By IPS Correspondents
UBON RATCHATHANI, Thailand, Jul 3 2005 (IPS)

When leaders of the six countries in the Mekong region meet in China on Monday, they will be out of the earshot of non-government groups and academics who say the area’s development would put at risk the environment, local livelihoods and cultures.

This is not only because non-state players have no role at the Kunming summit of leaders from the six Mekong countries – Burma, Cambodia, China, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam – but because a wide gulf remains between the development vision held by governments and financial institutions on the one hand, and non-government groups and researchers on the other.

This gap, and the lack of a venue to discuss these differing visions, stood out in the days just before the Jul. 4-5 summit, hosted by the Chinese government in the south-western province of Yunnan.

Two meetings – one among local communities in the northern Thai city of Chiang Rai and another attended by more than 300 people that ended Saturday in this north-eastern city near the border with Laos – touched on some of the most controversial issues of the day.

These include China’s dams in the upper reaches of the Mekong River, hydropower projects that affect other nations, and the blasting of reefs to allow bigger commercial vessels to travel along the river that the six countries share.

But none of these issues are on the agenda of the summit, which includes signing ceremonies on cross-border transport agreements, regional power trade, information technology and animal epidemics.

“That’s a meeting of governments but we would like to see people-to-people recommendations too,” said Charnvit Kasetsiri of the South-east Asian Studies Programme of Thammasat University in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

“Can we listen to the voices that are not always heard?” asked Surichai Wun’Gaeo, political science professor at Chulalongkorn University.

“The key players in the GMS (Greater Mekong Sub-region) are representative of the governments of the riparian states, not the people,” added Charles Keyes of the University of Washington, who has studied the region since the 1960s.

But the fact that the summit is being held, three years after the first one in Cambodia, is already quite an achievement, say officials of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The bank facilitated economic cooperation, starting in 1992, in what it called the Greater Mekong Subregion.

Before 1990, many of the countries that shared the 4,880-km Mekong River were either in conflict or had just come out of conflict.

At the first meeting of their officials in 1992, ”even at coffee breaks it was difficult to get the officials to talk to each other,” Jean Pierre Verbiest, director of the Thailand mission of the ADB, told the conference here.

Seen in this light, intra-regional ties among Mekong countries have indeed come a long way. Since 1993, the governments have reached agreements on transportation, telecommunications, energy, tourism and trade and investment.

But this is also where differences in views – and the lack of a venue to talk to each other instead of leaders preaching to their own converted audiences – are stark.

While ADB and government officials tend to talk more about infrastructure – roads, power grids, better shipping routes – non-state actors, be it social scientists or activists, tend to look at the negative social effects of economic integration.

So while roads are being built to connect the region from east to west (Burma to Vietnam) and from north to South (Yunnan to the Mekong Delta), and a navigation agreement makes shipping easier, critics talk about the risks that arise from increased mobility.

In meetings of academics and activists like the just-finished one here, ADB officials may come to speak but may not stay for dialogue. In official meetings of governments, non-state actors often have little roles.

A recurring concern has been China’s attitude toward its South-east Asian neighbours, and its pursuit of dam plans along the upper Mekong, called Lancang within China. Since the mid-1990s, communities in downstream countries have been complaining about uneven water flows, unusually low levels at unusual times of the year and declining fish catch.

China’s dams have often been blamed for these occurrences, but no regional or bilateral mechanism has been able to clarify or discuss this issue openly between China and the other countries. “Scientists say that the changing levels are due to climate change, but locals say it is the dams,” explained Chainarong Srettachau of the South-east Asia Rivers Network.

He also says it is time communities used scientific local knowledge instead of relying on governments or big institutions – much like how the villagers affected by the Pak Mun dam in Ubon Ratchathani did their own research in 2002 and made their case before the Thai government.

This ‘Thai baan’ (villagers) research method, which has been applied at the micro-level, in tracking fish species, was also used by communities in the northern Thai province of Chiang Rai in 2004 to argue about the negative impact of the blasting of reefs in the Mekong.

Some 20 reefs in the river, including on the Laos-Burma and Thai-Laos borders, were blasted under the Mekong navigation accord to allow bigger ships to use the river and to encourage trade and commerce.

But under pressure from locals, the Thai government suspended the blasting of one set of rapids, the Khon Pi Luang, which are key fish spawning habitats.

Efforts are now underway by Thai groups to train other communities in Cambodia and other countries to undertake similar “action research”.

It does not help relations between officials and civil society that there is no regional body where all six Mekong states are members. The Vientiane-based MRC consists of the four lower basin countries – Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam – while China and Burma are just observers, with little chance of becoming full members.

The MRC is “subservient to national interests” and has “not proven itself able to bring real dialogue to solve sticky issues,” such as that of dams that have cross-border impact, or the navigation agreement, says Philip Hirsch, director of the Australian Mekong Resource Centre in Sydney.

In the case of the flash floods and consequent deaths in north-eastern Cambodia due to the release of water from the Yali dam over the border in Vietnam, the commission was “unable to do much by only getting state-to-state talk”.

The Vietnamese government did not “easily disclose information” about the water flows from the dam, and it did not help that “the Cambodian government was trying to be a friendly neighbour to Vietnam, so there was weak intervention by governments,” explains Vann Piseth of the Fisheries Action Coalition Team in Phnom Penh.

Politics, needless to say, plays a key role. In the case of Chinese dams, Hirsch points out that the lack of a water governance venue stands out even more because China “is the most powerful, most developmentalist and least accountable” country in the Mekong region.

Charnvit adds that while the Mekong River, may well survive development projects now underway, “the small and underprivileged people” may not.

Still, he says, researchers, social scientists and voluntary groups need to work together to counter dominance by states and big institutions in defining where development is headed. ”Or else, the Mekong will be the river of the MRC, ADB and others,” he said.

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