Tajikistan’s Controversial Roghun Dam 'Too Big to Fail'

When it comes to energy bets, Tajikistan is all-in on hydropower. Having spent much of the last decade and several billion dollars building the Roghun "megadam," the project is clearly too big to fail from the point of view of Tajikistan's leadership. But amid spiraling costs and long-standing questions about the environmental and human impacts, its critics contend that Roghun is also too big to be sustainable.

Tajikistan is not alone in eying Roghun's potential 3,600 megawatts of installed capacity. While millions of Tajiks continue to live without…