Large dams and the 'risk society'.

Abstract

The ongoing controversy about the social, economic and environmental costs and benefits of building large dams is a sub-set of the even larger debate about how we should move to a sustainable world. A central part of this debate has been the discourse about the development of ‘the risk society’, one in which policy makers believe they can reliably predict future problems and manage them. The term ‘risk society’ was popularized by Ulrich Beck in the 1980s. He described the ethos of the state – thinking of governments in western Europe and North America – as animated with confidence that humans could conquer nature in all its manifestations and deal with future hazards by continually assessing potential risk and planning to deal with them. He did not suggest that they would be successful but diagnosed this as the underlying ideology of what is sometimes called the ‘modern’ state. Show more