Globalisation, regionalisation and local voices: The Asian Development Bank and rescaled politics of environment in the Mekong region

Globalisation is manifested in the Mekong Region both through processes and discourses that reflect the ideology of a borderless world allowing easy p assage of capital and commodities, and through resistance to such processes in an increasingly transnationalised civil society movement. However, more immediately significant supranational integrative agendas take the form of regionalisation, a process that has received less attention but which rais es analogous concerns of re-scaled governance. The Asian Development Bank ( ADB) has been a catalysing force. for regionalisation amidst a host of regi onal processes and initiatives; as such it has found itself the object of c ritique as an institution and through the specific projects it has supporte d that have impacted on local communities and ecosystems. Meanwhile, local and NGO voices associated with the emergence of a vibrant civil society in Thailand and nascent civil society responses in neighbouring countries have challenged claims on resources made in the name of national development an d regional integration. This paper considers some key issues of re-scaling resource and environment al politics in the Mekong Region, and the extent to which challenges have b een recast from national to regional development agendas. Politics of envir onment are shown to exist as a general rather than exceptional response to the region's development direction, and it is suggested that equitable and sustainable development increasingly needs to address simultaneously the re -scaling and reconfigurations of power in both environmental politics and t he "infrapolitics" of environment. The paper is illustrated with case studi es of dams in Laos and Thailand.