ABSTRACT
In the past two decades environmental resources have drawn increased global attention for their significance in the development of national, regional, and local economies. They have also become a focal point of national and regional security concerns throughout the region of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), particularly in the upper Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), where Yunnan Province of China borders on Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. In ASEAN as a whole and China in particular, a rapidly increasing energy demand necessitates the seeking of resources throughout the region, particularly the relatively cleaner and more renewable resource of hydropower. Myanmar’s Ayerawaddy river and those it shares with China, the Mekong/Lancang, Salween/Nu, and Shweli/Ruili rivers, can provide a significant portion of the needed hydropower (for details of the rivers and their names see Table 4.1); China Power Investment Corporation, Sinohydro, Hanergy, Huaneng’s Hydrolancang (Huaneng Langcang River Hydropower Co., Ltd) and four other energy corporations or their subsidiaries in Yunnan are actively working with Myanmar to finance and engineer hydroelectric generation. In this region the management of environmental resources, including
energy resources, involves the use of inhabited and cultivated spaces that extend beyond national borders. These rivers and their watershed areas also provide irrigation, transport, and thus economic livelihoods for the large transboundary rural population in China and Myanmar. Securing water resource areas is thus a national security concern as well as an environmental and economic one, yet hydropower’s appropriation of water and land spaces has negatively impacted the subsistence of communities in the same resource space. The environmental and economic security of communities were among the seven categories of human security that the United Nations Development Programme added to national security in its 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994: 24-25). The General Assembly, including Myanmar and China, adopted a resolution on human security in 2012; and, they have used it to identify targets, including those for their environments and local economies, that are expected to reinforce each other and ultimately reinforce
the state’s national security. Myanmar has to date implemented six projects funded by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security, and China one. In the case of upper GMS transboundary water resources, however, there is
a growing contradiction between the construction of water projects for regional economic security and the local environmental and livelihood security in the areas affected by these projects. This contradiction has begun to threaten national security along the upper GMS borders, particularly along the border of China and Myanmar. The need to secure watercourses and the land around them for hydropower dams has had locally destabilizing and costly effects in a region already faced with pressing environmental and political issues. In terms of hydropower development on the Mekong, Virtanen states this succinctly: ‘A major shortcoming of large-scale projects has been the unequal distribution of project risks and benefits’ (UNDP, 1994: 199). Land transfer and relocation of villages in the space of planned or existing hydropower projects have reduced local economic and livelihood security, and have contributed to the resurgence in Myanmar’s rural uprisings and armed conflict within these transboundary spaces. Cronin and Hamlin put it this way: ‘the decline of local livelihoods and food security caused by dams on tributaries might represent an acceptable development tradeoff at the provincial or national level. However, a dam project has yet to be built in the Mekong Basin that replaces all of the lost livelihoods on a sustainable basis’ (Cronin & Hamlin, 2012: 16). The changing use of watershed space now manifests new and heightened national security risks in transboundary resource use. The dilemma is that necessary uses of transboundary rivers for hydropower and thus for regional economic security are causing a decline in economic security in the agricultural sector. Along the riverine areas between Myanmar and China, the enhanced national and regional economic security expected from planned and existing dam sites is being placed in direct conflict with national security. This chapter addresses these interlocked security issues in terms of the new spatial organization of resource access that development projects have brought to the region.
