Water Conflicts and River Basins: The Contradictions of Comanagement and Scale in Northeast Thailand

Abstract

Questions of geographic scale, social conflicts, and shifting socioecological contexts are central to the prospects for and obstacles to comanagement of river basins. While thinking of a river basin as an environmental resource amenable to comanagement may have certain conceptual and practical advantages, the political and socioeconomic obstacles to creating effective comanagement regimes are substantial. The thorniest dilemmas involve devising effective institutions for managing water resources in basins characterized by intractable ecological conflict and within a national (and international) political-economic context that demands ever more rapid resource exploitation. These hurdles are compounded by the manner in which different actors are embedded within and contribute to socioecological processes linked--both materially and discursively--to multiple geographical scales. The comanagement and scale quandaries presented in the case of the Nam Phong basin in Northeast Thailand are characteristic of many river basins, and may provide a useful example for similar efforts to construct viable management regimes at a basin scale.

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