Partnerships, platforms and power - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 164

A related aspect of poverty, not included in the list above, is externalities.
Powerful people upstream, through their land and water management practices,
can impose costs on less-powerful downstream communities. The costs may
be increased water scarcity, lack of access to resources or increased vulnerability.
In the Andean basins, for example, grazing of fragile alpine wetlands by
livestock can reduce downstream water availability by reducing water capture
and increasing siltation. Conversely, powerful people downstream may use
political or financial leverage to reduce the access of upstream communities to
land and water to prevent negative externalities. For example, downstream
communities might persuade policymakers to name upstream regions as no-
access conservation reserves.
There are several examples from CPWF projects where combinations of
power, resource access, vulnerability, externalities and poverty were linked.
In the Ganges Basin, community-based fisheries improved livelihoods in
seasonally flooded areas in Bangladesh. Even the landless poor benefitted when
they were allowed unlimited fishing by hooks and lines, but not nets (PN35) 4
(Sheriff et al., 2010). Sustainability of community-based fisheries and expand-
ing them to new areas, however, depends on the ability of communities to
maintain lease rights to flooded areas. In this they compete with private
investors whose power relationships influence who gains access to the leases.
The poor can easily be excluded (Toufique and Gregory, 2008; Collis et al.,
2011).
In the Mekong Basin, CPWF projects worked on the nexus between hydro-
power, food and poverty. They found that hydropower dams, which benefit
urban and industrial centers, often impose costs on the rural poor living
downstream from the dams. Regarding flood and disaster management:
[P]romises of protection are often made in earth or concrete: upstream
dams . . . will regulate river flows; diversions will take the water around
and past the city; [longer and higher] dykes . . . will hold back the flood
waters; drains, pumps and tunnels will move water out faster. Flood
management policies, measures and practices in the greater Mekong
region, intended to reduce risks, however, frequently shift risks [on to]
already vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. Promises of protection and
how they are pursued can be explained in terms of beliefs, interests, and
power.
(PN50) 4 (Lebel et al., 2010)
Hydropower dams on the Mekong River are forecast to reduce the
productivity of fisheries, critical to the livelihoods of millions of poor people
living downstream. “There are good examples and verifiable science from
around the world to indicate that dams have a significant negative impact on
fisheries, in some cases driving them to collapse. The degree of impact will
vary and depends on dam location, river hydrodynamics, and dam manage-
ment” (Pukinskis and Geheb, 2012). In the Mekong Basin, the negative