SNUAC Special Lecture

Title: Disentangling the Ecopolitics and Geopolitics of Mekong Hydropower Development

• Time: Thursday, 10 December 2015, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm
• Language: Lecture will be given in English
• Venue: Seoul National University Asia Center Rm.#303
• Presenter: Philip Hirsch / Professor of Human Geography / University of Sydney
• Host: SNUAC Southeast Asia Center
• Contact: 02-880-2695 (s4091519@snu.ac.kr)

Abstract: The Mekong River and its tributaries are currently undergoing an extensive program of dam construction, principally for hydropower.  Not surprisingly, this program is highly political.  The environmental politics of dam development are complex in themselves, and they have been further complicated as developers and some national governments have employed environmental discourse in support of dams as alternatives to fossil fuel power plants and as part of integrated river basin management.  In any international river basin, hydropower development is also geo-politicized, the more so in a region with a history of conflict and distrust between the riparian states concerned. The geopolitics of damming a river that traverses six countries involves a complex set of stakeholder interests between, but also within, the countries concerned.  As unilateral decisions to go ahead with mainstream dams unravel any semblance of truly collaborative governance on the lower part of the river, the critical position in which the Mekong River Commission (MRC) finds itself highlights the entangled nature of ecopolitical and geopolitical concerns.  In this lecture, I will discuss the key dimensions of ecopolitics, geopolitics and their entanglements around Mekong dams. I will then consider the extent to which it is realistic for governance arrangements to disentangle them within a single riparian agency – particularly one whose members include only four out of the six riparian countries sharing the river.

Presenter Bio:

Philip Hirsch is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney. He specialises innatural resource management, rural change and the politics of environment in Southeast Asia. Phil leads the Mekong Research Group, which carries out engaged and collaborative research on a range of natural resource governance, livelihood and development themes in the Mekong region. He has been working on and in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia since the early 1980s. Phil is fluent in Thai and Lao, and also speaks and reads passable Vietnamese and some Khmer.