Tangled Nets of Discourse and Turbines of Development: Lower Mekong mainstream dam debates

Ming Yong and Carl Grundy-Warr

Third World Quarterly, 2012, vol. 33, issue 6, 1037-1058

Abstract: Hydropower development on the mainstream of the Mekong River in the Lower Mekong Basin (lmb) has become one of the most pressing issues on the development agenda, being touted as the way forward in solving energy, development and sustainability needs in the region. Despite dominant and compelling arguments in favour of such development, a growing anti-dam lobby has taken to arguing that hydropower development will threaten the economic, social, environmental and food security of some 62 million people living in the lmb. The anti-dam lobby comprises a heterogeneous assemblage of actors, agencies and networks, working to provide critical and alternative geographical (re)imaginations of the lmb. This paper explores these multiple perspectives afforded by the anti-dam lobby through the lens of knowledge production. The anti-dam lobby, it will be seen, engages in a politics of legitimacy and re-scaling with the pro-hydropower lobby, played out through varying strategies, while highlighting urgent and critical knowledge gaps which need to be taken seriously for future development in the lmb.

Date: 2012
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2012.681501

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