Map of Malaysia

On 11 January, a European television programme series reported on the latest flood in Germany. It narrated how Germany has to increasingly cope with floods due to climate change. Relying on classical solutions like flood control dams are not effective anymore. There needs to be more comprehensive approach.

That reminded me to my work and research over the years on the construction of dams in Malaysia, where I am from, and the strong push by both State and Federal governments for large dams as the way to progress. There is little attempt to ask questions about real effectiveness of dam projects and crucially, the fate of the thousands most affected by dam development processes and projects.

In my case studies I found that peoples who bore the brunt of dams’ impact often are indigeneous communities, with women, children and poorer families most disproportionately affected. The people directly impacted by the government’s decision, or desire, to build a dam are always not consulted from the very beginning of the planning process, and would be among the last to know about the project to be undertaken. Just one example:

‘Why are you here in our village?’ we asked the group of men. They said they were here to survey the land for a health project. Health project? Good, and we left. Days later we found sections of our crops were felled. Then in April 1990, our village leaders got a notice from the Land and Survey Department. It said the Waterworks Department would later conduct interviews with them about the dam project.

Today women have to find and bring water back from the river to their resettlement site

Those were the words of the Kadazandusun indigenous villagers from Tampasak. Their village and customary lands on the bank of the Babagon river was submerged when the dam construction started in 1992 (completed in 1997), built for water supply for the urban populace. The Babagon  dam (as in numerous dam cases throughout Malaysia) triggered many village mobilisations and petitions to the authorities and dam builders. I was among the activists and civil society groups supporting them to get the state government to cancel the project. Many village women were brave and vocal. Alongside fellow villagers, the women saw the potential of the dam eroding their land rights and threatening to destroy their origins, indigeneous identity, culture and way of life intrinsically linked to collective ancestral territories and other natural resources and artefacts.

The dam project drowned the protesters’ voices. In 1994-1995, the 30 affected families were relocated to a resettlement scheme: most families were wooed by promises of attractive R&R package (the so-called good compensation, modern facilities, services, etc) while six families that steadfastly refused to move away were forced. I revisited the area in 1997-1998 to conduct fieldwork for my master’s thesis on the Tampasak case.[1] The first imprint was jolting but unsurprising: the new Tampasak village had neither lush forests nor clear running rivers and streams.

These experiences are not unique to Malaysia: name a dam and you will find poor and marginalised peoples, a majority of whom often is tribal and indigenous peoples, pauparised by dams and displacement.

Subsequent years, I travelled extensively to various sites of completed or proposed dams in Peninsular Malaysia, and visited indigenous communities displaced by dam projects or faced with the threat of displacement. I felt the need for further extensive studies to understand in-depth dam displacement of lives and livelihoods, and how they exacerbated gender inequalities.[2]

Displacement, compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation processes are gendered. But gender also intersects with other elements of social and power relations to shape the ways in which indigenous women and men, young and old, have different experiences. Below I share personal insights and empirical findings of cases studies on villages affected by dam projects in Malaysia. I don’t make a blanket position on dams as ‘all bad’ or ‘all good’ but rather a focus on the gender dimensions.

Dam decisions: Indigeneous women on the periphery

Forest provides raw materials (rattan) for handicraft-making of indigeneneous peoples (Sabah)

Ground work for so-called development project has to start with understanding how different social groups within the affected communities can make senseful decisions on their future: men/women (gender), old/young people (generation), village/community leaders and ordinary villagers (status), etc. Then to have appropriate institutional frameworks to ensure the decision-making is benefiting everybody; in my case studies, they are the marginalised women, children and poorer families. In practice, the state has been largely hollow on adherence to the standards, principles and obligations under domestic and international laws and international human rights for projects that affect indigenous peoples. Rights to information, land/resources, representation and effective participation, consultation, and free, prior, and informed consent, just to give examples, at the earliest phase before any activity related to the proposed project is taken, are simply ignored by the state. The authorities and dam developer/contractor tend to use formal village structures (village-head, institutions) as key contact figures with the community rather than the traditional (adat) village leaders with a more egalitarian approach. The fundamental problem is,  today’s village-head and committees are government-appointees, predominately men. So the way state and dam planners work is already leading into gender bias, usually fail to properly address gender-related questions.

Land acquisition: why indigeneous women lose more than men

Customary rights to ancestral land is established through the process of occupation for generations. All members are entitled to the rights to control, develop and utilise communal reosurces, including women and girls, so long as they still live with or maintain relations with the family, community or kin groups. The point should be made that female rights, however, is mediated in gendered ways, meaning through her father, her husband or the community’s male leaders.

Jahai children capture their traditional lifestyle in the jungle deep in Gerik, Perak (in 1972 the Jahai along with thousands of other Orang Asli communites were displaced by the Temenggor Dam)

When indigeneous peoples’ lands are taken and developed for dam, the loss is irreversible. They are physically uprooted and then ‘planted’ into another’s areas, into another community’s lands. Their rights to customary land, respected and guarded across generations, is extinguished by state laws justifying compulsory acquisition. Overall, the entire community or communities suffer but the effects on indigeneous women’s lives, and also poorer individuals or families, is especially marked.

For indigeneous women and girls, exercising their rights to collective ancestral territories and lands means they can access and use them as livelihoods and income resources, and as the social and physical environments to sustain and nurture their worldview, socio-cultural traditions and spirituality. For example, women don’t simply gather food and medicines from the forests but guided by an elaborate knowledge of the nutritional and medicinal properties of these plants, roots and leaves.

Women are the custodians of Adat rituals of healing, as among Sabah’s Kadazandusun (bobolian/babalian priestess), and rituals associated with farming such as protecting the paddy spirit (padi pun) as among the Iban Dayaks of Sarawak. Adat has been practised for generations and is rooted in their customary lands. Adat cannot be merely transplanted into the new resettlement area as if it is transplanting crops. When women are relocated away from the forest, e.g. Sarawak’s Batang Ai dam affected Ibans to Bukit Peninjau with large scale commercial oil palm plantations surrounding them, it became harder if not impossible for them to practice the rituals and healing. This further marginalises indigenous women who held the knowledge and skills of food production, agricultural rituals and traditional healing in their roles as resource managers and conservationists.

Resettlement and compensation: The missing gender perspectives

There are many assumptions and male biases in the design and implementation of compensation, resettlement and rehabilitation policies and programmes, among others:

• Men as the perceived head of households, women and children their dependents; discriminating against de facto female household heads, single mothers and unmarried women. Of the two vilages displaced by the Sungai Selangor dam: in Gerachi village 12 out of 41 families (30%) were female-headed, and in Peretak, 8 out of 43 families (20%).
• Monetary compensation is enough, and usually given to the men assumed as household heads. Yes, piped water supply and LPG gas alleviate the burdens of carrying water and collecting firewood for many women and girls, since conventionally these tasks are ‘women’s work’. Yet many women say: ‘Water is free from the river and it hardly runs dry. We truly enjoy our bath in the river. With the tap, sometimes there is water rationing or disruption to the supply!’ There is also the extra burden of money to pay for the water and other utility bills.
• Men got the money = everybody in the family equally reaps the compensation and benefits?
• Gender-stereotyping in planned rehabilitation: womenfolk taught how to handle and use modern house equipment and appliances, household management, cleanliness and hygiene, men provided with training on building construction to prepare them for jobs at the dam site.

Temuan women on the way to look for food before the Sungai Selangor dam construction encroached further into their communal forests

Women’s marginalisation

After resettlement, the lack of recognition of indigenous women’s pre-existing position as landowners under the adat combined with the decline of traditional economic activities and capability to provide food and income-generating activities (foraging, fishing, farming, handicrafts, etc) have worsened the position of women and their economic self-reliance. During fieldwork, women lamented to me: ‘Many of us now wait at home for our husbands to return from work. In our old village, we had a life based on the land.’ In some cases, men equally suffer when deprived of land and forests, since new gender roles as ‘household heads and providers’ and ‘bread-winners’ have been created for them. Some men found this economic responsibility too heavy and turned to alcohol, others left their families.

Women losing support networks and privacy

Many women, as well as elderly men, are further marginalised when community relations and extended family living break down. Family and community networks provide support systems for women and men involved in exchange labour in farming and other economic activities, through reciprocal labour-sharing, or gotong royong during peak agricultural seasons, borrowing of small amounts of foodstuff and other household items, and collective childcare services, to name a few examples. Women depend a great deal on such informal networks. My fieldwork findings confirmed that resettled houses provided are built small to fit nuclear families and the resettlement site usually isolated. The new setting disadvantages women because they lose their support network.

My fieldwork debunks many of the population notions and perceptions associated with large dams projects as modernisation models. Sustainable alternatives to dams are available, but there are many reasons why governments and dam builders are not pursuing them more seriously… a topic for future discussion.

Back to the floods in Germany: It seems that in Germany it is understood that in the times of global climate change, dams are not the most effective answer, as said in the tv programme. In fact, in several recent cases of flooding in Germany, dams have triggered faster and unpredictable rising water levels in densely populated areas. Unprecedented heavy rains and extensive flooding in several areas across Germany carry a message: the need to rethink about conventional flood control measures and seek more effective solutions.

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