Hydropolitics in the Mekong Region: Water, Power and the Dialectics of Change (Environmental Governance)

Mainland Southeast Asia's great river systems sustain the world's largest inland fishery and provide food security for over 60 million people.Yet these extraordinary systems are being fundamentally transformed by hydropower development, with consequences that will reverberate for generations.Hydropolitics in the Mekong offers a critical analysis of how this transformation is unfolding across the region - not as an unfortunate byproduct of progress, but as the deliberate outcome of power relations operating across multiple scales.Drawing on political ecology, hydrosocial theory, and critical work on development narratives, this volume demonstrates that the rivers of mainland Southeast Asia are being perpetually reconstituted through hydropolitical processes that pattern space, determining what flows and what is blocked, who benefits and who bears costs.The contributors show how narratives do not merely describe these transformations but constitute the very spaces within which they proce