From Isolated Dams to Basin Governance Platforms: China’s Dam Reforms Suggest a New Model for Hydraulic Governance
Published 12 June, 2026
Dams have long served as critical infrastructure for flood control, water supply, irrigation, and hydropower generation, yet their global expansion has generated persistent dilemmas including reservoir sedimentation, ecological fragmentation, and governance gaps. Against this backdrop, in a new Perspective published in Water & Ecology, an international research team led by Shuguang Zhang from China Three Gorges Corporation reframes dams not as standalone hydraulic structures but as "basin governance platforms," drawing on China's experience with approximately 95,000 reservoirs to propose a three-layer framework for rethinking how dams are managed at basin scale.
The article identifies three interconnected pathways that underpin this platform paradigm. First, engineering safety functions as the baseline. The authors note that "safety is achieved as systematic resilience rather than concrete integrity alone," emphasizing innovations in dam materials, basin-scale water-sediment regulation, and nationwide reinforcement programs. China's experience with the Sanmenxia Reservoir, where rapid siltation forced emergency retrofits, demonstrates why site-level fixes must be coupled with watershed-scale sediment management. In the past five years, more than 18,000 reservoirs have been reinforced, monitoring has been upgraded across more than 51,000 small reservoirs, and no dam failures were reported from 2022 to 2024, helping establish a system-wide safety foundation.
Second, system operations constitute the core of the platform. The article highlights a shift from single-purpose approaches to multiobjective joint operations. Under this framework, ecological flow releases help translate ecosystem needs into operating rules that can be cooptimized with hydraulic safety, water supply reliability, and power system needs, the authors noted.
Along the Yangtze River, pulse releases now restore spawning cues for native fish species, while the Three Gorges navigation complex has transformed the upper river into a year-round freight artery exceeding 100 million tons annually. This operational layer embeds ecological state variables into the same decision space as hydraulic and energy targets, helping move dam management toward more coordinated basin-scale decision-making.
Third, digital-intelligent governance forms the frontier. The authors define this as "coupling auditable digital governance with AI-enabled, digital twin-based anticipatory decision support." Institutional reforms link resettlement with long-term compensation, while platforms like HydroBIM enable traceable quality control across megaproject lifecycles. Basin-scale digital twin architectures operationalize a "four pre" framework that includes forecast, early warning, rehearsal, and plan, converting hydrologic uncertainty into testable, preemptive action.
The article emphasizes that this three-layer logic, with safety as the baseline, operations as the core, and governance as the frontier, offers transferable principles rather than blueprints. Transferability depends on enabling conditions including basin-level coordinating authorities, transparent data stewardship, and legally binding ecological standards. The authors conclude that advancing this platform paradigm will require better sediment governance from headwaters to deltas, more coordinated cascade operations under changing power systems, and more transparent tools for managing risk under climate extremes.
Contact author:
Shuguang Zhang
-China Three Gorges Corporation, Wuhan 430010, China
Funder:
This study was supported by the Yangtze River Water Science Research Joint Fund of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U2340222) and the China Three Gorges Corporation Research Project (NBWL202200489).
Conflict of interest:
The authors declare the following financial interests which may be considered as potential competing interests: Yuyang Chen, Wei Li, Dianchang Wang, and Shuguang Zhang are currently employed by China Three Gorges Corporation. Dianchang Wang and Andreas N. Angelakis are editorial board members for Water & Ecology and were not involved in the editorial review or the decision to publish this article.