Hydropolitics in the Mekong Region

The Mekong Region is home to some of the world’s greatest rivers. Hydropolitics in the Mekong Region assembles the most recent thinking around the region’s political rivers, their governance, and their future. It offers a critical analysis of how this transformation is unfolding across the region — not as an unfortunate byproduct of progress, but as the deliberate outcome of power relations operating across multiple political scales, from the regional geopolitical, the national and the local.

Drawing on political ecology and critical hydro-sociology, this volume demonstrates how hydropolitical processes perpetually reconstituted the world’s greatest rivers, pattern political spaces, predetermine which narratives prevail, and preordain whose realities count.

The volume reveals the current deadlock in environmental governance, rooted in unequal power relations between the state and society. It illustrates how regional power relations diminish these rivers to artefacts in the region’s developmentalist zeal, shaping what flows and what is blocked, and who benefits and who bears costs. Spanning empirical cases from China's Yunnan Province to Vietnam's Mekong Delta, from Myanmar's Salween to Cambodia's Tonle Sap, the chapters examine how 'hydrocorruption' drives Lao dam-building; how state capture shapes Tonle Sap fisheries governance; how sediment has only recently entered regional discourse despite its profound ecological significance; and how Karen communities construct territories of life through the Salween Peace Park. Throughout, the volume traces how regional institutions like the Mekong River Commission have been simultaneously conserved and dissolved — maintained in form while emptied of regulatory content.

By revealing how hydropolitical assemblages are produced and operate across the region, by attending to whose voices are amplified and whose silenced, Hydropolitics in the Mekong provides essential reading for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand — and challenge — the politics of water in mainland Southeast Asia.

Kim Geheb is a geographer and Senior Researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research-The World Agroforestry Center. His research interests focus on the political ecologies, and the management and governance of natural resources systems. He is based in Nairobi, Kenya.