Water Governance Reform and Catchment Management in the Mekong Region

This article investigates complexities and dynamics of water governance reforms at a number of levels in the Mekong Region. It looks comparatively at countries within the region and at the Mekong as a transboundary basin. The study takes catchment management processes as a focus for reform agendas related to water and relates water management in a river basin context to wider issues of governance reform. A central argument is that the effectiveness of water governance cannot be assessed in terms of simple environmental, economic, or social outcomes, or even against a more comprehensive "triple bottom line." Governance agendas and definitions are too diverse, and stakeholder interests too complex, to come up with a straightforward "best practice" of catchment-oriented water governance toward which policy reform should aspire. Rather, catchment governance in the Mekong is an arena for negotiating more sustainable, equitable, and productive use and management of water at multiple scales.

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