Big dams built for irrigation, power, water supply, and other purposes were among the most potent symbols of economic development for much of the twentieth century. Of late they have become a lightning rod for challenges to this vision of development as something planned by elites with scant regard for environmental and social consequences, especially for the populations that are displaced as their homelands are flooded. In this book, Sanjeev Khagram traces changes in our ideas of what constitutes appropriate development through the shifting transnational dynamics of big dam construction.

Khagram tells the story of a growing, but contentious, world society that features novel and increasingly efficacious norms of appropriate behavior in such areas as human rights and environmental protection. The transnational coalitions and networks led by nongovernmental groups that espouse such norms may seem weak in comparison with states, corporations, and such international agencies as the World Bank. Yet they became progressively more effective at altering the policies and practices of these historically more powerful actors and organizations from the 1970s on.

Khagram develops these claims in a detailed ethnographic account of the transnational struggles around the Narmada River Valley Dam Projects, a huge complex of thirty large and more than three thousand small dams. He offers further substantiation through a comparative historical analysis of the political economy of big dam projects in India, Brazil, South Africa, and China as well as by examining the changing behavior of international agencies and global companies. The author concludes with a discussion of the World Commission on Dams, an innovative attempt in the late 1990s to generate new norms among conflicting stakeholders.

We assess the factors affecting national administrative rationalization in the context of the current worldwide movement for governance reforms. Focusing on indicators of corruption control, the rule of law, bureaucratic effectiveness, and investment openness, we conduct cross-national and longitudinal analyses for the period 1985-2002. First, we find a modest overall expansion of rationalization in countries worldwide, with the most substantial changes occurring in developing countries and previously communist countries. Change is mostly on the specific indicator of investment openness. Second, we find that national change tends to reflect links with global society - expanded trade, the penetration of scientific logics, and embeddedness in world organizational activity play prominent roles. We conclude, then, that the rationalization of national governance, as with a good many other dimensions of modernization, is not simply or principally a consequence of endogenous national development or social complexity. Rather, it directly reflects international trade, and institutional linkages with wider rationalizing movements in the current context of a neoliberal world polity.

This volume centers on the movement toward global legal standards, an increasingly recognized dimension of the quest to improve the rule of law. Although the drive to make law uniform across disparate political jurisdictions has a rich and imposing history, the contemporary enterprise to enact and enforce standard legal norms and procedures in fields as diverse as the law of companies, financial regulation, labor, constitutional dimensions of trade disputes resolution, environment and criminal procedure is clearly a growth industry. On the surface, the primary question posed by explaining this push toward standardization is why standard setting is emerging as a more prominent mechanism through which legal uniformity is pursued. There are numerous traditional and contemporary modes of extending the law across polities, among which the recent trend toward standardization commands particular attention. But just below the surface lie two related questions posed by the multiple movements toward legal homogenization.

The rule of law is a concept much in use to identify what is missing in many countries. It is a widespread and frequently repeated truism that the world in general, and the developing world in particular, needs "the rule of law." Most people do not have a very precise idea of what they mean when they invoke the rule of law. The reference is rich in historical and doctrinal connotations and therefore suggestive of meaning that is, however, hard to pin down.