This blog post originally appeared on the Water, Land and Ecosystem’s blog. The paper discussed here was in part a product of 
CPWF-Mekong initiative.
A review of “Scalar disconnect: The logic of transboundary water governance in the Mekong” by Diana Suhardiman, Mark Giordano, and Francois Molle in Society and Natural Resources Vol 25 (6): 572-586.
Taylor & Francis has generously granted free access to the article for the next 30 days.
A Review by Terry Clayton
I read Scalar Disconnect with a distinct sense of déjà vu. Between 2000 and 2003, I worked almost exclusively for the Mekong River Commission Secretariat, then in Phnom Phenh. I worked for every department in the Secretariat, all four National Mekong Committees and scores of line agencies and civil society ‘partners’. I like to think I had, at one point in time, a unique “birds-eye” view of the MRC.
Having seen the organization close up in all its facets, I came to the conclusion that the MRC works exactly the way everyone wants it to work. In the words of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, “Everything is what it is because it got that way”. Scalar Disconnect explains more articulately than I ever have how it is and how it got that way.
Institutional Analysis
Scalar Disconnect offers an “institutional analysis” of the MRC and examines the disconnect between regional and national scales of decision making. The authors argue that member country representatives and international donor agencies purposely obscure tensions and potential conflict situations and question academic approaches that depict the State as the main actor in international relations.
The article begins with international donors and how their support is often based on widely varying concepts of integrated water resources management, how they tend to overlook or simplify political processes and power dynamics, and how they reduce decision making to technical and managerial issues.
The initial declaration of the argument is that the Mekong River Commission “has been unable to translate the outcomes of its regional programs into policy formulation at the national level.” The reasons are the familiar villains of sectoral fragmentation within national bureaucracies and the mismatch between the aims and goals of a transboundary entity that reflects to a very large extent the interests of the international donor community and realpolitik national interests.
The institutional history part of the article is refreshingly blunt. The authors make no concessions to political correctness and do not attempt to sugarcoat or obscure the realities normally verbalized in the relatively safe confines of coffee break and after-hours debates. For example:
A country would in most cases approve MRC’s program activities as long as these activities do not threaten national development interests. In the opposite case, the country would then use the national consultation meeting as its means to halt the effort.
And later…
Lacking the power with regard to individual ministries, the Joint Committee and the Council hardly function as an interministerial decision making platform, despite the fact that (sector) ministries are formally represented within both the Joint Committee and the Council.
Conspiracy of silence
I can think of readers who will consider these and similar statements a gross breach of etiquette if not an outright betrayal of trust. The authors suggest that this very conspiracy of silence is what allows the “MRC and country members [to] proceed with conflicting developmental plans and reproduce the current disconnect between the national and regional level decision making landscape without displaying this tension in public.” Too bad they have blown the whistle.
As a long-time participant observer in the workings of the MRC and its Secretariat, I find the institutional analysis rings true. I question the proposition that it “brings into light MRC’s isolation” and that it “cannot be blamed for failure to achieve more than what these countries want”. If the MRC is ‘isolated’ it is isolated the way a fulcrum is isolated from a lever. As for “failure to achieve”, The authors admit that the MRC is, “a place of confrontation where members are sometimes forced to conceal or halt plans. It brings in grand discourses and concepts that can also legitimate some knowledge production that members would not like to see.” That capacity to bring in the grand discourses and legitimate knowledge is no small achievement and may be exactly what the countries want.
In my reading of the paper, its weakness lies in not going much beyond the institutional history (which is excellent) and persisting in the implicit conceit that international donors have a right to meddle in the affairs of sovereign states (“We should expand the current discourse on the MRC’s role from international to national fora.”). I have always been of the opinion that the best way to “increase the ownership of the MRC” is for the international community to get out the way (a la Dambisa Moyo) and let the countries get on with it. I suspect that if the MRC didn’t exist the countries would have to invent it because it is just too good an idea not to.
Scanning the list of references, the “going beyond” would not be difficult. The references make an intriguing reading list and I find myself wishing the authors had related their argument more explicitly to topics like the role of discourse, problem structuring, and the science-policy interface. For example, some reference to the literature on problem structuring would be useful (see for example Hisschemoller and Hoppe, 1995-96). Nonetheless, readers interested in the interaction between social and bio-physical processes and policies and practices at multiple scales will find Scalar Disconnect well worth the read.
Your Turn
Read the article, which Taylor & Francis has granted free access to for the following 30 days.
Contact the authors
Diana Suhardiman: suhardiman[at]gmail.com
Mark Giordano: mark.giordano[at]cgiar.org
François Molle: f.molle[at]cgiar.org
About the authors
Diana Suhardiman is an irrigation engineer and social/policy scientist with experience in water resources management and water governance. Her current research focuses on multi-level policy and institutional analysis of water resources development in the Mekong. This includes the institutional analysis of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the overall mapping of sectoral decision-making frameworks in the four Lower Mekong Basin countries (Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Lao PDR). Currently, Diana leads an initial review of national policy and legal framework on land-water-environment management focusing on hydropower and livelihoods options within the Mekong region.
Mark Giordano is a geographer and economist with wide experience in agriculture, water and development. He is currently Principal Researcher and Director of Water and Society Research at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a member of the CGIAR System Organizagion. Prior to joining IWMI, Mark worked as an agricultural trade economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. He also spent many years working on a large groundwater irrigated farm in the western U.S.
François Molle is a senior researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, France, and holds a joint appointment with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). He has 25 years experience in irrigation and water management in South America, Africa, Asia and the Middle-East region. François’s current research activities focus on institutional and political aspects of river basin development and management, irrigation water pricing, water governance and water policy; he is editor of the Water Alternatives (WaA) journal (www.water-alternatives.org).
Terry Clayton, the author of this review, is communications consultant and long-term resident of the Mekong Basin. He is also CPWF-Mekong’s Communications Coordinator. You can read more of Terry’s reviews here.
