ID: 1668
Presenting Author: Armeline DIMIER
Session: 524 - Power and Perception: Misinformation, Disinformation, and the Environmental and Social Narrative in Hydropower Development
Status: pending
The paper explores various tools and approaches that can reduce the power imbalances between developers and communities affected by hydropower projects.
Developing a hydropower project is no small business in a country like Malawi, where only 5% of the population has attended secondary school. When education levels are low, with limited to no understanding of basic scientific principles, introducing hydropower concepts is particularly challenging due to limited abilities of the audience to capture technical and scientific language.
The team in charge of a hydropower project in Malawi tried to address some of those issues, using a physical model of the project in its overall setting, which was deployed during community consultations at the ESIA stage. This innovative way of displaying the project attracted great interest from the participants.
However, this tool did not fully address the knowledge gap between the project developer and the local communities, and knowledge is power. Through a holistic approach, more could be done at the early stages of a hydropower project development to increase the capacities of communities to grasp the deep impacts hydropower projects can have on their lives and negotiate their compensations and benefit packages with knowledge levels sufficiently high enough that it effectively reduces the power gap.
We will explore the existing and potential new tools that could be developed to vulgarize hydropower concepts for local communities, whatever their educational background. We will discuss the recent pushes by some civil society organizations to provide technical and engineering assistance to communities affected by hydropower projects while looking at the challenges of such approaches.
Social Expert at the Hydro Engineering Centre of EDF working with technical teams to assess hydropower opportunities around the world and provide support to hydropower projects in development