Hydro-modernization Projects in Khuzestan as the Forerunner of Development in Iran

Looking at the ecology of Khuzestan reveals the fact that the extremes (dust storms, acid rain, severe drought, etc.) are the new normal in this south-west province of Iran. Anthropocene, the geological age defined by human impacts, demonstrates itself clearly in this corner of the world, which was once called ‘the oil capital of the world’ and ‘’a key for Iran’s cosmopolitan turn’. I argue that there is a link between Khuzestan’s current dystopian landscape, oil infrastructure development and large-scale hydro-projects. To grasp the complexity of its ecological degradation, one must understand it as a process, a historical socio-ecological process. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the infrastructures of oil have triggered radical and sequential shifts in society-nature relations. The first period of rapid transformations was defined by the formation of Anglo-Persian Oil Company and its subsequent alteration in the ecology of Khuzestan.
In this paper, I focus on the second rapid shift in the society-nature relationship which was erupted by new forms of land and water governance in the 1950s and 1960s. Under the shadow of the cold war conflicts, and according to large-scale technological programs and top-down planning, Dez Dam Project was started in 1956. The planning was based on the Tennessee Valley Authority Act - a New Deal Development project, which its aim was to ‘rebuild Khuzestan province’. By the construction of this monstrous dam, a new era for Khuzestan’s physical geography took off, which necessarily entailed socio-ecological transformations. Whereas the oil industry initiated capitalist land tenure pattern, westernized land use and capitalist social relations in this region, this large-scale hydro-modernization, intensified such patterns and relations. New processes of dispossession and displacements, regulation of rivers and land (‘taming’ nature), construction of new roads, power plants and factories, etc. further rifted apart the socio-natural metabolism in this province. Khuzestan’s hydro-development in the 1950s could be understood as the pilot project for Development Plans after the 1960s and Shah’s White Revolution. The western technical and managerial ‘know-how’ continues to define the socio-natural metabolism of Khuzestan to date.