ABSTRACT
This chapter is the story of damming the mainstream Mekong River – or, more precisely, of attempts by the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to bring a more integrated, informed and precautionary approach to mainstream development by initiating a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) of 12 hydropower dams proposed for the mainstream in Laos and Cambodia (ICEM, 2010). It is written by the team leader of the MRC-initiated SEA of hydropower development on the mainstream Mekong River, who is also director of the organization commissioned to conduct the SEA. 1 As such, it presents an inside reflection on the process and on the wider role of SEA in supporting an improved governance approach within an institutionally and scientifically weak planning milieu. Unless otherwise indicated, the insights and data in the chapter are from first-hand experience and from the SEA report. 2
The SEA was only partially successful – it recommended a ten-year postponement of all mainstream dams until the potentially far-reaching impacts were better understood and, much more importantly, until the institutional capacity, expertise and authority were in place at national and regional levels to properly plan, construct and manage cascades of mainstream dams should they proceed. Vietnam and Cambodia embraced the SEA recommendations. However, after some indecision, Laos has ignored international pressure to adopt the SEA, especially from its downstream neighbours, and has permitted the first and second of ten mainstream dams in its territory – Xayaburi and Don Sahong – to go ahead. The fact that Laos would disregard its old ally Vietnam with such unnecessary and confident haste, and where so much is at stake, reflects the complexity of influential interests at play – international and domestic – in pursuing this controversial development. Those interests include China and Thailand – the two most advanced and resource-hungry economies in the Mekong region – as well as narrow vested interests from promoters, financiers and developers in the energy sector. It also reflects Laos’s long history of political and economic domination by colonial powers and its neighbours, and now a determination in the Lao Politburo to assert its sovereign authority at all costs.
