ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Calculating Loss: Expert Knowledge, Cultural Value, and the Politics of Resettlement in Swiss Hydropower Projects

• In Event: Engineering Frontiers: Water, Expertise, and the Social Costs of Hydraulic Modernization

English Abstract

This paper examines how scientific and technical experts in mid-twentieth-century Switzerland attempted to quantify and compensate for the losses caused by the construction of dams and the resettlement of villages. Although engineers, agronomists, architects, cultural engineers and legal specialists developed increasingly sophisticated tools to calculate the value of submerged houses and farmland, these technocratic practices frequently conflicted with local perceptions of place, community and continuity. Drawing on the publications and consultancy work of the Schweizerische Vereinigung für Innenkolonisation und Industrielle Landwirtschaft (SVIL), the paper examines how this influential organisation positioned itself at the intersection of state planning, agricultural modernisation and rural advocacy. SVIL specialists were often responsible for translating social and cultural connections – such as ties to a valley, hopes for a prosperous future in a new settlement, or the cohesion of long-standing village communities – into compensation schemes expressed in francs, hectares, and architectural plans. Their reports, formulas, and site evaluations reveal a sustained effort to make resettlement predictable and manageable. However, correspondence from village archives and negotiation protocols demonstrate that experts often encountered the limitations of quantification. Disputes arose when residents insisted that cultural identity, intergenerational security and the integrity of communal life could not simply be factored into cost–benefit tables. By analysing how SVIL experts grappled with these tensions, the paper sheds light on the broader limitations of technocratic authority in Swiss hydraulic development. It contends that the discrepancy between expert calculability and local realities was not a peripheral issue, but rather a fundamental fault line that shaped the politics of displacement in Switzerland.

Author

• Sebastian De Pretto, University of Berne