In October 2015, Indigenous activists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Brazil, the United States, and Honduras gathered at Tanjung Tepalit, a Kenyah village on the Baram River in Borneo, to make a stand for their survival. They called it WISER—the World Indigenous Summit on Environment and Rivers—and they chose this place deliberately: Tanjung Tepalit and more than two dozen neighboring villages were scheduled to be drowned by the Baram Dam.
The proposed mega project would have flooded over 400 square kilometers of forest and displaced an estimated 20,000 Kenyah, Kayan, and Penan people. Backed by the Sarawak state government and aligned with a regional development scheme called the Sarawak Corridor of Renewable Energy (SCORE), the 1,200-megawatt hydroelectric dam represented the kind of massive infrastructure project that governments worldwide have sold as an engine of clean energy and prosperity. But ten years ago, something remarkable happened: Indigenous communities and their international allies sent that proposal down to historic defeat.
The victory emerged from a blueprint with three interlocking pillars. The first was Indigenous-led physical resistance. Starting 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 affected longhouses maintained these blockades continuously for more than two years, enduring violent intimidation and threats to hold the line. That 26-month road blockade became the visible spine of the campaign—a testament to what people will do to protect their homes.
The second pillar was rigorous independent science. Research by Atif Ansar and colleagues at Oxford's Saïd Business School, drawing on a global dataset of large dam projects, demolished the prosperity narrative. Mega dams, on average, run nearly twice over budget, take far longer to complete than promised, and in the vast majority of cases harm the economies they were built to enhance. Sarawak's own track record told the story: the Bakun Dam, completed in 2011, displaced more than 10,000 people in a resettlement scheme at Sungai Asap documented as a human rights failure. The Murum Dam, finished in 2014, repeated the pattern. The science was clear—these projects enriched politically connected contractors while leaving displaced communities landless and impoverished.
The third pillar was international solidarity infrastructure that amplified without replacing local leadership. The WISER gathering itself embodied this: Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals, Buddhists, agnostics, and people who followed traditional Indigenous religions stood united. As Peter Kallang, the Kenyah founder and chair of the local advocacy group SAVE Rivers, told the assembly: "We are people of many faiths, but we are united in one mission. To protect our forest homes and our ways of life."
Ten years later, as two leaders of a key NGO involved in the victory have reflected, this structure—Indigenous-led physical resistance, independent science, and amplifying international solidarity—has been reactivated in varying forms across the world. Each river, each community, each political configuration remains unique. But the blueprint forged on the Baram River endures as evidence that another path is possible when communities stand firm, facts matter, and the world listens.