Water and Hydropower

This chapter unpacks the institutional disjuncture in the hydropower decision-making landscape and processes in the Mekong region. It looks at actors’ and institutions’ strategies to transform the current institutional disjuncture into political spaces of engagement, as means to pursue their respective and sometimes conflicting interests, and how these unfold in (re)shaping of water governance structure, processes and outcomes across scales. Placing hydropower development and water governance within the broader context of contemporary struggle for inclusive development, the chapter unpacks processes of contestation in hydropower decision making. Taking Pak Beng hydropower project in Laos as a case study, it illustrates: (1) how institutional disjuncture and power asymmetry in hydropower decision making in Laos is manifested in formal institutional vacuum at grassroots level; (2) the relations between collective action (or the lack thereof) and various types and forms of political spaces of engagement; and (3) the importance of farm household strategies in weighing the cost and benefit between individual and collective action in the overall shaping of these political spaces of engagement.