This paper considers the difficulties of enabling effective multiparty decision-making about water resources where the parties hold different moral attitudes toward nature and different interpretations of scientific knowledge.

Nothing characterizes the modern attitude toward water more than the extensive human efforts to control it: store it, restrict or redirect its flow, convert the flow to energy, apply it to agricultural production, or divert it to serve the needs of humans hundreds of miles from its natural flow. In the effort to control the flow and supply of water, humans have dammed half of the world’s rivers; 45,000 of these dams are over four stories tall. The lack of equity in the distribution of benefits from these efforts has led critics to question the value of dams in meeting water and energy development needs. In these debates both scientific discourse and moral arguments have been appropriated to justify as well as criticize the diversion of water from one area, people, or lifestyle to support another.

The key decisions about water and energy development are about how to rethink the management of freshwater resources. As the contemporary supply of water falls short of the demand for it, we have become increasingly concerned with who controls it, and the choices about the lives or ways of life it is harnessed to support. Recognizing that “wounds [are] torn open wherever and whenever far too few determine for far too many how best to develop or use water and energy resources,” the World Commission on Dams set out in its 2000 report, Dams and Development, a controversial new framework for multi-stakeholder decision-making. The challenges are: 1) identify all key stakeholders and provide procedures for negotiation and dialogue among diverse and unequal sets of stakeholders; 2) to recognize that stakeholders interpret science through different experience and different sets of values; and 3) to enable a process that encourages cooperation rather than competition in reconciling competing needs. This paper examines the process that led to the WCD report and the potential of new frameworks for future decision-making.