The water resources of the Mekong river catchment area, from China, through Thailand, Cambodia and Laos to Vietnam, are increasingly contested. Governments, companies and banks are driving new investment in roads, dams, diversions, irrigation schemes, navigation facilities, power plants and other emblems of conventional "development." Their plans and interventions pose multiple burdens and risks to the livelihoods of millions of people dependent on wetlands, floodplains, fisheries and aquatic resources.

The Center for Development Research (ZEF) is an international and interdisciplinary research institute of the University of Bonn, Germany. This book focuses on how various social actors influence the planning process for Se San River Basin's management in response to the effect of Vietnamese Yali-Falls dam on Cambodian local communities' livelihoods. The author examined why responses employed by dam development agencies produce a particular outcome. He attempted to demonstrate their strategies and cultural means in taking control over negotiation process to win the battle for expanding hydropower exploitation in the Se San River for maximum economic gain. The organizing responses by local communities and their distant supporters are constrained and resisted by politics, resources and strategies of dam promoting agencies.

This publication is a compilation of up-to-date information on each wetland in the country. An overview of wetlands in Lao P.D.R. and management issues are also discussed in detail.

Considering the Mekong region as an aggregation of various commons, the contributors to this volume investigate the various commons across the boundaries of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The book incorporates the specialized fields of political science, area studies, public policy, international relations, international development, geography, economics, business administration, public health, engineering, agricultural economics, tropical agriculture, and biotechnology. The contributions to the book cover various issues including innovation and technology, transport and logistics, public health and literacy, traditional medicine, infectious diseases, advanced agricultural technologies, irrigation, water resources, labor migration, human trafficking, and counterfeiting. They examine various commons and goods related to these issues, and discuss practices, policies, decision-making processes and governance strategies for imagining a future Mekong Community that will avoid the tragedy, and explore the comedy of the commons/anti-commons. A valuable resource for scholars of the Mekong region, and more broadly for academics working on the interdisciplinary study of transboundary governance issues.

In Following the Proper Channels: Tributaries in the Mekong Legal Regime, Bennett Bearden offers in-depth policy and legal analyses of the marginalization of tributaries in the context of the 1995 Agreement on the Cooperation for the Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin, law of international watercourses, hydrosovereignty, and the national economic development interests of the Mekong riparians. As a problem-based study, enlightening conclusions are made based on the increasingly state-centric nature of water resources management in the Mekong region through pursuit of national agendas in the unilateral and bilateral development of tributaries. The overarching legal and hydropolicy issue is whether states can simultaneously pursue hydrosovereignty on tributaries and ensure the Mekong legal regime's efficacy to achieve holistic water resources management and basin-wide governance.