A Politics of Mobility and B/ordering in a Changing Riverscape in Cambodia

Abstract

Hydropower development taking place on the Mekong River's mainstream and tributaries across the river basin, including Cambodia, is threatening livelihoods and food security by altering critical mobilities associated with the unique ecosystems of the Mekong River. In this paper, we seek to understand how a politics of mobility around hydropower development links both human and nonhuman entities along the Mekong River in Cambodia. We examine how dams transform myriad localized cross-border and riparian political geographies of the physical-human landscape through partial enclosures, up-downstream reorderings and b/orderings of hydrosocial relations. To explain these transformations, we posit that it is necessary to pay attention to the politics of human and nonhuman (such as water, sediment, and fish) mobilities that are shaped by hydropower dams and the new forms of mobilities engendered as a result. We examine how hydropower development renders water, fish, and sediment immobile, or alters their routes and rhythms in ways that optimize the generation of hydropower but which create new concerns around these changing nonhuman mobilities for riparian communities in Cambodia. There is a tension that exists between technical representations and community experiences of these nonhuman mobilities, which raise implications for the exacerbation of vulnerabilities among Cambodian Mekong communities. In this paper, we focus our analysis on selected sites in Cambodia: 1) Stung Treng Province, downstream of Laos' Don Sahong Dam and the Cambodia-Lao border riverscape, and 2) the Tonle Sap Lake (water-based and floodplain areas), to highlight these changing mobilities and the critical processes of b/ordering.