Hydropolitics in the Mekong Region

Mainland Southeast Asia's great river systems sustain the world's largest inland fishery and provide food security for over 60 million people. Yet these extraordinary systems are being fundamentally transformed by hydropower development, with consequences that will reverberate for generations. Hydropolitics in the Mekong 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 scales.
Drawing on political ecology, hydrosocial theory, and critical work on development narratives, this volume demonstrates that the rivers of mainland Southeast Asia are being perpetually reconstituted through hydropolitical processes that pattern space, determining what flows and what is blocked, who benefits and who bears costs. The contributors show how narratives do not merely describe these transformations but constitute the very spaces within which they proceed. Terms like 'sustainable hydropower,' 'win-win cooperation,' and 'the Battery of Southeast Asia' function as nirvana concepts — future-oriented promises that cannot be falsified in the present, directing attention toward luminous horizons while costs accumulate unremarked.
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 provincial interests complicate narratives of Chinese state hegemony; how 'hydrocorruption' drives Lao dam-building regardless of economic rationale; 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 are constructing alternative 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.