The democracy-development tension in dam projects: The long hand of the law

‘Democratic development’ comprises two ideas: the idea of democracy that calls for devolution of power to communities and the idea of development that calls for conceding power to global institutions public and private. The post-war world has witnessed the simultaneous decentralisation of political power and the centralisation of economic power. Recent movements against large dams draw attention to developmental conflicts that embody this tension but do not theorise the underlying dynamic. Taking the award of the Krishna Water Disputes Tribunal as a point of departure this paper examines the centralisation–decentralisation dynamic in water conflicts in the Krishna basin in Southern India. The paper argues that there is a hiatus in our understanding of legal and institutional relationships in the ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’, ‘the national’ and ‘the international’ and ‘the colonial’ and the ‘post-colonial’ in relation to problems of river basin development. It challenges some conceptual underpinnings of the development paradigm.