Mira Käkönen

Mekong Delta at the crossroads: more control or adaptation?

Abstract Development in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam has been very dynamic in the recent past, and currently it stands at an interesting crossroads. On one hand, agricultural production has developed successfully, and economic growth has been very rapid, but on the other hand, intensifying agriculture and large-scale water-control structures have challenged the environmental sustainability and social equity. The development plans have included a strong belief in the human mastery over the nature and waters of the Mekong Delta. In many cases, water resources planners have underestimated the complexity and integrated nature of the ecology and livelihoods of the Mekong Delta. This article examines cases where development efforts, while successful in some dimensions, have also contributed to create new risks for, especially, the poorest groups. The current situation calls for a more sustainable future route that would require examination of more adaptive measures in relation to the changing water flows of the Mekong River.

Rendering Climate Change Governable in the Least-Developed Countries: Policy Narratives and Expert Technologies in Cambodia

Global discourses on climate change have significantly shaped how climate change is viewed as a problem and issue to be governed. This article discusses the role of policy narratives and expertise in the rendering of climate change governable in the so-called least-developed countries (LDCs). The main arguments are illustrated with examples from Cambodia. There are 3 key findings. First, climate change policy narratives are an important product and driver of the shifting rationalities of government with respect to adaptation and mitigation. In the case of Cambodia, policy narratives of donors have dominated, but have also been co-opted by national government. Second, most responses to climate change are framed in technical terms that draw on expert knowledge, tools and technologies. In Cambodia, mitigation has been viewed through the currency of carbon credits, as in clean development mechanism projects, that downplay other ecosystems and values as well as the livelihood dimensions of intervention projects. Third, the combination of donor-driven policy narratives and expert technologies is potent: it strongly depoliticizes climate change as an issue rendering it more easily governable through existing bureaucratic planning processes and without challenging the current structures of political economy. In Cambodia, opportunities for meaningful public engagement in shaping national responses to climate change remain limited despite significant opportunities for complementarities with sustainable development policies and concerns with adverse impacts and trade-offs associated with large-scale projects.

Actors, Interests and Forces Shaping the Energyscape of the Mekong Region

The linkages between energy and development are numerous and complex. Energy has been on the agenda of development actors for decades, but the emphasis has changed over time. In the past, the decis...

The World Bank, Laos and Renewable Energy Revolution in the Making: Challenges in Alleviating Poverty and Mitigating Climate Change

The World Bank is among the most dominant actors in defining objectives for energy development. It has announced that it is committed to nothing less than a revolution in the rate and scale of investments in renewables. Renewable energy production is seen to create win–win situations, where both poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation targets can be met. Synergies within the energy–poverty–climate nexus are, however, not self-evident. This article analyzes, firstly, how the win-win policy narrative has emerged in the World Banks energy policy. Secondly, it assesses how the World Bank has responded to the twin challenge of poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation in its renewable energy projects. In recent years, the two main renewable energy forms the Bank has financed have been large-scale hydropower as an on-grid solution and solar home systems (SHS) as an off-grid solution. Laos is an illustrative case for these trends. There, the World Bank has on the one hand supported controversial large-scale hydropower development that is linked to regional power trade scheme in the Mekong region. On the other hand, it has also funded rural electrification projects that include an off-grid component implemented with SHS. The article discusses what these developments in Laos tell about the World Banks role in conducting a revolution in renewables. The research material consists of policy and project documents, expert interviews and village-level fieldwork.

Mekong at the Crossroads: Alternative Paths of Water Development and Impact Assessment

The Mekong Region in Southeast Asia is undergoing rapid transitions socially, economically, and environmentally. Water is related to these changes in a very profound manner, and the Mekong River and its tributaries are seeing increasing number of plans for water development, most notably in the form of large-scale hydropower. The impacts of this development vary among regional, national, and local levels and across different timescales, influencing societies, politics, and the environment in a variety of ways. While different impact assessment and water management frameworks – including Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) – have been used by actors at different levels in the basin, they have not been too successful in analyzing and communicating the various development paths and their differing impacts in all their complexity. This chapter discusses the water development pathways in the Mekong Basin, including their potential impacts and the different possibilities to assess them, as of early 2010. It is concluded that the water development and related management practices in the Mekong are at the crossroads methodologically and, even more importantly, politically.

The framing and governance of climate change adaptation projects in Lao PDR and Cambodia

This study explores the way climate change adaptation projects in Cambodia and Lao PDR have been framed. Four frames were identified: inadequate infrastructure; information deficits; limited planning capacity; and insecure access. In all frames, there was internal coherence among: the problems identified; the form solutions are expected to take; and who should be included and in what roles. All projects claimed to be addressing the needs of farmers vulnerable to climate change. The infrastructure, information, and capacity frames are apolitical and privilege expert knowledge, whereas the access frame places rights and justice issues centrally, and thus holds more potential for addressing the root causes of vulnerabilities and supporting more just distribution of resources and power. Framing can interact with how projects are governed, for example, through assigning roles to actors based on types of solutions prescribed. The extent and direction of frame elaboration also depend on how a project is governed. Meeting local needs and objectives, for example, is constrained when external actors have too much influence in project governing structures, and initial project plans written from afar are followed too narrowly. This study shows that frames are an important part of the governance of adaptation projects.

Overlapping zones of exclusion: carbon markets, corporate hydropower enclaves and timber extraction in Cambodia

ABSTRACT This contribution looks at the interplay of different logics of governing the environment, resources and people in Cambodia that materialise in overlapping zones of exclusion, thereby co-producing new relations of resource control in a complex frontier constellation: a frontier for water, forest and carbon commodities and also for state control. Focusing on three Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) hydropower dams, the paper analyses a partly unintentional, but significantly consequential coalescence of distinct spaces of governing located in the Cardamom Mountains: a forest conservation zone, the CDM technological zone, an enclaved corporate hydropower zone and a semi-official timber logging zone. While the CDM element has exposed the projects internationally, it has obscured several problematic aspects and dynamics of resource politics connected to the dams that are revealed in this paper. These include the vulnerabilisation of local fisher communities, incarceral labour practices on the dams’ construction sites and accelerated logging in the conservation zone. The paper also shows how the interaction of the studied zones takes place through their distinct mechanisms of exclusion with the effects of more centralised resource control and the bracketing of the associated dispossessions.