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Reports suggest that up to 80 million people have been resettled due to the construction of large dams in the past century. Published resettlement data regarding large dam projects comes from different sources, with numbers that can be greatly dispersed. We have examined resettlement data for 29 large dam projects gathering and analysing up to 43 datum per dam project in our sample. We find that dispersion is influenced by the project cycle (with resettlement figures from the planning and design phase found to be lowest), the stakeholders releasing it (with resettlement figures released by project advocates lower than those of project opponents), the political regime (with highest data dispersion found in hybrid regimes and limited dispersion found both in democratic and autocratic regimes) and with time of completion (with dispersion increasing for dams completed since 2010). Our findings thus present some suggestive evidence for the political perspective within the project management literature which emphasizes the contested nature of truth and knowledge. Overall, our study highlights that data in the dam industry and resettlement data must be treated with caution. Furthermore, it provides the starting point for the development of a tool that helps to de-bias resettlement data provided for large dam projects.

Academic research on dams' social impacts traditionally focuses on ex‐post resettlement impacts. We explore a specific subset of ex‐ante resettlement impacts in this paper: 'Damocles projects', whose implementation is still uncertain. Our case study is Thailand's Kaeng Suea Ten Dam whose implementation has been uncertain for 36 years. We find the cultural life of the communities studied has been significantly shaped by the looming construction of the dam. Furthermore, most villagers report extreme anxiety induced by the threat of the project. As a consequence, many have postponed private investments. The government has also withheld public infrastructure investments, further hampering the villages' economic development. Our research highlights the negative impacts induced by projects whose implementation is still uncertain.

Scholars overwhelmingly adopt the case study method when analyzing causal conditions inducing anti-dam-protests. We have carried out the first medium-N-study on this topic analyzing public opposition to 12 dam projects in Asia. For this purpose, we employ a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) which is based on a thorough review of scholarly writings and press reports on the dam projects at question as well as an online survey and semi-structured interviews. We identify two causal recipes sufficient for the emergence of significant anti-dam-protests. First, lacking social safeguards in combination with the presence of political opportunity structures and higher levels of development are sufficient for significant anti-dam-protests to emerge. Second, lacking social safeguards in combination with rampant corruption and environmental risk induce these protests. Current scholarly literature particuarly emphasizes political opportunity structures and development as causal conditions inducing significant protests. Our findings build on this literature to highlight the importance of project-specific conditions.

The social impacts of large dams have been studied extensively. However, small dams' social impacts have been largely neglected by the academic community. Our paper addresses this gap. We examine the social impacts of multiple small dams in one upstream and one downstream village in Thailand's Ing River basin. Our research is based on semi-structured interviews with beneficiaries, government and NGOs. We argue that small dams' social impacts are multi-faceted and unequal. The dams were perceived to reduce fish abundance and provide flood mitigation benefits. Furthermore, the dams enabled increased access to irrigation water for upstream farmers, who re-appropriated water via the dams at the expense of those downstream. The small dams thus engendered water allocation conflicts. Many scholars, practitioners and environmentalists argue that small dams are a benign alternative to large dams. However, the results of our research mandate caution regarding this claim.

Chinese dam developers claim to construct at least every second dam worldwide. However, scholarly literature comprehensively investigating the social safeguard norms in these projects is rare. This paper analyses social safeguard norms in Chinese-led dam projects in Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, hotspots of Chinese-led dam construction. We find that social safeguard norms adopted have significantly changed in the past 15 years. While Chinese dam developers claimed to adopt standards of the host countries upon the launch of China's Going Out Policy in 2001, with occasional adoption of more demanding Chinese standards, they did not adopt international norms. In recent years, however, they increasingly take into account international norms. We argue that the root cause for this change is social mobilization, with the suspension of the Myitsone Dam in 2011 as a particular game changer. Enhanced social safeguard legislation in host countries and China, stricter rules of Chinese funders and cooperation of Chinese dam developers with international players have also facilitated this change.

Road networks, on which governments around the world spend significant shares of their civil engineering budgets, are rightly considered the lifeline for modern and successful economies. While those have been transformed by numerous innovations and (especially digital) disruptions, both the process and materials used in building roads as well as their key parameters and functionalities have remained remarkably unchanged over the past years and decades. However, this seemingly natural continuity should definitely not lead to the assumption that there will be no major changes in the road construction industry in the future. It is already becoming apparent that four megatrends – autonomous driving, automated production, digitization, and advances in road construction materials – as well as a new process flow for road construction are bound to not only make the roads of the future look significantly different from those of today, but also make road construction much faster and cheaper. Our aspiration in publishing this white paper is to provide objective insights into the various aspects posed by the emerging revolution in the road construction industry, its implications, and the pressing question of how to prepare for the shake-up of the industry landscape. The ideas and information in this article are the result of many months of work by numerous experts from McKinsey & Company and Oxford Global Projects. This paper should offer the latest and most relevant know-how on the status of road construction in Europe, current challenges, and an assessment of the potential of novel technologies and processes.