Civil society and interdependencies: Towards a regional political ecology of Mekong development

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: The chapter aims to provide a framework for understanding ‘the Mekong’ that engages with both the discourse and the material substance of integration and interdependency, in both developmental and river basin contexts. Definition of region draws, inter alia, on two key themes that remain somewhat separate in Harold Brookfield’s writings. The first theme is development as dialectic, an interdependent process of linkage and incorporation that represents a particular type of societal change associated with modernity rather than an end state to be achieved. This can also be seen as a regional expression of interlinkage that is more commonly understood under the rubric of globalisation. The second theme is environment as a social construct, and social relations needing to be understood with relation to specific ecological conditions and configurations – in other words, a regional political ecology. Necessarily, in dealing with such a large and complex transnational region, the analysis is somewhat coarse grained, but reference to specific local contexts and instances of contestation are brought in by way of illustrative, though certainly not fully representative, detail.

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