Suchergebnisse

The Mekong River, flowing 4909 KM through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Cambodia and Vietnam, is one of the greatest river systems in the world. It has great productivity and seasonal variation that provides rich biodiversity for over 60 million people living in the basin. The Mekong Basin is primarily rural, and the livelihood sources of the majority of people living in the basin are related to different kinds of use of natural resources, including fish, other aquatic life, plants, rapids, tributaries, streams and more. Additionally, many villagers believe in animism, the belief that all natural phenomena has a spirit, is associated with nature, both land and water. However, the value of these natural resources to people's livelihoods appears to be frequently underestimated. Over the past 15 years, a series of hydropower dams were constructed in China and several of them are being constructed and planned to be built in the Mekong mainstream. Hydropower dams pose a significant threat to the river's ecology and the ways of life of communities in the basin.

ABSTRACTSustained criticism in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in a decline of World Bank funding for large hydropower dams. The Bank subsequently participated in the World Commission on Dams process, which set higher global standards for hydropower dams. In 2005, the World Bank agreed to support the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project (NT2) in Laos, and in 2010 NT2 began diverting water from the Theun River into the Xe Bang Fai River. The World Bank has promoted NT2 as a successful model of poverty alleviation, justifying support for other large dams. Assessing actual impacts and associated mitigation and compensation is thus timely. This article presents qualitative field research from early 2014 about the downstream impacts of NT2 in the Xe Bang Fai River basin and a description and analysis of efforts to compensate for losses. The authors consider the situation with the assistance of baseline data collected in 2001, before project approval. Findings suggest that NT2 has had a significant negative impact, including on the livelihoods of large numbers of people dependent on the river's resources. Many of those impacted view compensation and mitigation efforts as having failed to adequately address their losses. Further independent investigation and documentation are needed.

Grassroots initiatives that aim to defend, protect, or restore rivers and riverine environments have proliferated around the world in the last three decades. Some of the most emblematic initiatives are anti-dam and anti-mining movements that have been framed, by and large, as civil society versus the state movements. In this article, we aim to bring nuance to such framings by analyzing broader and diverse river-commoning initiatives and the state–citizens relations that underlie them. To study these relations we build on notions of communality, grassroots scalar politics, rooted water collectives, and water justice movements, which we use to analyze several collective practices, initiatives, and movements that aim to protect rivers in Thailand, Spain, Ecuador, and Mozambique. The analysis of these cases shows the myriad ways in which river collectives engage with different manifestations of the state at multiple scales. As we show, while some collectives strategically remain unnoticed, others actively seek and create diverse spaces of engagement with like-minded citizen initiatives, supportive non-governmental organizations, and state actors. Through these relations, alliances are made and political space is sought to advance river commoning initiatives. This leads to a variety of context-specific multi-scalar state–citizens relations and river commoning processes in water governance arenas.