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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social development
Dr. Daniel Connell, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series
homepage can be accessed here.
Norris Dam, United States. The first dam
built by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Source: J. Stephen Conn
We are now accustomed to seeing large dams as highly contentious and their costs and
benefits being hotly debated. This essay attempts to create awareness of a time when they
were the source of great hope. The India Prime Minister Nehru described large dams as
temples of modernity, repositories of the spirit of a new age when it was possible to think
that the world’s problems could all be solved by harnessing the benefits of new technology.
Were those ideas simply wrong or are there things we can rescue from the past?
The Tennessee Valley Authority
The story of the Tennessee Valley Authority, established by United States President Franklin
Roosevelt in 1933, is one of high confidence on the part of governments that they could use
planning to harness the power and resources made available by a powerful river to
transform the lives of millions of people. The TVA was one of the most high profile products
of Roosevelt’s New Deal program which was developed to manage the impacts of the Great
Depression, one of the most devastating economic collapses of the twentieth century. The
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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Depression affected many nations and was particularly devastating in the south of the
United States. The catchment of the Tennessee River, which included parts of the states of
Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, was one
of the worst affected. It had been poor for a long time before the Depression. Poverty was
just one of a number of concerns for policy makers, however. Another was near monopoly
private ownership of the electrical power generation and distribution system that existed at
that time in the United States. Through creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority President
Roosevelt and the policy team developing the New Deal package hoped to deal with both
issues and transform this region of America.
The TVA built a network of major dams and management programs to achieve flood control,
generate hydropower and improve navigation by linking to the Ohio-Mississippi River
system which drains much of the central and southern United States. Associated with this
were ambitious rural electrification, agricultural and industrial development programs that
transformed the lives of millions of people in the seven states. The aim was to create a multi
resource management program that would not only transform this region but also serve as a
model that could be used elsewhere in the USA and, later, in the many parts of the world
which similarly had powerful rivers and large populations of poor people.
Dam construction crew, United States.
Source: Seattle Municipal Archives
The United States is usually thought of as the home of private capitalism but there are
surprising exceptions that force modification of that widespread view. One of the most
striking is that of electrical power generation. During the early twentieth century the use of
electrical power became widespread throughout the United States, but as it became more
important for the economy and in private homes many critics began to feel that the private
companies that supplied most of the power were exploiting their customers and negatively
affecting prospects for growth. During the 1930s support for the government ownership of
generating facilities and distribution networks became increasingly powerful. Political
battles about this this issue were fought in many parts of the United States and the TVA was
at the centre of the fight. Sixty years later in 2013 the TVA is an independent government
company that also operates a number of large coal and nuclear power stations in addition to
its hydropower stations, and is the largest provider of electrical power in the United States.
Before the creation of the TVA the region was one of the poorest in the United States. One
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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out of every three people in northern Alabama suffered from malaria. Tuberculosis and
typhoid were rife and infant mortality very high. Approximately 85% of the arable land in
the Tennessee Valley was eroded as a result of inefficient and destructive agricultural
practices. The proportion of people living on small farms was high and there were few large
towns. In the early 1930s, conditions were continuing to deteriorate under increased
pressure from the Depression. Many communities were trapped in a cycle of poverty which
led to low revenues for governments and consequently poor quality public services in
sectors such as education and health. Despite numerous attempts since the 1820s, the river
was also not navigable due to shoals, seasonal variations in flow and abrupt changes in
gradient. The most serious challenge was that of flooding. Advocates of the TVA project
argued that these problems could only be dealt with by large scale planning and
coordination on a level that only governments could undertake. The three goals of the
project are seemingly contradictory: flood control, which requires having empty dams to
retain inflows; hydropower generation, which needs full storages at times when power is in
demand; and navigation, which requires relatively stable river depths and a fairly steady
flow rate, as well as large scale channel maintenance. Massive investment in infrastructure,
detailed coordination at a regional scale and a strong focus on benefits in common rather
than profits for particular sections were needed to get a reasonable balance between the
competing objectives.
Portrait of Franklin Roosevelt.
Source: cliff1066™
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Key people
Many people were important in this story but two of the most significant were Gifford
Pinchot, who developed and popularized ideas about multi-resource development in the
early twentieth century, and Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected President in 1932 at the
height of the Depression when the country was experiencing extremely high levels of
unemployment and there was a widespread sense of despair. Pinchot, originally a forester
and a leader of the early conservation movement, thought of a river ‘as a unit from its
source to the sea’. Pinchot influenced Roosevelt’s thinking on many issues related to large
scale regional planning. In his view only governments, not large private companies, were
able to undertake major multi-use resource development projects such as the program to be
developed by the TVA in ways that would serve the public interest. President Roosevelt, who
has been described as a daring opportunist, saw the TVA as a project that he could use in
his campaign to transform the public mood and create a new sense of optimism for the
future.
Technological innovation
It would not have been possible to build the TVA system much earlier than the 1930s. The
engineering innovations in the fields of dam construction and electricity generation and
distribution upon which the TVA’s 29 large dams and hydropower plants depended were
only developed on a commercial scale in the early twentieth century. Another development
made possible by the new capacity to build big dams was large-scale irrigation, which now
in the early twenty first century supplies nearly a third of the world’s supplies of food. These
river harnessing technologies developed in parallel with other society-transforming
technologies, such as powered flight, radio, the telephone and the internal combustion
engine. Together they coincided with and helped fuel a great expansion in the capacity and
ambition of governments in Europe and North America. This expansion coincided with the
newly won right of most adults to vote in elections. In these conditions political leaders were
increasingly responsive to the needs of their voters, many of whom were still very materially
deprived and receptive to the opportunities that could be provided by large projects.
Irrigation based communities in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin
Political leaders were very aware of the potential of the new technologies. In the first half of
the twentieth century, schemes for large-scale community development based on the water
harnessing technologies of hydropower and irrigation were a high priority for governments
globally. An example was the irrigation development in south eastern Australia in the states
of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia along the River Murray and its tributaries
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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such as the Goulburn and the Murrumbidgee. A leading figure in the development of plans
to use irrigation to build communities in this region was the young Victorian liberal, Alfred
Deakin. A lawyer and journalist, he had the backing of a powerful newspaper, The Age, and
strong connections with the emerging labour movement. Deakin later became a leading
campaigner for federation and, after it was achieved, was three times prime minister of
Australia. In the 1880s, as a Victorian government cabinet minister, irrigation was the first
great cause of his career. Deakin and many other left-liberal public figures saw irrigation as
a technological innovation that would make it possible to populate inland Australia with
substantial towns based on irrigation along the inland rivers. The productivity of irrigated
land made denser settlement possible and this in turn would promote the civilizing
influences of urban living in rural regions. They also saw irrigation and laws to prevent
large holdings as a way to promote small independent farming and good citizenry (in
contrast to large properties with many workers which was seen as anti-democratic).
Community development programs were regarded as central government business and too
important to leave to random individuals or private companies motivated by profit. The
result, after substantial public investment, a number of false starts and considerable
cultural change in relation to the conduct of agriculture, was a long list of towns such as
Mildura, Renmark Griffith and many others which are now among the most economically
successful in rural Australia.
Hoover Dam, Colorado River, United
States. Source: L. Richard Martin, Jr.
Hydropower and irrigation in the south west United States
The head of the government agency responsible for implementing the irrigation based
community development program in Victoria during the period leading up to the First World
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War was an American engineer named Elwood Mead. Later the head of the United States
Bureau of Reclamation (the federal government body responsible for water infrastructure
development in the western part of the country), he was particularly interested in
settlement programs. (Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam is named after him.) In its early
years – but not later – the Bureau promoted small-scale irrigation-based farming across the
south-west of the United States. Mead was a member of an elite group of international
engineers who worked and campaigned to propagate a world-wide mission building dams
and establishing settlement programs. The most outstanding achievement of the Bureau of
Reclamation in the 1930s with Mead in charge was the building of the Hoover Dam to
supply water for irrigation and hydro-power across the south-west states, since then one of
the fastest growing regions in the United States. (Actual construction using radical new
techniques was undertaken by a consortium of private companies that subsequently
dominated the world dam building industry for many years.)
Achievements of the TVA
On the other side of the country Mead’s peers worked with the same confidence and similar
ideas to use water infrastructure to transform the Tennessee Valley. Building proceeded at
an extraordinary pace, eventually resulting in an integrated system of river management
and power generation based on 29 large dams. Although the TVA employed a large work
force it also promoted decentralised power delivery by encouraging the development of a
network of lower level organisations and working through rural cooperatives. Electrification
of rural areas, supplying ‘power too cheap to measure’ to all inhabitants of this once
deprived region, was complete by the 1950s. This in turn attracted new industries. In
parallel were forestry and agricultural development programs promoting conservation
forestry and better farming techniques. By 1943 there were some 15,000 demonstration
farms using highly effective extension techniques promoting terracing, contour farming and
strip cropping. This was accompanied by a major program of educational investment in
schools and libraries. (Despite its successes, however, its critics within the United States
concerned about its ‘socialistic’ aspects, impacts on commercial interests and threats to
local politicians, prevented it being replicated in regions such as the Columbia River Basin
in the country’s north east.)
TVA as the model for foreign aid projects
Although there had been some forced displacement of people through the dam building
program, the changes in the Tennessee Valley had been predominantly achieved through
voluntary arrangements. The TVA’s champions, in particular one of its directors David
Lilienthal, promoted its achievements as an outstanding example of democratic social and
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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economic development. In the Cold War environment that developed in the 1950s it was
widely trumpeted as the United States’ answer to the coercive development model offered
by the Soviet Union and China. Coming out of the Second World War there was a high
degree of optimism about the capacity of governments to achieve complex objectives
through detailed planning. At the outset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the late
1940s the TVA model was seen as the blue print for large scale aid programs that would
reduce poverty in regions that were strategically important to the United States and cause
their populations to support its goals and not those of its communist opponents. United
States aid planners took the model to a number of regions with varying degrees of
commitment but the most well-resourced effort was in the Mekong Basin, where in the
1950s and 1960s it was presented as the aid package that was to work in parallel with the
military investment in the war in Vietnam and its neighbours Cambodia and Laos. Through
the thirty or forty years following the Second World War there were many of these large
comprehensive development programs in Africa, Asia and elsewhere funded either directly
by aid donor governments or through organisations such as the World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank. Most had very mixed or little success. Why was the success rate so
poor? Why did western aid donors keep investing in the large-scale multi-faceted aid project
model despite the repeated failures?
Looking from the perspective of the early twenty first century, large community
development schemes are no longer in favour, either in countries like Australia and the
United States or in developing countries where there is large aid investment. Trying to
explain why is difficult and the opinions below are put forward more to provoke discussion
and responses than as confident explanations. In early twentieth century Australia and the
United States it seems that people had fewer options in terms of life choices and were more
accepting of social discipline. (Applicants to join the government sponsored irrigation
settlements in south-east Australia with the hope of earning an irrigation block, for example,
lived under almost para-military conditions with their lives controlled by officials in ways
that are almost unthinkable today.) In those times a high proportion of men had spent time
in armies often as conscripts, there were more people in churches and unions, fewer
divorces, more respect for employers and social superiors. Educational levels have since
risen and the greater diversity of options has broken down traditional hierarchies. (Social,
economic and political disparities still exist and may be greater than before but they are
more diverse.) In Australia and in the United States projects such as the big irrigation
schemes established in inland Australia and the TVA itself would not now be socially or
politically possible.
Arguably, other factors are also at play in the so-called developing countries which are the
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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recipients of aid. It is doubtful if those large multi-faceted development schemes ever
worked very well in that context. For a start the level of investment in terms of effort, time
and funds has not been remotely on the scale of that in the major schemes in Australia and
the United States discussed earlier in this essay. There have also been great cultural and
political differences between aid donors, with their very prescriptive projects, and the
people who ‘receive’ them. In practice goals and values are shared to a very low degree, a
gulf not helped by the fact that the donors are not linked to the recipients in the many ways
in which elected governments are linked to their voters in Australia and the United States.
Perspectives on aid projects have also changed. Now there is emphasis on more direct
poverty reduction and less faith in the transformative effect of big projects. Big Dams have
also come under particular scrutiny because of their displacement of people and disruptive
environmental impacts.
These comments are precursors to questions such as:
What should be the connection between large infrastructure projects (such as those
involved in river management) and social and economic planning?
What should be the role and expectations of external aid donors that invest in such
projects in so-called developing countries?
How should such external aid donors attempt to perform those roles and meet those
expectations?
Further reading:
1. Miller, B. A. and R. B. Reidinger (1998), ‘Comprehensive River Development – Tennessee
Valley Authority’, World Bank Technical Paper No. 416, available
at: http://water.worldbank.org/publications/comprehensive-river-basin-development-tenness
ee-valley-authority
2. Connell, D. (2007), Water politics in the Murray Darling Basin: Federation Press,
available
here: http://www.globalwaterforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Connell_Water-Politicsin-Murray-Darling-Basin.pdf
This article is part of an 11-part series titled ‘International Water Politics’. The series
homepage can be accessed here.
The views expressed in this article and the associated discussion forum belong to the
individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO
Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian
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The Tennessee Valley Authority: Catchment planning for social
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National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please
see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.
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