Sustainable Sloping Lands and Watershed Management Conference Development Intervention Disparities and the Poverty–Environment Nexus in the Lower Mekong Basin: Understanding Environmental Services in a Meso-Scale Perspective

The riparian countries of the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) are endowed with a richness of natural resources such as forests, water, agricultural land, mineral resources, and biodiversity. These resources provide a wealth of different environmental services to stakeholders from the local to the international level. However, their heterogeneous spatial distribution indicates that this service provision is uneven throughout the LMB, and that recent and current processes reinforce trends towards unsustainable development. These processes comprise general macro-economic dynamics among the riparian countries, resulting in socio-economic disparities that impact on natural resource management, as well as socio-economic and political dependencies that lead to inequitable configurations of decision-making governing environmental service provision in different sub-regions. In light of these general trends it is argued that environmental services provided by forests and upland agriculture must be considered as key for future development policies in the LMB: on the one hand, the weaker parts of the region are facing an increasing pressure to catch up with the high pace of economic growth. Whatever the engine of this growth will be in the long term, development will inevitably pass through agricultural transformation and intensification in the short term. On the other hand, it mus