ABSTRACT
Approaching the Mekong River Basin as a socio-legal arena, as this book does, embeds analysis of the basin in a long tradition of socio-legal scholarship, otherwise known as law and society research. This tradition has not featured to date among legal approaches to this transboundary watercourse. At the same time, such an approach dis-embeds the Mekong River Basin from the predominance of integrated water resources management in discussions surrounding the governance of river basins (Mukhtarov and Cherp, 2014; see also Chapter 3). It stretches the terrain of socio-legal research beyond its conventional nation-state frame of reference, and away from concern with the ‘deep’ study of a particular ethnographic site. Yet, in its focus on one river basin, and four of the six riparian nations that share it, this book spans a field more modest in dimensions than the ‘expansive global perspective’ that socio-legal research has recently embraced (Darian-Smith, 2013, p. 4; Merry, 2007). This chapter explains how this book is located in each of these senses. It also explains the understanding of ‘law’ deployed in this book, the different legal orders with which it engages, and its relationship to such notions as ‘governance’ and ‘development’.
