ABSTRACT
Since early 2007 there has been a rapid acceleration in hydropower development in the Mekong Basin. The value and importance of capture fisheries in the Mekong Basin and the threat of hydropower development to their productivity and sustainability is now well established, widely cited and rarely challenged (MRC, 2003; ADB, 2004; MRCS/WUP-FIN, 2007). Yet, despite this, on the rare occasions in which fisheries enter public debate on hydropower development, they do so in a constrained manner, as something of an afterthought and as an unavoidable, slightly unfortunate, cost of the inevitable march of progress and development.
