Philip Hirsch

Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices: The Asian Development Bank and Rescaled Politics of Environment in the Mekong Region

Globalisation is manifested in the Mekong Region both through processes and discourses that reflect the ideology of a borderless world allowing easy passage of capital and commodities, and through resistance to such processes in an increasingly transnationalised civil society movement. However, more immediately significant supranational integrative agendas take the form of regionalisation, a process that has received less attention but which raises analogous concerns of re-scaled governance. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has been a catalysing force for regionalisation amidst a host of regional processes and initiatives; as such it has found itself the object of critique as an institution and through the specific projects it has supported that have impacted on local communities and ecosystems. Meanwhile, local and NGO voices associated with the emergence of a vibrant civil society in Thailand and nascent civil society responses in neighbouring countries have challenged claims on resources made in the name of national development and regional integration. This paper considers some key issues of re-scaling resource and environmental politics in the Mekong Region, and the extent to which challenges have been recast from national to regional development agendas. Politics of environment are shown to exist as a general rather than exceptional response to the region’s development direction, and it is suggested that equitable and sustainable development increasingly needs to address simultaneously the re-scaling and reconfigurations of power in both environmental politics and the “infrapolitics” of environment. The paper is illustrated with case studies of dams in Laos and Thailand.

Water Governance Reform and Catchment Management in the Mekong Region

This article investigates complexities and dynamics of water governance reforms at a number of levels in the Mekong Region. It looks comparatively at countries within the region and at the Mekong as a transboundary basin. The study takes catchment management processes as a focus for reform agendas related to water and relates water management in a river basin context to wider issues of governance reform. A central argument is that the effectiveness of water governance cannot be assessed in terms of simple environmental, economic, or social outcomes, or even against a more comprehensive “triple bottom line.” Governance agendas and definitions are too diverse, and stakeholder interests too complex, to come up with a straightforward “best practice” of catchment-oriented water governance toward which policy reform should aspire. Rather, catchment governance in the Mekong is an arena for negotiating more sustainable, equitable, and productive use and management of water at multiple scales.

Common property as enclosure: A case study of a backswamp in southern Laos

ABSTRACT In this study we examine the enclosure of a common pool resource and ways in which a changed property rights regime has been legitimized by reference to the common property arrangements inherent therein. Legitimizing discourses of common property are situated in the wider discursive context of postsocialist development, territorialization, and community benefits. The resource in question is a backswamp 1 in southern Laos that has traditionally been fished by 17 villages, but which since 1997 has been claimed exclusively by one village. Multiple contexts for this altered property regime include an experimental fish stocking program, a nationwide land and forest allocation program, a development approach that seeks to simplify property regimes, and traditional management and belief systems that have adapted to new circumstances. The exclusion process has resulted in relatively little conflict, in part due to the legitimizing role of common-property regimes in incremental microprocesses of enclosure.

Can SIA empower communities

Public participation in social impact assessment (SIA) has been identified as a source of improved decision-making about resource development in several countries, with an implicit assumption that this sort of participation provides an avenue for empowerment of affected communities in these decision-making processes. This paper provides a critical discussion of the effectiveness of SIA as a means of local empowerment through case studies of resource projects in Australia, Canada, and Southeast Asia.

Real and Virtual Experiential Learning on the Mekong: Field Schools, e-Sims and Cultural Challenge

This paper describes two innovative and linked approaches to teaching and student learning in the environmental and development geography of the Mekong region, a region remote from students’ normal experiential options. The first approach is field-based learning through Field Schools carried out in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The second approach is a structured role-playing web-based simulation exercise (e-Sim) on Mekong Basin environmental management challenges. This paper discusses the complementarities of these approaches and considers the degree to which these two experiential approaches to teaching and learning have contributed to key competences, namely cross-cultural communication and understanding, multi-disciplinary approaches to environment and development, and regional knowledge of Southeast Asia.

Flexible Networking in Research Capacity Building at the National University of Laos: Lessons for North-South Collaboration

ABSTRACT This paper describes a research-training project for building social science research capacity at the National University of Laos (NUOL),supported by IDRC. At the international level, the project was structured as a flexible network of resource persons from six countries. The main successes of the project turned out to be unanticipated: the project offered significant insights to NUOLs ongoing assessment of its administrative capacity to manage university-based research. The flexibility of the network approach, combined with a structure that oriented the international network toward engaging with, and responding to, needs articulated by NUOL staff proved crucial to the projects ability to respond to changing institutional needs in NUOL. The importance of paying careful attention to how projects can be structured so that they are responsive to Southern needs has been heightened by intensified pressure in Canadian universities to generate funds, while promoting excellence in research and training takes a backseat.

Implications of economic reform in Vietnam: agrarian and environmental change in Hien Luong

Abstract Economic reform in Vietnam has been pervasive. To date, there have been few studies of the wider implications of reform outside urban and lowland agricultural areas. This study of agrarian and environmental change in a mountainous commune in north‐western Vietnam shows some of the consequences of the transitional economy for more peripheral communities and ecosystems. The study focuses on some key aspects of change, notably large scale infrastructure development, decollectivisation and the emergence of a market economy. It also investigates recent initiatives such as forest land allocation and small‐scale irrigation development within a more decentralised administrative and economic framework.

IWRM as a Participatory Governance Framework for the Mekong River Basin

Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been widely adopted as an over-arching framework for managing river basins. However, tensions are inherent in IWRM between top-down and bottom-up approaches to management. In seeking to move away from fragmented toward more integrative approaches to bio-regional natural resource management at the level of the river basin, IWRM initiatives also tend to centralise. Yet a participatory ideal, or at least rhetoric, is seen in “stakeholder-based” and other more inclusive approaches to basin management. In the Mekong, these approaches are seen in the Mekong River Commission’s basin development stakeholder processes, subarea-based planning, and the establishment of river basin organisations. These are essentially top-down driven approaches to participation. On the other hand, some regional NGO initiatives, broad coalitions such as “Save the Mekong”, community-based networks such as the 3SPN network in Cambodia, and decentralised irrigation management in its various forms, apply participation from the ground up and often seek to challenge projects that result from immense pressures for development of the river and its tributaries for hydropower. We need to move our understanding of IWRM in river basin governance away from a technical, “best practice” approach, toward recognition of its inherently political nature and its embeddedness in cultural practices at various levels.

Settlement and resettlement on marginal land: a case study from Thailand

SUMMARY Spontaneous land settlement has received less attention than planned schemes, and state policy on spontaneously cleared land is likewise neglected. A case study of a Thai resettlement scheme on land settled spontaneously illustrates the wider concern of heightened competition for marginal land. State policy and practice as revealed in the Tab Salao case shows the state as one of a number of actors in the local political economy of resource competition. The main resource in question is marginal land. Ambiguous tenure underlies the immediate problem of resettlement, but it also reflects the problematic role of the state as arbiter and manager of resources hitherto under vernacular forms of tenure.

River Hardware and Software: Perspectives on National Interest and Water Governance in the Mekong River Basin

At a global level, river basin development and management has shifted from a ‘hardware’-driven approach based around engineering river systems in the form of dams, diversions and other large structures, toward a ‘software’-driven approach under the broad rubrics of governance and integrated water resource management. Nevertheless, large-scale water resource development is still being pushed ahead. There is clearly not an ‘either/or’ scenario in terms of hardware and software approaches to river management. This chapter examines the implications of new approaches to river basin governance for the planning and implementation of river engineering structures in a transboundary river setting. The context for the study is the Mekong river basin. The Mekong has achieved prominence among the world’s more than 260 river basins that cross national boundaries, as a river and a basin that is actively managed across borders. One of the reasons for such prominence is the established institutional basis for cooperation among the four lower countries of the basin and the international support for this governance framework. Another is the longstanding and continuing plans for significant impoundment and diversion of the river and its tributaries. At present, the Mekong is moving toward something of a crisis of transboundary water governance. The Mekong River Commission (MRC) is at the heart of this crisis. At one level, the conundrum is the tension between management of the river for ecological sustainability and social justice, on the one hand, and the drive for development of a relatively under-exploited set of water resources on the other. This tension is exaggerated in a river basin whose population remains economically poor and heavily dependent on the natural resource base for livelihood. At another level, the conundrum is one of scale of governance, and this poses both challenges and opportunities for the MRC as an integrated water resource management agency.