Contested Waterscapes in the Mekong Region: Hydropower, Livelihoods and Governance

One of the most important undertakings of this book is that it seeks to understand critical issues of livelihood, development, and governance in mainland Southeast Asia through a focus on both water and land resources, in relationship to one another and in their relationship to societies in the region. This de-centers what I would argue is a focus in a large amount of academic literature that, through an explicit focus on “land”—and to a lesser extent “water”—essentializes these categories as distinct resources rather than questioning their division and exploring their connections. The concept that draws this out and binds the book’s chapters together is the “waterscape”: “landscapes viewed through the lens of their water resources, taken as a defining element of both ecosystems and human life ” (p. 2). I believe the concept has been inspired by Erik Swyngedouw’s (1999) important work on the Spanish waterscape where the term is developed as a critique of long-standing academic scholar-ship that separated the social and natural elements of water (instead of seeing them as connected). However, the term also functions as a critique of the more traditional understanding of scale in water resources analysis by questioning the naturalized scale of the “water basin ” or “watershed.” I would also argue that this innovative focus on waterscape owes much to the team of editors and authors that put Contested Waterscapes together. The authors are part of the Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience, or M-POWER, network, which combines both activists and academics (and activist-academics) in the Mekong Region which includes Cambodia, Lao PDR