- Threatening to inundate hundreds of square kilometers of forest and displace thousands of people on the island of Borneo, the Baram Dam spurred a principled response from a coalition whose members endured threats and harassment while undertaking brave actions like maintaining a 26-month road blockade.
- Ten years since Indigenous and local communities united with civil society organizations across the world to send that proposal down to a historic defeat, two leaders of one NGO that was key to the victory reflect on what helped the campaign succeed.
- “While the Baram victory cannot be automatically replicated — since each river, each community, each political configuration is its own — the structure of the campaign’s Indigenous-led physical resistance, rigorous independent science, and international solidarity infrastructure that amplifies without supplanting local leadership has been reactivated in varying forms and sites of victory across the world,” they write.
- This article is an analysis. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of Mongabay.
In October 2015, Indigenous activists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Brazil, the United States, and Honduras, together with delegates from longhouse communities throughout the Malaysian state of Sarawak, gathered at Tanjung Tepalit, an Indigenous Kenyah village on the Baram River on the island of Borneo.
They called the gathering WISER: the World Indigenous Summit on Environment and Rivers. Tanjung Tepalit hosted the gathering because the village, along with more than two dozen others along the river, was scheduled to be drowned. The Baram Dam, a 1,200-megawatt hydroelectric mega project backed by the Sarawak state government and aligned with a regional industrial development scheme called the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE), would have flooded an area of more than 400 square kilometers (more than 150 square miles) and displaced an estimated 20,000 Kenyah, Kayan, and Penan people.
Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, agnostics, and people who followed traditional Indigenous religions were among the attendees. As we gathered, Peter Kallang, the Kenyah founder and chair of the local advocacy group SAVE Rivers, addressed the assembly: “We are people of many faiths,” he said, “but we are united in one mission. To protect our forest homes and our ways of life.”
In one sense the WISER gathering was a strategy meeting to coordinate an international coalition against a state-corporate project. In another, and perhaps deeper sense, WISER was rooted in something older. It was an assertion that the values that hold communities to their land across generations — the sanctity of the forest, the duty to ancestors and descendants, the conviction that rivers are not merely resources — are deeply held values and time-proven survival strategies, and not to be casually swept aside in the name of development. These were, the gathering insisted, the foundation upon which any livable future would have to be built.
The problem
Hydropower mega dams have long been pitched to the developing world as engines of clean energy and prosperity, but the actual record tells a different story. Research by Atif Ansar and colleagues at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, drawing on a global data set of large dam projects, showed that mega dams, on average, run nearly twice over budget, take significantly longer to complete than promised, and, the vast majority of the time, harm the economies they were built to enhance. Mega dams tend to enrich politically connected contractors and timber concessionaires, who profit from the one-time clearance of inundation zones, while displaced communities are left landless and impoverished. A few profit, many suffer, and citizens have to pick up the bill.
Sarawak, under longtime Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, had become a textbook case of heedless mega-dam investment. The Bakun Dam, completed in 2011, displaced more than 10,000 people in a resettlement scheme at Sungai Asap that has been widely documented as a human rights failure. The Murum Dam, completed in 2014, repeated the pattern. By the early 2010s, the state had announced plans for as many as 12 more dams across the upper Rajang and Baram river systems. The Baram was next.
The response’s three pillars
The campaign against the Baram Dam was built on three interlocking foundations, and each was necessary for success.
The first was Indigenous-led physical resistance. In October 2013, communities along the Baram established blockades at two key access points on the road to the proposed dam site. Teams of villagers from the affected longhouses maintained these continuously for more than two years, even in the face of violent intimidation. James Nyurang, then headman of Tanjung Tepalit, was among the longhouse leaders who anchored the resistance.
The blockaders endured threats, harassment, and the slow grinding pressure of standing, year after year, in defense of their forest home. The duration alone — 26 months — offers a model for future struggles. Sometimes winning takes a long time.
Their bravery and steadfastness were rewarded: they stopped the dam, they were not displaced, and their forest is still standing. In stopping the Baram Dam, they also halted most of the other 12 planned dams. Theirs was a victory for their communities, for the forest, and for the world.
It was also a real-world confirmation of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s critique of the “tragedy of the commons.” The evidence clearly shows that the best protectors of rainforest are the Indigenous peoples who live in it. The destroyers are what Ostrom — following the themes of Mancur Olson’s scholarship — called “roving bandits,” those who extract fortunes from places they will never have to live in, and who never experience the consequences of what they destroy.
Independent science played another key role in the campaign. Dr. Rebekah Shirley, then a doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted detailed analyses of Sarawak’s energy alternatives. Her work showed that a portfolio of solar, wind, micro-hydro, and biomass — the last drawn from the abundant waste stream of Sarawak’s existing palm oil industry — could meet projected energy demand more cheaply, more reliably, and without flooding a single valley. She also documented what the Baram Dam would destroy: the biodiversity of one of the oldest continuously forested ecosystems on Earth, where dipterocarp canopies that have stood since before the extinction of the dinosaurs harbor species found nowhere else.
Shirley’s adviser, Dr. Daniel Kammen, a leading energy systems scientist who has advised governments worldwide, supported the research and, through what Kallang would later call a stroke of fortune, found himself in direct conversation with then-Sarawak Chief Minister Adenan Satem. In that exchange, Kammen was able to convey, scientist-to-head of state, that the existing Bakun Dam already produced more electricity than Sarawak was using. When measured by benefits to the country as a whole, then, there was no real economic case for the new dam.
Ansar’s Oxford economics scholarship provided further analysis by placing the Baram Dam in the global context, where mega dams usually harm the economies of the countries they are supposed to benefit. His work was featured prominently in a film series about mega dams produced by our organization, the Borneo Project, which were projected in longhouses throughout the Baram area during the campaign.
Seeing their fellow villagers taking a principled stand empowered people to demand environmental justice. The films were also circulated internationally to journalists, policymakers, and Indigenous communities facing similar threats. Ansar later commented that many academics feel their work doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, and that, sadly, much research that would be of great service gets buried — the ivory tower becomes the ivory crypt — but not so with the rigorous research Kammen and Shirley conducted on the Baram Dam.
Finally, the international solidarity infrastructure was key, including from us at the Borneo Project with only one full-time paid staff member at the time, serving as one connective node in a coalition that also included the Swiss-based Bruno Manser Fonds, SAVE Rivers in Sarawak, and the broader network of international NGOs and academic networks the campaign drew on. The coalition’s role was not to lead the resistance — that authority belonged to the longhouse communities themselves — but to amplify it, translating local testimony into international attention, financial pressure on potential dam financiers, scientific scrutiny, and sustained press coverage that made the political cost of proceeding higher than retreating.
Then, on July 30, 2015, Chief Minister Satem announced a moratorium on the Baram Dam, citing the need to “respect the views” of local communities and to explore alternative energy sources. In November 2015, the project was shelved indefinitely, and in March 2016 the gazettement for the Baram Dam was officially withdrawn. With the blockades no longer in use, land that had been scheduled for inundation was eventually returned to community control, and the legal and political work of consolidating those gains continues.
What Berta knew
Among those present at the WISER gathering was Berta Cáceres, the Indigenous Lenca leader from Honduras whose campaign against the Agua Zarca Dam on the Gualcarque River had made her one of the most threatened environmental defenders in the world. She told the gathering that many of her companions had been murdered, and that she lived in constant danger. She also told me, right on camera, that she knew the Baram campaign was going to win.
She knew, she said, because the river told her.
Five months later, in March 2016, Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in La Esperanza. The Goldman Environmental Prize, which she had received for her activism the year before, could not protect her. International attention did not protect her. What her killers understood, correctly, was that her powerful certainty was a danger to their profits. She was killed because she would not stop defending her forest home and her community’s way of life.
She was also right. The river did tell her. The Baram was saved.
The conviction that the natural world has a voice and that people who know how to listen can hear it is sometimes dismissed in policy circles as sentiment or folklore, but the Baram campaign shows that Indigenous values should be respected. The communities who win against extractive mega projects, again and again, are the ones whose relationship to their land tells a greater story that cannot be reduced to the language of resource economics. They are fighting for something the spreadsheets cannot price, and that turns out, in the long run, to be a strategic asset as well as a moral one.
What can be taken down
At the closing meeting of the WISER gathering in the city of Miri on the Sarawak coast, Sammy and Jon Luke Gensaw — Yurok brothers from Northern California and leaders of an Indigenous youth group called the Ancestral Guard — taught participants how to play a hand drum made from elk hide. They told a truly inspiring story relevant to Indigenous groups everywhere: not only that dams could be stopped before they were built, but that dams that had stood for generations could also be taken down.
In 2024, four dams on the Klamath River, which they had fought for 20 years to have removed, finally fell, in the largest dam removal in history. The river is once again running free to the sea, and salmon are returning to spawning grounds they have not reached for more than a century. The Klamath will never be as healthy as if the dams had not existed, but much can be restored.
The removal was a decades-long fight. Like the two years on the Baram blockade, it shows the power of endurance, of tenacity, and of refusing to relinquish hope.
A model for the movements coming next
The Sarawak government’s appetite for large hydropower has not disappeared, however. The Baleh mega dam is still under construction, though Sarawak already runs on excess energy supply, while the state advances proposals for cascading dams on five other river systems — projects that, by being broken into smaller pieces, are claimed to be less destructive than the Baram Dam. So, the fight against dams here is not over; it has just moved.
While the Baram victory cannot be automatically replicated — since each river, each community, each political configuration is its own — the structure of the campaign’s Indigenous-led physical resistance, rigorous independent science, and international solidarity infrastructure that amplifies without supplanting local leadership has been reactivated in varying forms and sites of victory across the world.
What the Baram Dam campaign suggests is that this convergence is not coincidence. The same form of knowledge — land-based, community-held, generationally tested, compatible with science but not reducible to it — is what allows coalitions like that one to defeat opponents with vastly greater resources.
It is what sustained a 26-month-long blockade, and is what Peter Kallang meant when he said, “We are united in one mission.” It is also what Berta Cáceres heard when she listened to the river.
The forests of Borneo have been growing for roughly 130 million years. They were ancient when the dinosaurs died. In just the last few decades, we have watched them disappear at a rate without precedent in human history. The Baram is one river saved from damming within that vast and ongoing loss.
It is not enough, but it is a model, and the model can be carried forward.
We can stop dams. We can also, as the Gensaw brothers said, take them down. We, the people of many faiths, can, when united, protect and preserve the living systems upon which we all depend.
When united, we can also restore.
Joe Lamb is founder of the Borneo Project and a writer, activist, and arborist living in Berkeley, California. Jessica Merriman is project & campaign coordinator at the Borneo Project and holds a master’s degree in international affairs from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.
See related coverage:
Indigenous communities in Sarawak left in the dark about hydropower proposal
In a big win, Yurok Nation reclaims vital creek and watershed to restore major salmon run
‘Heart of Borneo’ dams raze Indigenous forests for Indonesia green energy drive
Citations:
Ansar, A., Flyvbjerg, B., Budzier, A., & Lunn, D. (2014). Should we build more large dams? The actual costs of hydropower megaproject development. Energy Policy, 69, 43-56. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2013.10.069
Shirley, R. G., & Word, J. (2018). Rights, rivers and renewables: Lessons from hydropower conflict in Borneo on the role of cultural politics in energy planning for small island developing states. Utilities Policy, 55, 189-199. doi:10.1016/j.jup.2018.09.010
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