[Download] "Transboundary River Cooperation and the Regional Public Good: The Case of the Mekong River (Company Overview) (Report)" by Contemporary Southeast Asia * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Transboundary River Cooperation and the Regional Public Good: The Case of the Mekong River (Company Overview) (Report)
- Author : Contemporary Southeast Asia
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Politics & Current Events,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 321 KB
Description
An increasing number of river-based cooperation projects have emerged in mainland Southeast Asia since the conclusion of the Cambodian conflict in 1991. Three of these projects have attracted a great deal of international attention because of their impact on the economic development of the Mekong River region: the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS), the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the Quadripartite Economic Cooperation (QEC) or Golden Quadrangle. This paper analyses the extent to which these schemes are designed to produce a regional public good. Public goods are goods that are non-excludable, that is to say no one can be excluded from them. Further, they are non-rivalled, that is, consumption of the goods by one party does not reduce its availability to other parties. When these goods are spread across a given geographical area, they can be deemed regional public goods. (1) Part of the public good discussion includes the concept of participatory governance, which is supposed to ensure that the concerns of local communities are taken into account during political decision-making processes and therefore produce a public good through multi-stakeholder processes. (2) Participatory governance has become a prominent proposal for enhancing efficiency in natural resource management by involving all relevant stakeholders in managing a common resource such as a transboundary river. The overall aim is to avoid resource conflicts by managing resources in a sustainable way. (3) Participatory governance is designed to prevent resource conflicts between user groups, thus creating a regional public good of equitable resource sharing while maintaining economic development. The central question is whether participatory governance leads to the avoidance of conflict and better resource management, and therefore the creation or maintenance of a regional public good. The inherent challenge is that different stakeholders may have different ideas about what the public good is or how it should be achieved: opinions may vary from poverty reduction (by which resources are subjected to fast-track economic development), to a focus on quality issues such as pollution control and hence resource protection, or quantity issues such as water allocation. This article will address the relevance of these concepts for the watershed management of the Mekong River by examining the three programmes mentioned above.