ABSTRACT
Although originally conceived as a purely national project, and constructed in the heart of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland to provide a functional reinforcement for the somewhat unsteady political structure of that experiment, Kariba owed some part of its existence to international legal institutions in the form of a substantial loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (hereafter referred to as the World Bank) 1 . The loan itself was made to the Federal Power Board, and guaranteed by the United Kingdom and the Federation. Since 1956 however, the Kariba project has moved further and further into the international legal sphere, as first the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was dissolved 2 at the end of December 1963, and later, on the 24th October 1964 Northern Rhodesia became the independent state of Zambia. Thus, the highly ambitious, and enormously expensive project, born within the framework of the municipal legal system of a single dependent State, under the overall direction and control of the United Kingdom, must needs be operated within the much less integrated system of international law, and against a political background (at least since the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by the former government of the colony of Southern Rhodesia), which makes functional cooperation between the two entities most directly concerned extremely difficult 3 . Before examining some of the problems raised by Kariba and the machinery created to deal with them, it is necessary to set out briefly what the project involves.
