Stagnant Rivers: Transboundary Water Security in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Transboundary rivers are increasingly difficult to govern and often involve issues of national security, territoriality, and competition. In developing countries, the management and governance of these rivers is dominated by a particular decision making group, often comprised of politicians, bureaucrats, and engineers. These groups perpetrate a technocratic paradigm towards the management of transboundary water, with limited genuine international cooperation. The transboundary water situation in South and Southeast Asia is becoming increasingly fraught as the geopolitical context is changing due to China's increased involvement in regional issues and climate change. With over 780 million people dependent on these rivers, their governance is vital to regional and international stability. Yet, the technocratic management of transboundary rivers persists and is likely to become increasingly unsustainable and inequitable. A discourse-based approach is applied to consider transboundary water governance in the shifting South and Southeast Asian context. The result is an alternative perspective of why governance approaches on transboundary rivers have resisted meaningful reform.In developing Asian countries, the state is often dominant in water governance. As a result, water governance tends to be dictated by state-centric thinking and bureaucratic management policies that support the state's role [5]. Even in the era of governance and decentralisations, governments are reluctant to concede sovereignty and so states often retain power through re-regulation. This redraws the boundaries of a state's mandate and shifts power structures without detracting from state power [6].The group responsible for water governance is termed the 'hydrocracy' [2], or the hydraulic bureaucracy [7]. This group comprises of bureaucratic agencies responsible for designing, planning and implementing water resources management, and elite decision makers. The decision makers are those who hold influence and responsibility for actions concerning water allocation, utilisation, and general transboundary water resources management. In the developing world, this group is often dominated by engineers and technocratic thinking. The hydrocracy is, in essence, a state creation, and consequently reflects state objectives and concerns. As such, states can utilise this group to strengthen their legitimacy [7], and the hydrocracy commonly maintains that the state has a duty to develop its water resources [2].The hydrocracy has a history of dominance in governing transboundary water [8]. Its power largely relies on maintaining the cyclical planning-to-construction process of hydraulic infrastructure development. Consequently, the interests of the hydrocracy are often shared by politicians, construction companies, landed elites and development banks. This actor constellation is described as forming an 'iron rectangle' between businesses, politicians, bureaucrats and development banks in the developing world [7]. As a result, alternative groups and interests ar...

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