He Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development.

Abstract

The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach River Basin Development. By Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul and Natalia Scurrah. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Softcover: 251pp. This book is impressive assemblage of scholarship by four professors of and one researcher in human and environmental geography--all based at Australian universities. In eight chapters that bear no single author identification, the book presents the and hydropower development a socio-legal lens and legal pluralism that encompasses both formal or law as well as more informal law. The former includes executive decrees, legislation and action that can be enforced, and especially international governing investment designed reduce political and financial risk foreign capital. The latter ranges from customary rights water, fisheries and forest land, Environment Impact Assessments (EIAs) that lack objective criteria for decision making such as the formally agreed but unenforceable rules including the River Commission's (MRC) Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA) for proposed mainstream dams. The purpose of the book is not explore solutions conflicting local, national and transboundary interests, differing concepts of the objectives of development and the vastly uneven power of stakeholders but to assemble a nuanced account of how laws and institutions at different levels operate and shape water governance outcomes, claims and expectations in the Mekong (p. 35). Some fifty-three joint field interviews conducted in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam inform the range of understandings and expectations of that different actors hold in relation transboundary water governance in the Mekong, and the various factors (historical and contemporary, institutional, regulatory and careerist) by which those understandings and expectations have been shaped (p. 35). The book seeks particularly dispel two prevailing notions: first, the idea that better management of the river basin only awaits the messianic coming of (hard) law which it refutes by presenting an account of the basin as legally saturated, with arguments in regard hydropower in particular shown be, already highly juridified in various (p. 60) and, second, that various policy reform models should be recognized for their political significance and their negotiability, and navigated tactically through socio-legal inquiry and mobilizing a plural understanding of law (p. 60). The authors provide important historical background into how water development and water conflict have evolved in the Lower Basin (LMB) and the varied ways in which both hard and soft have played roles. The book will be of interest anyone concerned about the future of the Mekong, but the focus is on and theory--not moral issues or the impact on real people. Abuses of power and objective human rights constraints in all of the LMB countries are on the whole treated rather antiseptically. The authors frankly acknowledge that civil society has not been effective in using the influence the behaviour of developers or government decision making in any Lower country, with some limited exceptions concerning Thailand when it is not in the thrall of a military coup. Chapter 4 documents and analyzes the formation of the MRC under the 1995 Accord and its ambiguous--hence contestable, negotiable, and changeable--governance role (p. 87). While the conventional wisdom holds that the MRC has largely failed in its coordinating and governance roles, the authors argue that if the softer notion of regulation as exhortatory, goal setting, or framing use of knowledge is taken on board ... then the PNPCA is in fact a suite of measures by which the MRC seeks govern: its knowledge programs, guidelines and standards (p. …