildlife in Nam Theun 2

Submitted by Tony Whitten on Wed, 2010-09-08 16:51
A baby black gibbon

I did my PhD field research on black gibbons. I mean really black—black skin, black fur everywhere, and even the whites of their eyes seemed black when they were at the top of tall forest trees and I was wandering around on the forest floor. How I longed to be in the position of my peers studying zebras or lions or elephants—they could distinguish dozens of individuals by their markings. I couldn’t even find a candidate for Scarface or Four-Toes or Ripped-Ear. Over time I could tell my group’s adults (whose black nether regions also appeared identical at a distance) apart by their individual mannerisms, but then only when I had a good view, which was rare. The inability to reliably distinguish between them limited the extent to which I could ‘experiment’ with them and thereby collect new levels of information.

What difference do 16.5 kms of rural roads make? An answer from the effect of NT2 revenues in Laos

Submitted by Victoria Minoian on Wed, 2010-07-07 05:02
The author at one of the roads renovated with NT2 funds (2010 rainy season).

Last week I hopped on one of our office cars and led into the Southern province of Champassack, along with our filming crew, to collect some stories related to the recent roads improvements made out of the NT2 Revenues (386kb pdf). Following the sale of electricity to neighboring Thailand in early March, monies have started to flow into the National Treasury of Laos.

As the reader and follower of NT2 may know, the project offers a Revenue Management Agreement (24.46mb pdf) component which has been designed to strengthen the overall Government of Lao’s Public Financial Management Program. For the specific case of NT2, the Program was implemented via budget classification and monitoring systems, physical progress of expenditures at the sector ministries of the identified eligible programs where the monies are allocated and increased capacities to conduct expenditure audits, among others.

Does the chance to access information carry a duty from those who ask?

Submitted by Victoria Minoian on Thu, 2010-04-29 11:52
Accessing information is a right that comes associated with—at least—the homework of reading, studying and understanding such information. (February 2010, World Bank booth at Library Week in Vientiane, WB photo)

Those who help disseminate information at the World Bank have a rule about the topics of disclosure and access to information. We do not talk about access and disclosure, we help exercise it. This blog is not about accessing information or disclosing it. Rather it is about reflecting on the use and exercise of accessed information from the two sides: that of the originator and that of the receiver. If the reader allows me a basic judgment, I think the exercise of accessing information comes associated with, at a minimum, the basic task of reading. Do you agree?  If you do, you may want to continue reading this blog.

Nam Theun 2 – How are the resettled people doing overall? In their own words… (part 2 of 2)

Submitted by Nina Fenton on Tue, 2010-03-30 02:07

In the last blog we saw that most resettlers are broadly satisfied with the resettlement process and are positive and optimistic about their lives as a whole. But…how do they feel about their lives in comparison to the very different world they lived in before relocation? What are the changes they value or regret?
 
The respondents were asked directly how they felt about life now compared with life before resettlement. The overwhelming majority think that life has got much better, and that the vulnerable households are even more likely to feel this way than the non-vulnerable—no vulnerable households felt that life had got worse.

Nam Theun 2 – How are the resettled people doing overall? In their own words… (part 1 of 2)

Submitted by Nina Fenton on Mon, 2010-03-29 03:15

In last week’s blog I showed that, when we examine consumption—a commonly used measure of household welfare—the resettled households appear to be doing relatively well, and much better than before resettlement. But economic circumstances are just one small part of what really matters to households. In order to get closer to a broader picture of “well-being”, I’m going to present some evidence of how these households themselves view their lives overall and how they feel about the changes going on around them. I hope that this will provide new insights to the question of “how are the resettled people doing overall?”

Nam Theun 2 – how are resettled people doing? (a note on epistemology, or what we can and can’t learn using socioeconomic data)

Submitted by Nina Fenton on Thu, 2010-03-25 21:56

On the Nakai plateau, a large proportion of income is non-monetary. If we fail to account for this income, we grossly underestimate the living standards of most households. (WB photo)

In my last blog I presented an initial look at how the resettled households are doing overall. But now that I’ve hopefully satisfied some of your curiosity on the big picture, I’d like to go back and talk in a little more detail about the data that I’m using here, and what it can tell us.

Economics is often (and sometimes fairly!), maligned for its reliance on assumptions. But the reality is that it is impossible to even start analyzing a situation like that on Nakai without making some assumptions about how progress can be measured, and using data which is inevitably a simplification of a complex, multi-faceted reality. Even though we are working with the best data available, the honest thing to do is to be upfront and honest about what we can, and cannot, know about how people are doing, with socioeconomic data in general, and the Nakai Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) in particular.

Nam Theun 2 – How are the resettled people doing overall?

Submitted by Nina Fenton on Mon, 2010-03-22 00:11

The NT2 project required the damming of the Nam Theun river and the creation of a reservoir that has flooded large areas of the Nakai plateau, leading to the physical relocation of 17 villages by April 2008.  However, this physical relocation was just the first step in the resettlement process. The key challenge now is to ensure that the 6,200 people who were resettled because of the reservoir develop new and better livelihoods—and do so in a sustainable fashion—meeting the high-level commitments made in the project’s Concession Agreement (CA) (787 kb pdf).

The project has invested in strong socioeconomic monitoring systems to track progress in meeting the CA commitments, although it’s far too early to judge whether the objectives have been achieved and livelihoods are sustainable. This series of blogs uses some of that evidence to give insights into how the resettlers are doing so far and the challenges they still face in improving their livelihoods. By presenting this information a bit at a time we hope to slowly build up a comprehensive picture of the resettlement process, with all its complexities, complications and surprises...

Nam Theun 2 – How are resettled people doing?

Submitted by William Rex on Wed, 2010-03-17 22:16

There’s an extensive literature on dam resettlement, and according to much of this, the track record on rebuilding sustainable livelihoods is not great. For those interested, an excellent starting point is “The Future of Large Dams” by Ted Scudder. Ted has spent 50 years or so studying dams and resettlement, and has been on Nam Theun 2’s (NT2) external Panel of Experts since the early days of project preparation.

The broad reasons behind poor results in dam-related resettlement are intuitive: dams often require the resettlement of entire communities (rather than, for example, the resettlement of specific households to make way for a road), and dams may also significantly impact on existing livelihood opportunities, by, for example, flooding agricultural areas.

Independent Advisory Group makes 9th visit to Nam Theun 2

Submitted by Victoria Minoian on Wed, 2009-11-25 14:08
The International Advisory Group in action at Ban Sop On, one of the resettled villages at Nakai Plateau.

Over the last two weeks the Nam Theun 2 project received the 9th visit of the International Advisory Group (IAG), one of the  Independent Assessment bodies assigned to the project.