ABSTRACT
Evelyn Goh Introduction The Mekong is the eighth largest river in the world, with a basin covering 800,000 square kilometres of mainland East Asia.1 It flows through Yunnan province in southern China, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam; and forms part of the borders between Myanmar and China, and Myanmar and Laos. More than 80 million people (90 per cent of the riparian population) depend upon the Mekong River for resources ranging from drinking water, fish, transport and irrigation water, to the fertile land and forest products of its catchment area – mainly agriculturalists who rely on the wild freshwater fish as a key source of protein in their diets. The river’s largest development potential though, lies in hydropower and large-scale irrigation projects. These potential resources have been relatively undeveloped until now because of civil strife and wars, but the relative peace and subsequent economic development drive in the region in the 1990s has boosted a range of national, bilateral and multilateral plans for building dams on the mainstream and major tributaries of the Mekong to provide electricity and irrigation water. The troubled experiences in other large transboundary rivers like the Nile, the Jordan and the Tigris-Euphrates suggest that these developmental projects will have significant impacts on the environmental security of, and relations between, the Mekong basin states.2 Hydropower development on the Mekong River could provide a critical case study for the question under investigation in this volume, in terms of the
1 A river basin is defined in hydrological terms as the catchment area or watershed of the river itself, including tributary and distributary streams, and the immediate surrounding land.
