Hydraulic Dreams and Delusions: The Social, Political, and Environmental History of the Misicuni Dam Project, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1944–2015

This paper traces the long history of the Misicuni dam project that promised to provide water for irrigation, urban drinking water, and hydroelectricity to Bolivia’s Cochabamba Valley. First proposed in the 1940s, the project captured the popular imagination in the 1970s, when local civic groups organized a 1,000-person caravan to the proposed dam site that successfully pressured the national government to commission feasibility studies. Despite great popular expectations, project plans lingered on the shelves of the regional planning department for decades. While construction finally began in the late 1990s, corruption, technical problems, and conflict with peasants whose communities slated to be flooded have stalled the project repeatedly since. This paper argues that the project gained popularity, survived over the course of decades, and ultimately broke ground due to the demands and interests of a range of actors, including rural smallholding cultivators, popular and elite urban residents, local and national politicians, and international banking, engineering, construction, and consulting enterprises. My analysis of the history of this project suggests that rural and urban interests around urban hydraulic expansion are potentially compatible when ongoing processes of negotiation happen directly among water-using groups. Nevertheless, while not imposed from above, the project has exploited popular desires for a solution to water scarcity to enrich creditors, construction and supervisory firms, and politicians, and has already had formidable social and environmental consequences that will be exacerbated if the project is completed.