Those Dam(n) Experts: The International Expertise of the Tennessee Valley Authority
By Vincent Lagendijk
In 1933 American President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. It assumed a unique place within American historical consciousness. The TVA sought to develop the poor American South by putting the river Tennessee to use, through a system of multi-purpose dams. It was to contribute to power generation, flood control, navigation improvement, and was accompanied by reforestation, agricultural and social programmes. As a result, the TVA gained a name for regional development through dam-building.
The world was quick to take notice. For one, daily newspapers around the world reported on it [1]. For another, a steady stream of foreign dignitaries, experts, and engineers came to the banks of the Tennessee River to take first-hand stock of the TVA. This started as a modest trickle, with some 150 foreign visitors in 1943, and swelled to almost 2,100 over 1951-52 [2]. In the decades following the Second World War, river-related projects all over the world were labelled local adaptations of the TVA (see the image above).
This influence proved long-lasting, particularly because the United Nations (UN) and World Bank took over elements stemming from the TVA. They embraced dams as the technological incarnation of world development. In the 1950s more than 80 per cent of World Bank loans to developing countries went to power and transport, while the UN supported TVA-like projects for the Mekong and Jordan rivers. This helped to stimulate and sustain TVA-expertise in the post-1945 world.
But what does expertise actually entail? First, expertise is a concept that requires looking back as well as forward. Joseph Hodge showed that many former British colonial officers came to work for development-oriented international organizations (IOs), bringing their experiences on how to mobilise resources in the (now independent) Global South [3]. Second, expertise requires a certain vision and set of expectations. Suzanne Moon and Donna Mehos have shown how experts believed that localized (colonial) knowledge could be made ‘portable’: what worked in one place, would elsewhere, too[4]. This was a belief well-entrenched after World War II, including within IOs. Third, expertise entails a claim to knowledge — practical, scientific, or both — and being recognized as such. It is here that experience and expectation come together. Having had particular training, and/or been part of an earlier endeavour, arguably provides people with the credentials to carry the label ‘expert’. Lastly, the very notions of experts and expertise are intimately linked with modernity. Though often claiming to be ‘technical’ and ‘non-political’, experts thus came to play important roles in political decision-making, either in the formulation or the fulfilment of certain policy aims. This was tried in various contexts and experimental spaces.
The Tennessee Valley was such an experimental space, which in turn was a stepping stone to expertise in dam-building in the Global South. TVA-experts in part derived their authority from having been part of the American example. The vast attention to the TVA, epitomized by constant references and Tennessee site visits, underlined its recognition as a site of authority. The TVA itself, as well as its supporters, was able to foster a particular organization myth, tightly related to its origins. At the same time, in the immediate post-war years, there was a need for ‘proven’ development packages for war-ravaged countries and newly-independent nations. The TVA was seen by many as fulfilling that need.
This included IOs. The TVA figured prominently at a major UN scientific conference on resources in 1949 — it was discussed at a plenary and special session, and was part of the study tour. Participants would eventually form a cohort of UN experts in development, and author a manual on how to develop rivers [5]. The World Bank, apart from hiring former TVA staff, also used the American example as a template for mediation in the Indus Basin dispute between India and Pakistan [6]. In sum, in the transfer from an American to a global setting, the expertise of the TVA made its way from the American South to the Global South. This was not just because of the prominent post-war role of the US, but also because IOs adopted elements of TVA expertise into their development toolkit, which was tested and tried in newly-independent countries. According to one calculation, some 3,500 big dams (higher than 15 metres) were built in the period between 1945 and 2000 [7].
As late as 1998 the World Bank published a manual for river development based on the TVA. It thus seemed that dam experts were still going strong. Yet around that time, they found their match in the anti-dam movement, a bricolage of environmental, human rights, anti-capitalism activists. Its roots are older, and stem at least from the 1970s. The appearance of a transnational anti-dam movement in the 1980s benefited strongly from earlier more local and national protest movements. Successful protests included those against the construction of dams on the Indian River Narmada. A hallmark outcome of anti-dam activism was the creation of a new institution that operates as an interface between proponents and opponents, the World Commission on Dams (WCD). The WCD was established following a workshop in Gland, Switzerland, in 1997. Participants there concluded that the differences between “builders” and activists appeared insurmountable, and needed a constructive platform. The WCD tried to devise new guidelines for dam-building that respected and secured independence, inclusiveness, openness and transparency — elements all parties could agree on.
With that, those dam experts seemed to have become those damned experts. No longer seen exclusively seen as architects of modernity, but questioned for their harmful impact on societies and ecology. The experience of dam-building no longer hinges on the hallmarks of the TVA, but now also includes decades of displaced people and harmful ecological effects. This has significantly changed the expectations for development projects; dams are no longer seen as the linchpin of developing regions and nations. With that, those dam(ned) experts seem to have lost their authority.
Notes
[1] See http://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/view?coll=ddd&identifier=ddd:010014690:mpeg21:p006.
[2] “World Significance of TVA,” in Annual Report of the Tennessee Valley Authority (Knoxville, Ten.: TVA, 1952), 75. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b568960;view=1up;seq=313. An example, the visit of the King of Laos, can be found here.
[3] Joseph M. Hodge, ‘British Colonial Expertise, Post-Colonial Careering and the Early History of International Development’, Journal of Modern European History 8, no. 1 (15 April 2010): 24–46.
[4] Donna Mehos and Suzanne Moon, ‘The Uses of Portability: Circulating Experts in the Technopolitics of Cold War and Decolonization’, in Entangled Geograpies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 2011), 43–74.
[5] United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East, Manual of River Basin Planning, Multiple Purpose River Basin Development 1 (Bangkok: United Nations, 1955).
[6] Daniel Haines, ‘(Inter)Nationalist Rivers?: Cooperative Development in David Lilienthal’s Plan for the Indus Basin, 1951’, Water History, 4 September 2013.
[7] Sanjeev Khagram, Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power (Cornell University Press, 2004), 6.
Dr Vincent Lagendijk, Maastricht University is a historian of technology and international organisations. He is currently preparing a book on the transnational history of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
