Towards Sustainable Hydropower: Policy Implementation and Livelihood Transformation in the Sekong Basin, Laos
Creators: name: Souksakoun, Kanya
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2022

description: Hydropower development is a pressing issue for water governance in the Mekong Basin; the world's top hydropower development location. Mainstream hydropower discourses in the Mekong Region, especially in Laos, overestimate the economic and renewable potentials of hydropower development with inadequate attention to sustainability, especially social impacts. Numerous studies have debated such impacts, especially the changes of resettlers' livelihoods due to dam resettlement. Yet, there remains a need to critically analyse how the multiple policies of national and sub-national governments and their unequal power relations in resettlement processes significantly shape resettlers' livelihoods, and outcomes of vulnerability or precarity. In addition, there is an inadequate debate on how ineffective governance of hydropower can entail economic risks at the national level. This thesis takes political ecology as a broad theoretical framework and mobilises three main supporting concepts: the political economy of powersheds, governance and scale, and livelihoods and vulnerability, to examine the politics of hydropower development and governance in the region, with a focus on Laos, the regional export-based hydropower hub. It uses a mixed methods approach, including policy interviews, case studies, household surveys, and ethnographic analysis. I develop a multi-scalar analysis and a relational approach to understand the complexities of Laos' hydropower governance regime. I hierarchically trace how Mekong regional power sector trends interact with Lao national hydropower development discourses and regulatory institutions, which critically shape local resettlement process and outcomes. I argue that the current rapid-paced hydropower development with weak governance not only marginalises the livelihoods of local communities, but also exposes new risks to the national economy. These problems are sliding Laos out of a sustainable hydropower pathway. At the regional level, the hydropower boom in Laos has benefited the energy security of the Mekong Region. However, there has been increasing evidence of pitfalls in Laos: significant oversupply of domestic electricity capacity, a sovereign debt crisis, and privatization of national strategic assets; even though decision makers in Laos view hydropower as a key driver for economic growth. At the national level, I show a series of structural regulatory and institutional disconnects that bedevil sustainable hydropower governance in Laos, across and within key state agencies, both due to and resulting in ineffective hydropower governance. At the local scale in two case study communities, I present the multiple political, social, and environmental objectives that are mobilised in state-led hydropower resettlement, extending existing scholarly literature on dams, towards an understanding of what I call "multi-purpose resettlement." Of surveyed HHs involved in multi-purpose resettlement under the State-owned Enterprise model and a regional Independent Power Producer model, 75% and 45% respectively, identified significant difficulties with regaining their pre-resettlement livelihood standards. Such resettlement also exposes them to new livelihood vulnerability and precarity. This is primarily because the different objectives of multi-purpose resettlement are largely in conflict with each other, and changes in access to agricultural land and natural resources are undercompensated or uncompensated. The ongoing hydropower development paradigm and the evidence of drawbacks in Laos; livelihood vulnerability at the community level, financial risk at the national level, and the collapse of four dams; is in contrast with the country's sustainable hydropower discourse. The evidence assembled in this thesis aims to support decision makers and energy regulators, to review the country's energy development policy, especially in relation to hydropower investment.