Dams and Development: the Moral Mission of the the Mekong River Commission

Abstract

The puzzle that I have addressed in this thesis relates to how the Mekong River Commission, an intergovernmental institution responsible for sustainable development of the Mekong and its surrounding land, has aimed to reform the regional hydropower industry into a more sustainable sector – despite the heavy constrains placed on its functioning due to the lack of formal authority to push riparian states or other key actors into action. As the Mekong River Commission mainly relies on the powers of persuasion to fulfil its sustainability plans for the basin, I used the concept of moral economy building as a suitable analytical tool while studying the Commission’s official discourse in relation to its Initiative on Sustainable Hydropower from 2008 to 2015. It illustrated that the unifying strategy adopted by this river basin organisation – in its quest to moralise dam building processes – had a profound effect on (1) the definition and interpretation of sustainable hydropower, (2) the way in which basin-wide cooperation has been organised, and (3) practices with respect to knowledge management. As such, this thesis contributed to scholarly literature on the topic of transboundary water governance.