SOAS Research Online

A Free Database of the Latest Research by SOAS Academics and PhD Students

[skip to content]

Cooke, Fadzilah Majid, Nordensvard, Johan, Saat, Bin Gusni, Urban, Frauke and Siciliano, Giuseppina (2017) 'The Limits of Social Protection: The Case of Hydropower Dams and Indigenous Peoples' Land.' Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies, 4 (3). pp. 437-450.

[img]
Preview
Text - Published Version
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).

Download (553kB) | Preview

Abstract

Hydropower dams have been criticised for their social and environmental implications. There have been attempts to create international social standards for hydropower dam projects, but these standards have had limited impact. This article uses an extended environmental justice framework to make sense of the resettlement and compensation schemes for Indigenous peoples who were resettled for the construction of the Bakun dam in Borneo, East Malaysia. The article therefore analyses the social protection measures designed for the protection of Indigenous peoples and their livelihoods. The case study is based on in‐depth interviews and focus group discussions with local communities, institutional actors in Malaysia, Chinese actors and dam builders. The article concludes that the social protection policies did not protect Indigenous people and their land sufficiently, but it facilitated a commodification process of both land and people. This should also be understood as a colonisation of their land and their cultures

Item Type: Journal Article
SOAS Departments & Centres: Departments and Subunits > Interdisciplinary Studies > Centre for Development, Environment and Policy
Legacy Departments > Faculty of Law and Social Sciences > School of Finance and Management > Centre for Development, Environment and Policy (CeDEP)
ISSN: 20502680
Copyright Statement: © 2017 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1002/app5.187
Date Deposited: 10 Aug 2017 15:15
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/24396
Funders: Economic and Social Research Council

Altmetric Data

Statistics

Download activity - last 12 monthsShow export options
Downloads since deposit
6 month trend
338Downloads
6 month trend
350Hits
Accesses by country - last 12 monthsShow export options
Accesses by referrer - last 12 monthsShow export options

Repository staff only

Edit Item Edit Item