ABSTRACT
This chapter utilises the WCD Knowledge Base to present a number of issues of strategic importance surrounding the social impacts of large dam projects, particularly those that underpin the growing worldwide opposition to dams by affected communities. The chapter begins with a brief overview of social impacts during the planning and project cycle, with an emphasis on the social costs and benefits, as well as the indirect economic benefits, that accompany dam projects and the services they provide. The impacts on people displaced from their homes and livelihoods, indigenous people's, downstream communities, gender, human health and cultural heritage are then explored at length. At the planning and design stage an important social impact is the delay between the decision to build a dam and the onset of construction. As with livelihood enhancement, the broader impacts of irrigation projects on rural and regional development were often not quantified.
