ABSTRACT
The Mekong region has gone through massive human and material transformations (Rigg, 1997; de Koninck, 2005). Even as wars, expanding land frontiers, urbanization and industrialization have profoundly remodelled landscapes and societies, rivers and wetland ecosystems have remained persistent defining elements of rural livelihoods and agricultural waterscapes. Large-scale water resources development, although locally significant, has long remained short of the grand projects of ‘harnessing’ and ‘taming’ the Mekong River and its tributaries pushed forward by various regional organizations, governments and investors during the second half of last century. Regional conflicts and an obvious poor fit of many grand projects to local conditions and actual water/energy needs have thwarted large-scale investments (Kirmani, 1990).
