Enerjisa meets social safeguards in dam project

By Metin Demirsar

Istanbul (Dunya) – A husband-wife team of international consultants has helped Turkey’s Enerjisa, one of the nation’s leading private investment companies in energy, to meet and exceed international social safeguards while building a dam in southern Turkey.

The 207 MW Kandil Dam Project is expected to be launched by the end of this year. Located in Kahramanmaras province, the euro 265 million dam project is part of the hydroelectric development of the Ceyhan River System and has a 14.5 square km reservoir.

Partially financed by borrowing, including a loan from the International Finance Corporation, a World Bank affiliate, the Kandil Project will meet the electricity demand of a city of 50,000 inhabitants.
Enerjisa is a joint venture between Turkey’s Sabanci Holding and Germany’s E.ON.
Consultants Jonathan C. Brown and Ayse Kudat were involved in the preparation and execution of the Kandil Project’s land acquisitions and resettlement plan, working closely with Enerjisa.

Ex-World Bank managers

Mr. Brown and Dr. Kudat are former World Bank managers specializing in the social impact of major international development projects, financed by the World Bank and other international lending institutions.
With 50 years of combined experience, the husband-wife team has worked on hundreds of projects around the world, including the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East.
The World Bank experience gave Mr. Brown and Dr. Kudat firsthand knowledge of many social plans that didn’t succeed and where affected people were left worse off, not better.
Mr. Brown is president of Social Risk Management LLC (SRM), a consultancy company based in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. Dr. Kudat, a Turk, is a social anthropologist and former academician.  
The independent social monitoring and evaluation for the Kandil Project was carried out by a team from SRM. The team did qualitative and quantitative surveys to monitor the process by which people affected by the project were resettled and restored their livelihood.
Simulations were carried out to foresee the outcome for the families involved.
The two consultants a produced a 128-page book on the Kandil Dam Project, ‘Promises Made Promises Kept,’ published by Karadeniz Kitap Ltd. of Istanbul.  Photojournalists Ara Guler and Benjamin Ward illustrated the book with their photography of the communities before and after resettlement.

Farmer families affected

“The impact of the dam on the people was relatively small: 113 homes where 141 farmer families lived were lost, and approximately 750 families lost a total of 344 hectares of land," Dr. Kudat said in an interview. “Still it was a most challenging project."

Dislocated peasant farmers and homeowners were compensated with hefty sums of money that allowed them to build palatial homes, which they rented out to engineers working on the dam project, and buy new land, she said.
Some families owned neither homes, nor land, and they were given free modern homes and employment during the project.

“Kandil was one of the best practice projects where the World Bank and its affiliates were involved," she stressed.
Dr. Kudat said that the social safeguards applied in the project surpassed international standards mainly because the sponsor of the project, Enerjisa, was committed in resolving the social challenges.
“Enerjisa pledged to provide housing to the homeless and vulnerable and compensate and restore the livelihoods to those who lost income from land-based assets. It has kept its promises," she explained.

Ilisu Dam project

She noted that many hydroelectric projects in Turkey, including the huge Ilisu Dam Project, in southeast Turkey, which she was also once involved in as a consultant, would fail to meet international social safeguard measures and would be environmentally harmful.

Work is continuing on the controversial 1,200 MW Ilisu Dam on the Tigris River, despite a massive Internet campaign by environmentalists against the project and withdrawal of some foreign state funding that had originally left the project in a lurch. A group of western banks, government agencies and contractors and suppliers for construction of the dam are providing financing of the $2.5 billion project.

Construction of the barrage began in fall 2006 after a five-year delay, caused by protests.
Environmentalists argue that up to 78,000 persons will be left homeless and that 80% of Hasankeyf, a picturesque ancient town, will come under waters.

Proponents of the dam say the benefits outweigh the sacrifices of displaced people and the environmental impacts downstream. Turkey is using only one-fourth of its hydroelectric resources and plans to build 450 dams in the next 25 to 50 years. The Ilisu Dam is slated for completion in 2014.