Retrofitting the Mekong: Community-based environmental responses to Chinese transnational infrastructure in a Thai border town

Abstract

For decades, the Mekong River has been a site of ongoing tensions between China-backed infrastructure and communities relying on the mighty Mekong for their lives and livelihoods. In Thailand, tensions have escalated into actions against ecologically damaging hydropower dam development and the blasting of river rapids for Chinese navigation in a Thai border town. This article examines how Chinese transnational infrastructure has been reconfiguring power relationships among actors at multiple scales. Based on my fieldwork, I offer a narrative of the concerted efforts by one small community-based environmental group in northern Thailand, some of whose activism has prodded Chinese planners and project managers into responding to widespread criticism of ecological damage caused by its hydropower and riparian infrastructure and ignoring the needs of downstream local communities. The interactions between Chinese agencies and local NGOs will be discussed through the concept of a moral ecology of infrastructure, which contributes to transcending infrastructure and the environment, enabling a broadened understanding of human and nonhuman relations in more recent retrofitting of the dams and waterway projects. I argue that the reconfigured ‘Green’ Belt and Road Initiative is a contingent process in which multiple transnational actors claim decision-making power over the retrofitting and redevelopment of the Mekong's ecological infrastructure.