Food security, flood pulses and fisheries: transnational common-pool resource management in the Mekong Basin
This paper argues that the current policies and institutional structure at local, national and transnational levels in the Mekong Basin could be detrimental to the already concerning food security in the region, through their expected negative impacts on widely used fisheries. The managemen...
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| Format: | Theses and Dissertations |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2015
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65023 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | This paper argues that the current policies and institutional structure at local, national and
transnational levels in the Mekong Basin could be detrimental to the already concerning
food security in the region, through their expected negative impacts on widely used
fisheries. The management of the Mekong River is extremely complex, given its nature as
an International Common-Pool Resource, and this is observable through appealing to
appropriate theory on collective action. Yet despite this complexity, overfishing at the local
scale is currently manageable- although this could cease to be the case if national and
transnational institutional plans towards the proliferation of hydrological development
continue at their current rate. National governments are in danger of leaning towards
outdated, ineffective models of state development which rely too exclusively on economic
growth- and are thus too often incentivised to build dams despite their expected negative
impacts fish migration, to the detriment of food security. Transnationally, cooperation
within the Mekong River Commission is currently poor, which cannot hope to be effective
whilst China and its cascade of mainstream dams fail to be involved. The alteration of the
Mekong's flood pulse by upstream states' dams could have significant effects for the lower
Mekong Basin's fisheries, highlighting the interlinking and compounding concerns which
policy in the region faces. Without integrated efforts towards nested enterprises of
governance, food security could likely become seriously threatened.
Keywords: Common-pool resources, collective action problems, governance, Mekong,
Mekong River Commission, food security, fisheries, flood pulse, hydrological development |
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