Reframing Dams as Basin Governance Platforms: Engineering Safety, System Operations, and Digital-Intelligent Governance in China

Dams are central to securing flood protection, water supply, irrigation, hydropower, navigation, and ecological functions. However, their global record reveals persistent dilemmas, including reservoir sedimentation, ecological fragmentation, and governance gaps. Hydropower still provides approximately 14.3% of the global electricity supply, but dam expansions in erosion-prone, biodiversity-rich basins underscore the unresolved risks of sedimentation, structural stress, single-purpose approaches, and social contestation. Chinese dams epitomize both the severity of these challenges and their possibilities for reform. Spanning approximately 95 000 reservoirs, updates to China’s hydraulic infrastructure have promoted systemic advances in three pathways: engineering safety through innovating dam materials and types, basin-scale water-sediment regulation, and nationwide reinforcement; system operations through ecological flow releases, river-lake reconnection, and multiobjective joint operations; and digital-intelligent governance through institutional reforms, project-level digitalization, and digital twin-based anticipatory management. Here, digital-intelligent governance refers to coupling auditable digital governance with AI-enabled, digital twin-based anticipatory decision support. Thus, these three pathways reimagine dams not as isolated structures but as basin governance platforms. This platform model (i.e., safety as baseline, system operations as core, governance as frontier) offers transferable principles for the governance of other countries’ hydraulic infrastructure when their enabling legal, institutional, financial, and data conditions are met. • Dams are reimagined not as isolated structures but as basin governance platforms to address reservoir sedimentation, ecological fragmentation, and governance gaps. • Engineering safety is positioned as the baseline, advanced by innovating dam materials and types, basin-scale water-sediment regulation, and nationwide reinforcement. • System operations form the core, enabled by ecological flow releases, river-lake reconnection, and multiobjective joint operations across the basin. • Digital-intelligent governance, as the frontier, advances through institutional reforms, project-level digitalization, and digital twin-based anticipatory management. • The baseline-core-frontier platform model offers transferable principles for other countries’ hydraulic infrastructure when enabling legal, institutional, financial, and data conditions are met.