ABSTRACT
Environmental security represents efforts to inject interdisciplinary understanding of ecological and social concerns into international deliberations with the goal of influencing states toward more adaptive, transboundary behaviour. Both environmental security and transboundary water governance offer frameworks for inclusive, and, therefore, more realistic consideration of multiple ecological and social drivers of change, not just one. In the Mekong River Basin, the combination of low development levels and closed systems of governance makes progress difficult in strengthening environmental security and adaptive water governance. The chapter identifies six security stressors –ecosystem degradation, food, energy, and water issues, human development, and climate change–that will need to be managed cooperatively in the Mekong region. With demand growing and many farmers shifting from subsistence farming to cash crops, food security in the Mekong requires improvements in production efficiencies to use less water to produce more food. In a best-case scenario, new energy from hydropower development would lead to coordinated dam operations among and between countries.
