The Anti-Politics of Mekong Knowledge Production

Despite the enormous efforts of planning agencies and significant amounts of time and money spent on feasibility studies for water resource infrastructure, the Mekong River has remained one of the world’s least developed of the world’s major rivers and is thus now perceived by national decision-makers and many international donor organizations as having ‘underused potential’. This is at a time when there is a major concern that most large rivers have been over developed. There are clear signs that countries in the Mekong River Basin are striving more aggressively after ‘modern development’ in forms of large-scale dams, irrigation and hydraulic controlling structures. But at the same time, many in the region are aware of the failures of the modernist projects elsewhere, and in those parts of the region where dams and irrigation have been installed, the uncritical belief in human mastery over the forces of nature has been seriously questioned. There are also evolving domains of knowledge that actively contest the scientific and expert knowledge usually used for policy and development plans of the basin. It is thus important to look at how these modernist plans and aspirations, epitomized by large-scale dams and diversions, are being justified and legitimized in relation to competing knowledge domains.