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Article Excerpt
An increasing number of river-based cooperation projects have emerged in mainland Southeast Asia since the conclusion of the Cambodian conflict in 1991. Three of these projects have attracted a great deal of international attention because of their impact on the economic development of the Mekong River region: the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the Quadripartite Economic Cooperation (QEC) or Golden Quadrangle. This paper analyses the extent to which these schemes are designed to produce a regional public good. Public goods are goods that are non-excludable, that is to say no one can be excluded from them. Further, they are non-rivalled, that is, consumption of the goods by one party does not reduce its availability to other parties. When these goods are spread across a given geographical area, they can be deemed regional public goods. (1) Part of the public good discussion includes the concept of participatory governance, which is supposed to ensure that the concerns of local communities are taken into account during political decision-making processes and therefore produce a public good through multi-stakeholder processes. (2) Participatory governance has become a prominent proposal for enhancing efficiency in natural resource management by involving all relevant stakeholders in managing a common resource such as a transboundary river. The overall aim is to avoid resource conflicts by managing resources in a sustainable way. (3)
Participatory governance is designed to prevent resource conflicts between user groups, thus creating a regional public good of equitable resource sharing while maintaining economic development. The central question is whether participatory governance leads to the avoidance of conflict and better resource management, and therefore the creation or maintenance of a regional public good. The inherent challenge is that different stakeholders may have different ideas about what the public good is or how it should be achieved: opinions may vary from poverty reduction (by which resources are subjected to fast-track economic development), to a focus on quality issues such as pollution control and hence resource protection, or quantity issues such as water allocation. This article will address the relevance of these concepts for the watershed management of the Mekong River by examining the three programmes mentioned above.
The Rationales for the Establishment of the Three Mekong River Programmes
The Mekong River Commission
The Mekong River Commission (MRC) was founded in 1995 as a successor to the moribund Mekong Committee, which had been created in 1957. (4) Membership of the MRC includes Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. The MRC is troubled by the diversity of expectations among the member countries.
Thailand is an upstream country and is primarily interested in irrigation of its arid northeast region in order to diversify economic development away from Bangkok. As a consequence, it is less interested in strict rules pertaining to dam construction on the Mekong and its tributaries, preferring instead a loose cooperative structure which would allow it to implement future diversion projects of the river's tributaries. Thailand is also in favour of Chinese dam construction upstream, as it plans to divert the additional water to be released from the Chinese reservoirs for irrigation without the need to build dams of its own. Laos is interested in the development of its hydropower resources and seeks to attract Thai, Chinese and Vietnamese investment to its hydropower sector. All three countries face severe energy shortages and import hydropower from Laos to mitigate the problem. Hydropower, therefore, represents an important source of revenue for Vientiane. The largest dam now under construction in Laos is the Nam Theun 2, jointly financed by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Vietnam is developing hydropower stations on the Sesan and Srepok rivers, both Mekong tributaries flowing from Vietnam to Cambodia, provoking anger from Phnom Penh and downstream fishing communities because of the resultant decline of fish catch and water flow. At the same time, Vietnam is critical of Chinese dams and holds them partly responsible for the increasing salinization of the Mekong delta, where roughly 50 per cent of Vietnam's annual rice crop is produced. (5) Cambodia is concerned about the well being of the Tonle Sap Lake and eyes with suspicion Chinese dam-building activities on the Chinese stretch of the Mekong. Milton Osborne emphasizes that Cambodian officials only express their concerns in private, and that Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen has resolved not to raise them up for fear of jeopardizing aid inflows from the People's Republic of China (PRC). (6)
The foundation of the MRC was a departure from the economic rationale of the Mekong Committee. While the latter had planned grand water construction schemes, the MRC in the first decade of its existence was more cautious. Particularly under its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Joern Kristensen, the MRC Secretariat focused on environmental protection and viewed the construction of dams for energy development and large-scale irrigation in a critical light. However, it should also be noted that Kristensen rejected the views of certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who argued against all developmental projects.
The introduction of the Western concept of sustainable development came at a time when countries in the region were just emerging from the Third Indochina War and were therefore focused on economic reconstruction. Since then, successive MRC CEOs have focused on different aspects of river management. The first CEO, appointed in September 1995, was Yasunobu Matoba, an engineer from the construction department of the Kanto Regional Agricultural Administration Office in Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. His successor, Joern Kristensen, focused primarily on environmental protection. While this made sense from the perspective of industrialized countries, it made less sense from the perspective of the riparian states, and disagreements ensued between the CEO and member countries. Olivier Cogels, who succeeded Kristensen and served as CEO from 2004 to 2007, was an expert on river modelling and shifted the focus of the MRC to water construction projects. The current CEO, Jeremy Bird, took office in April 2008. While Bird is sympathetic to NGO concerns, his focus is on increasing regional investment, particularly in the hydropower sector. In this way, Bird will continue the path established by Cogels who sought to shift the focus of the MRC from river protection to economic viability.
The absence of China, where the source of the Mekong River is located, is one of the MRC's main weaknesses. China is pursuing large-scale plans to dam its section of the Mekong, known as the Lancang, in Yunnan province. (7) This is a concern for downstream countries such as Cambodia and Vietnam. Beijing has tried to assuage these concerns by arguing that only 16 per cent of the overall Mekong flow comes from China, and that while Laos may be impacted, other downstream countries will not be affected. (8) Moreover, it is predicted that the Chinese reservoirs will help with dry season flows and lower wet season floods, a view that is contended by some analysts. (9)
China's absence from the MRC and its dam building activities along the upper reaches of the Mekong are not the only dangers facing the river. Thailand, Laos and Cambodia have also proposed dam construction along the Mekong mainstream, leading to opposition from environmental NGOs who have called on the three governments to abandon or at least modify their plans. Civil society activities in the Mekong region are particularly strong in Thailand and Cambodia, where NGOs have strong links to their international counterparts. (10) Conflicts within national governments are apparent as well, pitting for instance fisheries departments against those departments concerned with economic growth or energy security. The mainstream dams may also incite additional conflict between riparian states given the fact that they are already quarrelling over dams built on transboundary tributaries. (11)
The Greater Mekong Subregion
The GMS was a 1992 ADB initiative established to facilitate economic development and political rapprochement following the settlement of the Cambodian conflict. (12) In contrast to the MRC, the GMS is participated in by all riparian countries including the PRC. China's membership is at two levels: the central government level, and...
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