[The first post in this series is available here. Image source.]
Before his disappearance while on a research trip in Somalia in early 2008, myself and a number of research colleagues were in some contact with a charismatic Vientiane-based environmental consultant by the name of Murray Watson.
Murray had emerged as an unlikely critic of the Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project project. Indeed, Bruce Shoemaker (2000) earlier identified Watson as a “favoured consultant of the ADB in Laos” and noted his work in a series of early hydropower projects in Laos, including Nam Leuk, Se San 3, Xekaman and Nam Ngum 3. Watson’s consulting company, Resource Management and Research (RMR), also conducted the studies that contributed to establishing the THPC Environmental Management Division (EMD) in 2001, a move pushed by the Asian Development Bank (Whitington, 2012).
Starting in 2004, Watson and RMR began working on the Environmental Impact Assessment for the Theun-Hinboun Expansion Project (THXP). Around 2006-2007, disagreements emerged between RMR Consulting and THPC, around the appropriate level of detail in the documentation of environmental damages from the phase 1 of the project. In 2007, MR was summarily replaced by the Norwegian firm Norplan as the lead consultants on the THXP environmental and social impact assessment. This set up a situation of “competing EIAs” and further contributed to the widely diverging knowledge claims regarding the changing hydrology and fluvial-geomorphology of the Hai-Hinboun Valleys, and the extent to which these changes could be tied to the downstream outcomes of the THPC-THXP projects (see also Whitington 2012).
I came into contact with Murray Watson in late 2006, after my primary period of dissertation fieldwork in the Hinboun Valley was completed, and as I was preparing a research paper that would be published as “Power Progress and Impoverishment”.
Initial predictions by visiting anthropologists and project proponents were that the THPC project would produce little to no ecological impacts. The ADB initially claimed that it had “backed a winner” in THPC (Watershed, 1999). By the time of my fieldwork in 2005-2006, I found that the THPC project was clearly creating very significant downstream socio-ecological transformations in the inter-basin transfer recipient river— the Nam Hinboun. By this time the land concessions boom in Laos was getting well underway. My research traced through the damaging ‘hybrid’ social, ecological and economic changes that were being produced in a community landscape, when two major resource development sectors— hydropower and industrial tree plantations— collided and combined in their environmental externalities.
Many people could never quite pin down Murray’s motivations in moving from hydropower consultant to hydropower critic in Laos. Indeed with his mysterious 2008 disappearance, perhaps he is destined to remain an enigmatic figure. In tracing through the various actor-networks which have been enlisted and assembled into the remaking of the Theun-Hinboun watershed, Murray Watson and his company emerge as key players.
In his last communications, Dr. Watson expressed a desire for more information to be publicly released on the situation in the Hinboun Valley, and in particular to call out the final Norplan Environmental Impact Assessment, that he argued minimized the real environmental effects of THPC’s interventions, and that cleared the way for the international financing of the US $665 million Theun-Hinboun Expansion Project.
Murray Watson’s last correspondence regarding the THPC project and the communities along the Hinboun watershed is available on the International Rivers website and it is reprinted below, as it deserves a close reading.
Statement by Dr. Murray Watson, Resource Management and Research, December, 2007
I wish to clarify, for the record, our findings concerning the Theun-Hinboun Expansion Project, which have been misrepresented in the project’s official Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), prepared by Norwegian company Norplan.
In 2004 RMR was contracted to conduct the EIA for the Theun-Hinboun Expansion Project by the Theun-Hinboun Power Company. After more than two years of investigations and data collection about the existing project and the planned expansion project and its impacts, we were unable to finalise our report within the contracted period. The problem we came up against was the need to treat the impacts and mitigations already experienced by families on the downstream Hai and Hinboun Rivers at a due diligence level. We found these impacts to be much more serious than those shown in the company’s reports. We delivered the reports which we had completed to the company towards the end of 2006. From that moment we have heard nothing from the Company nor from Norplan, a Norwegian company, whom we eventually discovered had been contracted to complete the EIA.
The company claims that the report we produced was “too detailed”. Normal EIA studies don’t usually go into much detail as they deal with the future and all its uncertainties. However as the Theun-Hinboun Project had been operating for 8 years and had already had effects on about 30,000 people, there was a massive amount of investigation and documentation to do. Our investigations over two years showed that the Hai River – the river to which the water is diverted to – had become destabilized, with about 1 million tons of annual erosion along the Nam Hai, a widening and straightening of its course, and a slow moving sediment wave penetrating down the Hinboun, leaving deposits on the banks and filling the deep pools.
Not surprisingly these processes, which were still occurring at the end of 2006, have devastated the fishery in both rivers, produced more frequent, slightly deeper and more prolonged floods of more turbid water, leading to more frequent rice crop failures, more periodic dislocations of normal life and higher risks for human and animal health. We have documented at least 820 hectares of rice paddy land that has been abandoned by Hai and Hinboun residents as a result of the flooding. THPC’s mitigation programmes were found to have been only slightly effective in remedying losses, partly because they were not equitably and immediately distributed to all affected families. We estimated the accumulated uncompensated economic losses to recipient river communities at about US$11 million.
Unfortunately and unwisely the Company had already widely publicized its belief that the impacts of the river diversion were slight, and that its mitigation programme was remedying all the negative consequences. RMR was therefore in the unenviable position of being compelled to document increasingly detailed and well supported facts of the true impacts of the existing project, which would seriously damage the Company’s reputation and cause it to spend large sums on remedies and compensations. We were therefore not surprised that the Company closed down the EIA when the opportunity arose. By that time, however, the levels of detail were distinctly inconvenient for both parties.
The main reason for the exceptional impacts on Hai and Hinboun river communities was due to the diversion of large water flows into a river not “designed” to accommodate this flow. This had already been flagged as a problem by Norplan in studies they conducted in 1996, before the project began operation. They recommended that THPC take measures to stabilize the river banks before project operation. The Company decided against doing this, apparently for financial reasons. Instead they decided that the consequences of impacts of the Theun-Hinboun diversion on the recipient river should be managed by environmental mitigation measures, when in fact they could only be managed by major and expensive engineering mitigations. Much of the damage to the recipient river would have been avoidable had normal engineering practice been followed.
From our detailed investigations of events from 1998 to 2006, we have concluded that the Company’s plans to construct an additional storage reservoir upstream of the existing Headpond and double diversions into the Hai and Hinboun rivers (known as the Theun-Hinboun Expansion Project) require at the least that the Nam Hai banks are stabilized and current erosion halted, and that engineering measures to control additional erosion are implemented. These engineering works are not part of the Expansion Project’s plan. Norplan’s EIA, which understates the severity of the impacts, proposes that the currently occurring erosion and new erosion from the Expansion Project should again be treated as unavoidable damage and remedied through much less costly social and environmental mitigations.
If the diversion is doubled to 200 m3/s, as is planned, some problems will be approximately doubled, but others, such as flooding and the flood-sediment effects on rice cropping, will cross tolerance thresholds and have disproportionately larger impact consequences. The consequences for the riverine communities in the upper reaches of the Hai and Hinboun (about 2,000 families) will be serious livelihood damage and periodic dislocation of most other activities, leading to substantial impoverishment, impairment of health and the exhaustion of current coping mechanisms. Many families will find they have to move to new locations. Continuing and increased erosion of the Nam Hai will result in aggravated flooding, higher mortality of submerged rice, loss of productive land, acute fishery damage, higher public and livestock health risks and forced relocations of hundreds of families in the Hai and Hinboun valleys.
The seriousness of these consequences has not been properly presented in the Norplan EIA, which does not meet professional standards expected of scientists. The Norplan EIA seriously under-estimates the risks of the THXP, and understates or ignores the changes already experienced from the Theun-Hinboun Hydropower Project. They are deceiving the Lao Government and enabling their client to externalize costs. The costs of these impacts will definitely seriously impoverish 10,000-15,000 people, probably will moderately impoverish a further 10,000-15,000, and add to existing deficit lines in the national accounts.
Other risks which Norplan has inadequately reported or ignored can be seen in the expanded version of this statement which is in the RMR archive.
Dr R.M.Watson
Resource Management & Research
Littlebourne, Forest Green
Dorking, Surrey
In my third and final posting, I will bring this story of Remaking the Nam Hinboun up to the present, providing a summary of a research trip to a Hinboun community conducted in May 2012.
References
Shoemaker, Bruce (2000). Theun-Hinboun Update: A Review of the Theun-Hinboun Power Company’s Mitigation and Compensation Program. December 2000.
Watershed (1999). “Always Very Little, Always Very Late: The ADB and the Theun Hinboun Hydroelectric Project.” Watershed: People’s Forum on Ecology. 4(3): 44-50. http://www.terraper.org/pic_water/Watershed%204(3).pdf (Accessed November 3, 2012).
Whitington, Jerome (2012). “The Institutional Condition of Contested Hydropower: The Theun Hinboun–International Rivers Collaboration.” Forum for Development Studies. 39(2): 231-256.
Great post. Thanks for highlighting Watson’s response.
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This is an interesting post, but there are two important points worth making.
First, Barney writes, “By the time of my fieldwork in 2005-2006, I found that the THPC project was clearly creating very significant downstream socio-ecological transformations in the inter-basin transfer recipient river— the Nam Hinboun.” This sentence implies that he was the first, or at least amongst the first, to discover the downstream impacts along the Hinboun River. The reality is that the impacts were already well documented by that time. The ADB had even admitted them by that time. On this matter, the posting is quite misleading.
Second, I would be wary of presenting Murray Watson as some sort of champion of justice fighting against the Theun-Hinboun dam. In fact, his main motivation for releasing information about the project appears to be revenge. He was angry with the THPC for dumping him as their consultant, so he went after them. His motives do not appear to have been particularly noble. In fact, a few years earlier he had threatened to sue the anti-dam NGO, International Rivers Network (IRN), in order to keep them from legitimately criticizing projects that he was involved with. I am sorry that he died in Somalia, but the record seems to suggest that he was simply a high priced hydropower dam consultant who was willing to turn on anyone who he felt was blocking his own path to advancement. He didn’t want anyone to mess with him, and he was willing to make anyone who did pay. I have no doubt that much of what he wrote against Theun-Hinboun is true, but I doubt that he would have released the information had he not had a falling out with THPC.
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As someone who has closely observed the Theun-Hinboun PC’s dramatic transformation of these river basins over the last decade and was in communication with Murray Watson (MW) during the period mentioned by Keith, I would like to add a few comments to this discussion.
Firstly, I do not interpret Keith’s post as implying he was making any claims to be the first or amongst the first to “discover” d/s impacts along the Nam Hinboun, and thence, did not find his post misleading. Anyone that goes to his report will find he has correctly cited most of the previous material related to the project’s impacts.
Secondly, I think Keith was being purposely cautious about presenting MW as any kind of “champion” of social or environmental justice in Laos and do not recognise this characterisation in the post. As Keith implies, he was an enigmatic character, and who really knows why he was motivated to change his stance quite so dramatically in the space of a few years. MW claimed it was mostly concerns with trying to protect “good science”.
What is clear is that MW had already tried to set the record straight on other projects apart from THHP prior to his spat not only with THPC, but also with Norpower and others he saw as having a huge conflict of interests with regards to the lucrative Lao hydropower sector. For example, he had through his Final Completion Report for the Nam Mang 3 Hydropower Project, made a quite impassioned plea for improved practices across the entire environmental impact assessment process, which went far beyond his TOR and would be an interesting document of study in itself, given that this was just a relatively minor hydropower project and was funded by a Chinese developer, rather than a Western developer as with THHP. For example, this is MW’s argument to enlarge the scope of the EIA process into social matters (Section 8.2, p. 20 of report):
“Secondly, the EIA Process has been enlarged to take on too large a socio-political burden. The regulations require standards of equitability and distribution, and rights to property ownership and economic and livelihood opportunity, for families and groups by gender and ethnicity which are far in advance of the current situation. As targets for society they are admirable, but as a requirement for a developer they almost guarantee non-compliance. Any developer following the regulations would find himself trying to force political changes at rates far greater than is possible without severe social dislocation. He would be at odds with the officials and administrators, and would threaten their livelihoods more severely than his project threatens the livelihoods of rural stakeholders.
The EIA Process is much too frail an instrument to carry these additional purposes. It is in any case doubtful how much social change can be generated from external pressure. More progress could be made with regulating environmental damage, a much more important and long term topic, with higher potential for success, if the social elements were to be removed, and placed back into the general context of the entire relationship between lenders, investors, donors and the developing country.”
I think he surely knew this report would win him few friends in either GoL, the hydropower industry, the development banks and fellow consultants who are used to writing what MW termed as “Status Quo Reports” (SQR), which are the recognised norm for the industry in the Lower Mekong Basin. Personally, I think he’d probably had had enough of the culture of SQR, and unusually for his profession, was prepared to be a canary within the mine, singing that the air was getting increasingly foetid and if something was not changed quickly, there would sooner or later be no mine left to exploit.
I agree he was way too litigious and perhaps trying to turn the situation to financial profit, but I think it would be wrong to paint him as an entirely self-interested party in the case of Theun-Hinboun, but was trying in his own way to right some more general wrongs in the hydropower industry in Laos and move beyond the ingrained culture of SQR’s, seen once more with Compagnie National du Rhone and Poyry over the Xayaburi Dam debacle.
Therefore, I remain to be convinced that he was he was “simply a high priced hydropower dam consultant who was willing to turn on anyone who he felt was blocking his own path to advancement”.
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Dear Observer:
Thank you for your post, it is good to get some discussion and information sharing going on this issue.
I might respond with a few points.
I would be reticent to say that Mr. Watson has died. He is reported as kidnapped without proof of life. I am sure that his family are still holding out hope for contact, however slim those hopes may be at this point.
Second, I really don’t think I presented Murray as a champion of social justice. I noted for example his close involvement in previous problematic hydropower projects in Laos. Clearly RMR was considered as an industry friendly consulting firm.
I certainly didn’t have an inside line into the inner psyche of Mr. Watson. He could very well have been acting out of venality, revenge, greed and empire building as you suggest. He even threatened legal action against IRN at one point, as you indicate. So that is certainly one line of plausible interpretation of his actions and intent.
However, it seems to me at least, that this interpretation would not adequately explain the sheer extent of documentation that RMR produced on the downstream effects of THPC in their draft EIA, long after it became of any use to his firms ability to secure contracts or for their reputation. Watson also developed a new line of thinking on why the flooding effects in the downstream area were becoming so severe (his ‘sediment wave’ hypothesis). Your interpretation would also have trouble explaining the significant level of his later cooperation with International Rivers (for example with their joint media conference held at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok).
Mr. Watson may have been acting solely out of self-interest through this whole episode- who knows. However, it seems to me at least, that he might also have had more than one source of motivation going on (for example a professional desire to document what was actually happening). So that is why I suggested that it was difficult to pin down his motivations, and that’s part of what (I think at least) makes him an interesting character in this story.
Regarding the first point, well, I did not intend to be at all misleading, or to portray myself as having some kind of singular insight into this issue. In my published work on this, I have tried to be careful to cite all the previous evidence that I could gather on this subject. For this short blog post of course I did not present an exhaustive bibliography.
I could have noted other previous studies written by, for example, the late Charlie Pahlman on the effects of THPC; as well as a study entitled “An Update on the Environmental and Social-Economic Impacts of the Nam Theun-Hinboun Hydroelectric Dam and Water Diversion Project in Central Laos” published by IRN in 1999 and written by Ian Baird. In these earlier studies from 1998-1999, the issue of increased wet season flooding in villager rice fields is noted, as well as a range of other issues such as for fisheries and riverside gardens.
Terry Warren’s 199 fishery study on the Hinboun is very important.
In addition there was the Review of the Environmental Management Division written by Blake, Carson and Tubtim in 2005, although in this report the level of wet season flooding and paddy abandonment was not closely described.
That said, (and I am happy to stand corrected on this), I think that my study was amongst the first ethnographic community studies, based on longer term fieldwork in a single village on the lower Hinboun, and in particular that showed how these downstream effects (particularly with respect to the widespread abandonment of lowland paddy and the failure of EMD mitigation and compensation programs, including dry season irrigation) translated into complex social-ecological and livelihood changes in a particular community setting.
In parallel, Watson was also documenting the emergent erosion and flooding regime, and arriving at a fluvial-geomorpological explanation for why so much flooding was happening (his ‘sediment wave’ idea).
The broad outlines of the downstream impacts of THPC may have been known by many by 2006, however in presentations like this one, from 2003
[http://www.adbi.org/conf-seminar-papers/2003/12/09/370.power.progress.partnership/ ] THPC was still avoiding any serious discussion of these effects.
In particular, THPC were rejecting the notion that seriously aggravated downstream flooding from THPC could be linked to their inter-basin transfer project (they still preferred ideas that pinned the blame for the flooding upon deforestation, logging and swidden cultivation in the upper watershed, and to water back-up effects from the main Mekong channel).
Is Watson’s sediment wave interpretation really correct? What are the real prospects for the social-ecology of the Nam Hinboun as a result of the doubling of inter-basin water transfers due to the expansion project- THXP? Those seem like very interesting questions that deserves further study.
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I would just like to add a bit more context to my earlier response and clarification regarding the February 2007 Environmental Completion Report on the Nam Mang 3 Hydropower Project for Electricite du Laos (EdL), under the name of MW’s company, Resource Management and Research. This project was funded by a loan from China’s Export-Import Bank and built by a contractor, China International Water and Electric Corporation (CWE) and handed over to EdL to operate on completion. RMR’s involvement came as a result of concerns by ADB and the World Bank after construction began in November 2001 without an EIA or other safeguard studies having been conducted by the developers. RMR were hired (under pressure from ADB/WB who seemed to be using it as leverage for progression on the financing and project safeguards for Nam Theun 2)to conduct an Emergency Environmental Management Plan (EMMP) and combined EIA-EMP-SAP between 2002-2005 during the construction period, paid for by CWE, as a kind of tokenistic retroactive three-in-one process to make it appear as if Lao law was being followed. In other words, a bit of a charade was being played by all.
RMR’s Completion Report on NM3 was an internal document for EdL, but was widely circulated at the time. In reality, it seems that few of RMR’s suggestions and practical advice in the EIA-EMP-SAP was ever demanded by the regulators or followed by the developers (who were clearly trying to minimise costs and maximise profits, as would be expected in the absence of independent oversight) and I suspect it was this experience as much as the THHP/THXP debacle that stirred up MW ‘s juices to not merely write a report that the developer’s wanted to hear and bank the fat pay cheque that inevitably follows a compliant consultant’s report. In other words, RMR was prepared to break ranks from the pack and make some quite novel and daring suggestions for their profession (in the context of Laos, at least), for which I guess he surely paid a high financial (and personal) cost by ultimately having to relocate from Laos.
I mentioned MW’s use of the term Status Quo Reports (SQR’s)in the NM3 Completion Report, but didn’t define what he meant by these, so reproduce below an excerpt from the Preface of the said report:
“They serve the purpose of maintaining the present system, and moving it slowly without de-stabilising discontinuities, in the directions of a development model written by the developed world’s financial institutions, centered on economic issues.
The Advisers are aware that SQR cannot, nor are they supposed to, provide information which could change directions or modalities of development investment.
There are however risks in having a reporting process which is constrained to avoid dissecting difficulties and limited to presenting only the convenient truths. Such a process lacks the capacity to change directions, detect mistakes and illuminate lessons. The more the events suggest a change is needed, the more important it becomes to hire consultants skilled in SQR drafting. So more unsatisfactory outcomes are met by more skillfully composed reports showing the general direction taken has been and remains sound.”
To my mind, these are quite radical words and reflections from an environmental specialist who seemed to regard himself as a non-partisan, positivist natural scientist, and suggests, perhaps, that MW was prepared to rock the boat when he wrote this Completion Report by proposing a paradigm shift in the standard practices of that professional community in Laos and beyond to the regulators, donors and financiers of hydropower development. In a way, his report was aimed at a root and branch reform of the EIA process, which he saw as unfit for purpose, by essentially being a foreign-demanded (read: Western) practice foisted on an unwilling local constituency of hitherto largely unaccountable decision-makers. A better excerpt to include, rather than the bit in my previous post would have been this quote from the Completion Report’s discussion (p.172-174) containing RMR’s reflections on the deficiencies of the EIA process:
“There has not yet developed internally among Lao decision makers a majority who believe that environmental and social impacts from infrastructure construction should be regulated. There is however recognition that a significant, but presently falling, proportion of foreign investments and grants require there to be a Regulatory Procedure in place. The creation of an Agency and issue of legal and administrative instruments, under strong external influence, does not suddenly persuade Lao decision makers that environmental regulation is a good idea for them. There is no framework in which the public or special interest groups can compel individuals or agencies to follow regulations. There is no Public Liability Law under which agencies or individuals can be held accountable and liable for neglect for breaches of environmental regulations leading to damage or loss. Poor performance by the Agency is unlikely to attract adverse comments in local media. The sanctions available to the Regulator under
the regulations for poor implementation are arbitrary and toothless. The main sources of discomfort for the Regulator and for parties which fail to adhere to regulations come also from external sources.”
Given the process of decision-making surrounding the Xayaburi Dam project, I would suggest that these words were quite prophetic and significant, given that they came from an industry insider, rather that an external civil society critic. And as I mentioned, this occurred well before the dispute with THPC and Norplan over-spilled into a semi-public issue, and does not tend to support the “self-interest” hypothesis proposed by “Observer”.
NB: I would like to make an amendment to my earlier posting, regarding the quotation listed as Section 8.2 (headed “Enlargement of EIA into Social Matters” which should have been introduced as “….MW’s argument to not enlarge the EIA process into social matters (Section 8.2, p. 172) of report:” In other words, MW recognised that the EIA process was failing to meet its objectives in Laos and required a radical overhaul to become a little more “fit for purpose”.
The confusion over page numbers is as a result of there being a full pdf copy of the report and a shorter Word file “Executive Summary”. If anyone would like a copy of said NM3 Completion Report, please send me a p.m.
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