Preface

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 throughout 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 conditions 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.

In contrast, gender, group and ethnic biases affecting the equity and parity of procedural justice and the statutory recognition of traditional land and water rights have been obscured or omitted during policy deliberations. The regulating, cultural and non-market provisioning ecosystem services of wetlands, forest and water systems have tended to remain “invisible” and have only been incorporated to a limited extent into the decision-making process.

The critical interdependence of equity and natural resource management are however increasingly recognized by decision makers, the research community and civil society concerned with Mekong sustainability. Recent initiatives have seen the principles and aspirations of distributional justice, gender parity and the sustainable management of natural resources articulated and ratified throughout national and supra-national policy instruments, treaties, conventions, development plans and statutory laws of the Mekong River Riparian countries. Supra-national and updated national instruments are increasingly framed by principles set out by, for example, the Sustainable Development Goals, and guided by multifactor development indices such the Human Well Being Index, Human Capital Index and the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index.

However, these policy initiatives have not yet emerged as an operational praxis and the upward trajectories of distributional inequalities continue unabated, affecting the most vulnerable. Examples of this lack of implementation and policy enforcement actions include the opaque granting of land and water concessions subject to traditional common property rights, as well as the ongoing decline of forests, fish and river sediments, which affect the communities that depend on them.

The present volume makes a timely and practical contribution to research endeavours and policy debates concerned with sustainability in the Mekong region.

The authors notably address the problem of variable interpretations and implied meanings of equity contained in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Apart from goals 11-14, the remaining SDGs refer to equitable access, sharing or opportunities as an outcome of sustainable development. What is not immediately evident from the SDG framework and language is a clear understanding of what equity entails. Variable interpretations and the interchangeability of equity, justice and equality have compromised the formulation of a coherent analytical framework and comparative analysis of efforts to correct inequalities.

The authors propose a clearly defined and tractable working definition of equity by classifying economic, political, social, cultural, environmental, spatial, and knowledge-based inequalities into three distinct classes. Distributional equity refers to the allocation of resources, costs, and benefits among people and groups; recognitional equity refers to the acknowledgment of and respect for identity, values, and associated rights; finally, procedural equity highlights participation in the decision-making process, the asymmetries of power and influence, and jurisprudence or the capacity to be legally recognized and represented during disputes and conflict resolution.

This typology improves analytical sensitivity by describing the equity “of what” and “between whom,” which also resonates with practical notions of vulnerability: from the vulnerability of “whom” (e.g. communities and/or ecosystems) to “what hazards and stressors” (e.g. uncertain water access, reduced nutrient and sediment loads, global warming, political decisions).

A systematic mapping of documented relationships between equity and natural environment factors and variables represents the second major contribution of this volume. The rigorous and systematic mapping and analysis of thousands of publications reveals relationships between equity and natural resources in the Mekong, disentangling reported environmental stressors or change (the “what”), across a range of affected communities and groups (the “whom”), as well as the implications for equity. The document mapping exercise and text analysis reveal; i) the multiple disciplines engaged in the equitynatural resource nexus; ii) the focus on climate change, resource rights and access, and exposure to pollutants as the three dominant research themes; and iii) an accelerating research focus and interest from 2011 through 2020.

The separation of the environment-population groupequity classes into an enumerated matrix represents a substantial step in improved diagnostics and analytical sensitivity. Analytical sensitivity, in turn, acts as a basis for defining the problem characteristics of collective decision making, an improved understanding of the capabilities of vulnerable groups to exercise choice, and importantly, differentiating the environment-equity interactions into those that matter and those that do not. The matrix provides a basis for more equitable negotiations between competing decision influencers and actors by rendering the interactions between the three equity classes and natural resource “values” both legible and visible. Making equity-environmental interactions legible is a major achieve-

ment of this volume. Despite increasing acknowledgment by national and regional decision makers, equity-environmental interactions are either invisible, illegible or ignored in the majority of contemporary Mekong development debates.

The compendium of Mekong case studies investigating the equity-justice-natural resource condition nexus represents the third contribution of this volume. Multi-factorial indices (such as the SDGs, the Human Development Index and the Human Capital Index) that guide national policy development tend to be aggregated and are usually reported at the national level, thereby obscuring inequalities and disparities in environmental conditions that only become apparent when considered through finer geographical, gender, linguistic and ethnic lenses. We hope that the local case studies presented in this volume will contribute to the development and refinement of a responsive scientific research agenda capable of contributing to more balanced and procedurally just development decisions.

The volume includes a set of important recommendations to bridge science policy boundaries. There is at least one additional recommendation that warrants further investigation. That is, establishing whether the priority equity-environment relationships revealed in the document mapping matrix are consistent with the priorities of affected population cohorts and decision makers, or are an artefact of academic interests and accessible funding.