Preface
Inequalities and Environmental Changes In the Mekong Region John Ward and Alex Smajgl, Mekong Region Futures Institute (MERFI)
Although there are manifold conceptualizations of the “Mekong”, richness and dynamism are commonly used to characterize the politics, economies, ethnicities, societies and ecologies of a highly diverse region. Policy and investment decisions are being formulated and enacted in an increasingly connected region subject to a changing climate regime, a rapidly growing population, accelerating gross domestic product, changing foreign investment flows, a young and expanding labour force and migration away from smallholder agriculture. Popular and leadership aspirations suggest an ambitious trend towards expanded trade, mining, agriculture, natural resource utilization and increasing industrialization. There is also a concomitant increase in the demands for a more equitable distribution of the benefits and costs of development programs. National and sub-national decisions on large-scale development investments are triggering ripple effects through‑ out the region, affecting the trajectories of factors influencing hydrological flows, wetland area and functions, fish migration, forest diversity and sediment-nutrient transportation, in turn disproportionally altering the livelihoods, forced migration and adaptive opportunities of the most vulnerable. As a corollary, while dynamism continues, richness is being degraded and unevenly distributed. The ambitions prescribed in national development programs have been underpinned by a legacy of political alliances and power asymmetries, country-specific institutional histories, cultural biases, tenuous “traditional” property rights and ideological preferences. Institutional biases and norms can also affect the level and reproduction of inequalities, reinforcing exclusion based on gender, race, class, ethnicity and disability. Development decisions affecting natural resource con‑ ditions and status, and the distribution of benefits, costs and impacts amongst affected interests and communities have generally been made independently and are reliant on a constrained set of metrics. Notions of equity-equality are typically expressed in economic terms, albeit referencing important indicators of wealth distribution such as the Gini coefficient.
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