The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development.

• Author: Cronin, Richard
• Position: Book review

The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development. By Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul and Natalia Scurrah. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Softcover: 251pp.

This book is an impressive assemblage of legal scholarship by four professors of law and one researcher in human and environmental geography--all based at Australian universities. In eight chapters that bear no single author identification, the book presents the Mekong and hydropower development through a socio-legal lens and "legal pluralism" that encompasses both formal or "hard law" as well as more informal "soft law". The former includes executive decrees, legislation and action that can be enforced, and especially international law governing investment designed to reduce political and financial risk to foreign capital. The latter ranges from customary rights to water, fisheries and forest land, Environment Impact Assessments (EIAs) that lack objective criteria for decision making such as the formally agreed but unenforceable rules including the Mekong River Commission's (MRC) Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA) for proposed mainstream dams.

The purpose of the book is not to explore solutions to conflicting local, national and transboundary interests, differing concepts of the objectives of development and the vastly uneven power of stakeholders but "to assemble a nuanced account of how laws and legal institutions at different levels operate and shape water governance outcomes, claims and expectations in the Mekong" (p. 35). Some fifty-three joint field interviews conducted in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam inform the range of understandings and expectations of law that different actors hold in relation to transboundary water governance in the Mekong, and the various factors "(historical and contemporary, institutional, regulatory and careerist) by which those understandings and expectations have been shaped" (p. 35).

The book seeks particularly to dispel "two prevailing notions": first, the idea that better management of the river basin only "awaits the messianic coming of (hard) law" which it refutes by presenting "an account of the basin as legally saturated, with arguments in regard to hydropower in particular shown to be, already highly juridified in various ways" (p. 60) and, second, that various policy reform models "should be recognized for their political significance and their negotiability", and navigated...