With the enfranchisement of our native peoples who were very much affected by the dams we had built, they revisited these projects and new conflicts arose years after the dams were built. As a result, one of my jobs was to apologise formally to the native people for the sins of the past - sins committed inadvertently by overriding the interests of people who, at that time, were not regarded as having the same kind of rights as others and sins of omission in failing to properly evaluate and allocate the costs and benefits of the dams among the different sectors that were affected by them. There are parts of the world that still hope to benefit from hydroelectric power, irrigation, and other water-related developments. I can say to them that our respective experiences, and those of others, have certainly taught us how to avoid such mistakes in the future. The environmental community, social advocates, and dam builders tend to be in a continual state of tension, if not conflict.
Dams take a long time to develop.
Time is needed to plan them, to evaluate them, and eventually, to decommission them. Too often the World Bank commissions a panel to evaluate a dam project when that project has already developed a constituency of interested parties and a certain degree of inertia, a very powerful factor in human affairs. While examining some dam projects at the Bank, I found that the objectivity needed to evaluate those projects diminished at some point down the stream. In fact, it was quite clear from reviewing the files that Bank staff had often become advocates at a very early stage. It became their project.