Turbulent Waters: Karkheh Dam and The Contested Discourses of Development

This essay examines the contested discourses surrounding the political economy of dam construction in Iran by focusing on Iran’s largest dam, Karkheh, in Southern province of Khuzestan. Fascination with large dams is not something new, or limited to Iran. The period after the end of Iran-Iraq war witnessed a resurgence of interest in large dams at a time that the global consensus around the benefits of dams was being seriously contested. While Presidents Ali Akbar Rafsanjani (1989-1997), Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) ran on completely different political platforms (under the banners of economic reconstruction, political reform, and social justice respectively), they all took pride in advancing Iran’s march towards development through construction of dams. These hydraulic interventions are mostly justified as ways of maximizing the use of Iran’s erratic water resources and modernizing its agriculture. The leading idea here is to prevent ‘a single drop of water going into waste’. The end result is a total re-organization of Iran’s hydraulic landscape at multiple scales and a radical transformation of its environment with lasting impacts. These mega-projects are embedded in the technopolitics of modern state, empower certain technocrats, who in turn mobilize national resources towards particular sub-contractors. All these groups form a ‘network of interests’ that create what I call ‘a perpetual project generating machine’ in the context of a rentier develpopmentalist state. Parallel to these developmental interventions, the past decade is also witnessing an emerging counter-hegemonic discourse that raises many socio-environmental and technical concerns regarding large dams. This paper uses discussions surrounding Karkheh Dam as an entry point to investigate larger socio-political context of development practice in Iran.