Suchergebnisse

At the core of the Mekong region are the 320 million people who share a common culture and are nourished by the same great river. More connected than ever before, lives are changing as the meaning of community expands beyond borders. The photographs in My Mekong take us into the heart of that community, as seen through the eyes of its young people.

The article compares three cooperation projects in the Mekong River basin: the Greater Mekong Subregion, the Quadripartite Economic Cooperation initiative and the Mekong River Commission. It analyses the three projects by asking if and how they produce a regional public good. Part of the public good discussion is participatory governance, which, in natural resource management, has become a prominent proposal for enhancing the efficiency of resource management by involving all relevant stakeholders. The central question is whether participatory governance leads to the avoidance of conflict, better resource management, and thus the creation or maintenance of a regional public good. The article will address the relevance of these concepts for watershed management of the Mekong River. (Contemp Southeast Asia/GIGA)

This article assesses the effectiveness of the Mekong River Commission, its impact on the policies
of its members, Thailand, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Viet Nam, and their engagement with the
Commission. It also seeks to account for China's influence on their cooperation, as China, the
strongest upstream riparian state, is not a member of this cooperation scheme for the Mekong
River basin. This is achieved using a model for explaining regime effectiveness which rests on the
two main variables of problem malignancy and problem-solving capacity. Furthermore, the level
of engagement of the riparians is accounted for by mainly two geographical variables: position on
the river (upstream/downstream), and size of fraction of territory within the basin.

Examines regional development initiatives to develop the Mekong River basin; planning and development of water resources, infrastructural projects, sustainable development options, and other issues.

As the global market economy pushes into the former battlefields of Indochina, a long-contemplated plan to build a huge system of hydroelectric dams on the Mekong and its tributaries is once again being taken seriously. Western and Japanese businesses and aid agencies are working together with a UN-affiliated agency to draw up and implement the scheme. The Thai, Laotian, Kampuchean and Vietnamese villagers whose livelihoods would be undermined by the dams have not been consulted. (DSE)