The water resources of the Mekong river catchment area, from China, through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos to Vietnam, are increasingly contested. Governments, companies and banks are driving new investment in roads, dams, diversions, irrigation schemes, navigation facilities, power plants and other emblems of conventional "development." Their plans and interventions pose multiple burdens and risks to the livelihoods of millions of people dependent on wetlands, floodplains, fisheries and aquatic resources.

This book, the first in a three-volume series, brings together the work of researchers, scholars, activists, and leaders in the Mekong region to provide a baseline, state-of-knowledge review of the contemporary politics and discourses of water use, sharing, and management, and their implications for local livelihoods.

The Mekong Region has come to represent many of the important water governance challenges faced more broadly by the mainland Southeast Asian region. This book focuses on the complex nature of water rights and social justice in the Mekong region. The chapters delve into the diverse social, political and cultural dynamics that shape the various realities and scales of water governance in the region, in an effort to bring to the forefront some of the local nuances required in the formulation of a larger vision of justice in water governance. It is hoped that this contextualized analysis will deepen our understanding of the potential of, and constraints, on water rights in the region, particularly in relation to the need to realize social justice. The authors show how vitally important it is that water governance is democratized to allow a more equitable sharing of water resources and counteract the pressures of economic growth that may pose risks to social welfare and environmental sustainability.

Transboundary rivers and lakes are often the remaining new sources of water that can be developed for human uses. These water sources were not used in the past because of the many complexities involved. Written and edited by the world’s leading water and legal experts, this unique and authoritative book analyses the magnitudes of the transboundary water problems in different parts of the world. It also examines difficulties and constraints faced to resolve these problems.

This book applies interactive perspectives, which have historically mainly been discussed in the context of Western European countries, to case studies on water governance in Asia. It examines how these perspectives can be used to reveal complex and dynamic interactions in water governance in Asia, and how interactions between policies and practices, as well as those between formal institutes and emerging informal institutes, come to pass. In two introductory chapters and seven case studies in Asia (two from China, and each one from Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India), the book reveals the interactive forms currently emerging in Asia under hierarchical but often fragmented administrative systems. In addition, it explores emerging hybrid forms of interactive governance, which bring together governmental and non-governmental actors, and discusses how the expected role of government and roles of non-governmental actors could be changed to solve problems in a more cooperative manner. In this context, researchers from outside the locality could play an important role, helping facilitate such forms of interactive governance. The book offers extensive information on the essential features of interactive forms, and on the role of such transdisciplinary approaches, making it a valuable resource not only for scholars and university students, but also for policymakers and grass-roots practitioners directly involved in the interactive process of water governance.

The Mekong Basin is home to some 70 million people, for whom this great river is a source of livelihoods, the basis for their ecosystems and a foundation of their economies. But the Mekong is also currently undergoing enormous social, economic, and ecological change of which hydropower development is a significant driver. This book provides a basin-wide analysis of political, socio-economic and environmental perspectives of hydropower development in the Mekong Basin. It includes chapters from China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Written by regional experts from some of the region's leading research institutions, the book provides an holistic analysis of the shifting socio-political contexts within which hydropower is framed, legitimised and executed. Drawing heavily on political ecologies and political economics to examine the economic, social, political and ecological drivers of hydropower, the book's basin wide approach illuminates how hydropower development, and its benefits and impacts, are linked multilaterally across the basin. The research in the book is derived from empirical research conducted from 2012-2013 as part of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food's Mekong programme.

This book examines the political economy that governs the management of international transboundary river basins in the developing world. These shared rivers are the setting for irrigation, hydropower and flood management projects as well as water transfer schemes. Often, these projects attempt to engineer the river basin with deep political, socio-economic and environmental implications. The politics of transboundary river basin management sheds light on the challenges concerning sustainable development, water allocation and utilization between sovereign states. Advancing conceptual thinking beyond simplistic analyses of river basins in conflict or cooperation, the author proposes a new analytical framework. The Transboundary Waters Interaction NexuS (TWINS) examines the coexistence of conflict and cooperation in riparian interaction. This framework highlights the importance of power relations between basin states that determine negotiation processes and institutions of water resources management. The analysis illustrates the way river basin management is framed by powerful elite decision-makers, combined with geopolitical factors and geographical imaginations. In addition, the book explains how national development strategies and water resources demands have a significant role in shaping the intensities of conflict and cooperation at the international level. The book draws on detailed case studies from the Ganges River basin in South Asia, the Orange–Senqu River basin in Southern Africa and the Mekong River basin in Southeast Asia, providing key insights on equity and power asymmetry applicable to other basins in the developing world.

Conventional wisdom says that the world is heading for a major water crisis. By 2050, global population will increase from 7 billion to a staggering 9.5 billion and the demands this will place on food and water systems will inevitably push river basins over the edge. The findings from this book present a different picture. While it is convenient to visualize an inevitable global water and food crisis in which increasing demands result in increasing poverty, food insecurity and conflict, the reality is far more nuanced and revolves around the politics of equitable and sustainable development of resources. The first part of this book provides detailed insight into conditions of water flows within nine river basins. In the second part, authors summarize and re-analyze the outcome of the nine basins, providing a coherent global picture of water, water productivity and development. They assess the impacts of variations of these attributes on development and approaches for poverty alleviation, and explore the institutional factors that support or obstruct change. How people will manage river systems while protecting vital ecosystem functions will make the difference between catastrophe and survival. As Prof Asit Biswas points out, "... the world is facing a water crisis not because of physical scarcity of water but because of poor management practices in nearly all countries of the world." The book is based on the four years (2006-2010) of extensive research into the state of ten of the world’s major river basins carried out under the CGIAR Challenge Program for Water and Food’s Basin Focal Project. This book was published as a special issue of Water International.

Water - and its governance - is becoming a global concern partly because it is turning into a goods in short supply, with devastating effects on literally billions of people, but also because it is the "carrier" of global warming; whether through irregular weather patterns or through flooding, water is how global warming will be 'felt'. The lion's share of the globally available fresh water resources is to be found in transboundary systems. In spite of its significance, the generated knowledge on how to deal with transboundary waters is weak and leaves policy makers with seemingly unavoidable, trade-off dilemmas and prioritizations, often with detrimental effects. In order to disentangle this predicament this volume works with one case: the Lower Mekong Basin and covers state-of-the-art academic and practitioners' knowledge and hence appeals to a wide audience. The topic this volume addresses is situated in the nexus of an IR- (International Relations) approach focussing on transboundary politics and its inclination to remain within the sphere of state sovereignty and national interest on the one hand, and Development studies, with its imperatives on participation, planning, and intervention, on the other. The dilemma, we argue, of better understanding transboundary water management lies in how to understand how these two rationalities can be simultaneously nurtured. Audience: This book will be relevant to scholars, as it provides cutting-edge research, and students, since it covers the primary debates in the field, interested in resource management, regional politics, and development issues in the area. It also addresses the global debate on transboundary water management and presents an in-depth case of one of the globally most sophisticated attempts at pursuing sustainable river basin management. Finally, practitioners and policymakers would benefit greatly because all contributions have explicit policy relevance, launching suggestion on improvements in water management.

This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of multi-level water governance, developing a conceptual and analytical framework that captures the complexity of real water governance systems while also introducing different approaches to comparative analysis. Applications illustrate how the ostensibly conflicting goals of deriving general principles and of taking context-specific factors into account can be reconciled. Specific emphasis is given to governance reform, adaptive and transformative capacity and multi-level societal learning. The sustainable management of global water resources is one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century. Many problems and barriers to improvement can be attributed to failures in governance rather than the resource base itself. At the same time our understanding of complex water governance systems largely remains limited and fragmented. The book offers an invaluable resource for all researchers working on water governance topics and for practitioners dealing with water governance challenges alike.