Dead in the Water: Global Lessons from the World Bank’s Model Hydropower Project in Laos
Bruce Shoemaker and William Robichaud (eds)
University of Wisconsin Press: 2018
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In Lao and Thai they call it the “Mother of Rivers”, the Mekong. It has seen empires rise and fall, survived wars and all manner of imperial attempts to tame its wild, free flow of currents, rapids and sediment. But in this new era of globalisation the Mekong is under siege from a hydropower invasion driven both by a Chinese desire for control over water resources and by the World Bank’s backing of so-called sustainable dams.

The Mekong brims with biodiversity and furnishes food security to 60 million residents of the river basin. But the river is already diminishing in strength; its natural energy is being sapped and dissipated, dam by dam. It is crying out for protection from the frenzied rush of hydropower that has reduced a healthy river to a long series of stagnant water reservoirs.

This story is all about how and why China’s dam fever in the Lancang, or upper Mekong, spread downstream into Laos and the lower Mekong — culminating, for now, in the $3.8 billion Xayaburi Dam conceived, developed and funded by Thai interests.

• Tags: Bruce Shoemaker, Issue 15, Laos, Mekong River, Tom Fawthrop, William Robichaud, Xayaburi Dam