The Mekong Watershed

The Contested Landscapes of the
Nam Theun, Lao PDR

Australian Mekong Resource Centre


The Mekong Watershed Taken in its entirety, the Mekong Basin spans a wide range of altitude, latitude, climate and vegetation zones along the 4200 kilometre length of the river. The lower Mekong Basin (downstream of where the river leaves China) covers a somewhat narrower range of bio-geographical conditions. The four lower riparian countries contain 77 per cent of the Basin area and account for more than four-fifths of the water that passes through the Basin each year. This entire area is monsoonal and thus marked by great seasonal variation in rainfall. Typical low (May) and high (September) flows show a difference of the order of 15 times, and this fluctuation is a defining characteristic of both physical conditions and resource management strategies within the basin.

Main socio-cultural features

The Mekong Basin has a population of approximately 60 million, of whom about 50 million are in the Lower Basin. The great majority of the Basin’s inhabitants are farmers and fishers, relying quite directly on the natural resource base. Integrity of the Basin’s ecology is vital to their social, cultural and economic well-being.

Wet_land_rice_Nong_Ped1.jpg (10400 bytes)

Rice farming in Laos

The Mekong Basin is an area of great ethnic diversity. Within each riparian country there is a dominant ethnic majority, but only in Cambodia does this majority dominate the country’s basin area.

In China, the diverse ethnic minorities of Yunnan outnumber Han Chinese, notably in the autonomous region of Xishuangbanna. Burma’s portion of the Mekong Basin is located in Shan State, where the Burmese are in a minority to

Wa and Shan peoples, and where the central government has only limited political control. Lao PDR is an ethnically diverse country, whose dominant lowland Lao population makes up only about half the national population. Officially there are 68 ethnic groups, classed into lowland (Lao Loum), upland (Lao Theung) and highland (Lao Suung) peoples, with associated ethnic distinctions and cultivation practices. Thailand’s section of the Basin is mainly inhabited by the Lao speaking people of Isan and Thai Yuan (khonmeuang) and Thai Leu of Chiangrai province. Cambodia’s ethnic diversity is somewhat less in the lowlands and has been further reduced by recent conflicts that have targeted Chams and ethnic Vietnamese in some areas. However, in the eastern highlands there is great ethnic diversity, with several dozen groups listed for Rattanakiri Province alone. In Vietnam, the Delta’s population is mainly Kinh, but significant minorities of Khmer, Chams and ethnic Chinese form important pockets. The Central Highlands are ethnically diverse, although in proportional terms this diversity has been reduced by large scale settlement of lowland Kinh into New Economic Zones since 1975.


Main economic features The Mekong Basin is economically diverse. In part this is due to the historical differences and divisions within the region.
The most notable economic feature of countries in the Basin is the difference in average levels of income between the wealthiest and poorest countries. Thailand and Vietnam differ by a factor of about 10 on this measure. However, this is tempered significantly by the regional disparities within each country. Given that Thailand’s northeastern region is its poorest, and Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is its most prosperous area, the difference in living standards between these two most populous regions of the lower Mekong Basin is much less than the national comparisons indicate. This is further tempered by the fact that a significant proportion of Isan incomes come from off-farm work (largely from labouring remittances sent from Bangkok or the Middle East), while most of the income in the Delta is generated from local farm productivity and aquaculture. While the majority of the Basin’s inhabitants are farmers and fishers, most of whom maintain a strong subsistence orientation, the main areas of resource development envisaged for the basin lie in different sectors.		Homes in the Mekong Delta Local transport in the Mekong Delta

The Nam Ngum hydropower dam in Laos

In particular, hydropower and forestry are seen as major earners of national income and foreign exchange. This potentially places industrial and export sectors at odds with the subsistence needs and livelihood security interests of the region’s poorest people.

Main political features

The Mekong Basin is divided along national lines into six riparian countries. Five of these countries have been through some form of socialist or communist administration,

and three (China, Lao PDR and Vietnam) remain nominally socialist states in the process of economic reform. All countries have gone through periods of authoritarian rule. Thailand’s political development has given the most credence to democracy, but many democratic structures even here are still quite fragile. On the other hand, diversification of economies, opening up of previously isolated and partially closed systems, together with the emergence of new institutional forms all make emergence of civil society an issue to contend with. This has significant implications in the area of resource management, since it potentially allows for a greater diversity of actors and institutions to become involved at various levels.