National and Sub-national Consequences of a Regional River Basin Agreement: The Case of the Mekong River Agreement

Abstract

"This paper concerns itself with the risk for malevolent change in development cum exploitation of natural resources in international watersheds. More concretely, it focuses on the Lower Mekong River Basin and on water as an indispensable and valuable asset. It scrutinizes the risk for ecologically damaging interventions and the absence of public participation in the process. It assesses, finally, and in the light of the above, what difference the 1995 MRC-Agreement has made in this regard for the two core countries in the Lower Mekong River Basin, Laos and Cambodia."