ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the potential downstream impacts of cooperative, transnational development of the Lower Mekong Basin on the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. While much of the discussion focuses on ecological issues, it is argued that the dialectic character of social and ecological transformations is central to an understanding of the evolution of political and environmental outcomes. This must not be lost in the litany of potential ecological concerns over human alteration of the basin (Harvey 1996). In other words, ecological transformations are crucially dependent on the political and economic changes occurring within and external to the riparian states of the Mekong. How these states conceive and implement river basin development in turn hinges on the complex biophysical processes at work in the basin. In the past, states have tended to ‘see’ environmental systems with a simplifying and utilitarian gaze (Scott 1998), one that masks their inherent dynamism and ignores the uncertainty of knowledge claims about their future patterns and processes. Predictive models of Mekong futures which overlook this complexity and uncertainty jeopardise both the integrity of the basin’s ecological systems and the resilience and security of the livelihoods of the basin’s residents.
