Food security, flood pulses and fisheries: transnational common-pool resource management in the Mekong Basin

• Main Author: Bostock, Benjamin Timothy
• Other Authors: Deborah Kay Elms
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Business::International business::Policy
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65023
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

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 National governments are in danger of leaning towards outdated, ineffective models of state development which rely too exclusively on economic growth- and are thus too often incentivised to build dams despite their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