Thank you for mentioning my book as an entry point you take to this essay. I was there in several MRC summits and at the end I got the gist that as long as there are some "donors" (ADB, World Bank, Australian Bank), the MRC will "invent" something to spend the money and call it a day of intervening. Over 15 years, I didn't see MRC did much meaningful things to mediate the water conflict in the region, rather, it lets it brew as it is a way to maintain something spending development money, a reason to feel good among the west, the reason to reject from China, and every country does what they do best to take the most amount of water they can take.I get to learn that only people who live along the river lose everything when the river rises too fast (by water release), and lose everything if no water comes down (when Thailand, Laos, part of higher of Vietnam take it, and of course China). I can't see faces of those who lost and are losing everything, there are too many of them.
I feel like that's often the case with international institutions, unfortunately. By design they can facilitate, but can't generally make countries follow through. It's disheartening. I look forward to reading more of your work and hopefully one day my language skills will be good enough that I can read your works in Vietnamese as well.
Ironic! Hydropower dams supposedly good for the environment are wrecking lives of communities. Same fate in South Asia as hydropower poses danger to downstream settlements.
Energies are closely intertwined so an act will affect another in the ecosystem. Perhaps we should just do less and much rashly rather than doing more and more with new fancy ways that don’t tackle the root causes - same old business as usual.
Thank you for mentioning my book as an entry point you take to this essay. I was there in several MRC summits and at the end I got the gist that as long as there are some "donors" (ADB, World Bank, Australian Bank), the MRC will "invent" something to spend the money and call it a day of intervening. Over 15 years, I didn't see MRC did much meaningful things to mediate the water conflict in the region, rather, it lets it brew as it is a way to maintain something spending development money, a reason to feel good among the west, the reason to reject from China, and every country does what they do best to take the most amount of water they can take.I get to learn that only people who live along the river lose everything when the river rises too fast (by water release), and lose everything if no water comes down (when Thailand, Laos, part of higher of Vietnam take it, and of course China). I can't see faces of those who lost and are losing everything, there are too many of them.
I feel like that's often the case with international institutions, unfortunately. By design they can facilitate, but can't generally make countries follow through. It's disheartening. I look forward to reading more of your work and hopefully one day my language skills will be good enough that I can read your works in Vietnamese as well.
Ironic! Hydropower dams supposedly good for the environment are wrecking lives of communities. Same fate in South Asia as hydropower poses danger to downstream settlements.
Energies are closely intertwined so an act will affect another in the ecosystem. Perhaps we should just do less and much rashly rather than doing more and more with new fancy ways that don’t tackle the root causes - same old business as usual.