The question of how transnational environmental regimes affect the management of natural resources has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in the last decades, but some significant theoretical voids remain to be explored in greater detail. Among them is the participation in these regimes of non-state actors who can influence the adoption of decisions that are critical to protect the quality of resources. Tun Myint's Governing International Rivers is a valuable addition to the ongoing academic efforts to fill in this gap.

In this engaging book, Myint seeks to answer the question of how and why non-state actors and local communities are shaping transnational environmental regimes. To answer this question he applies his own Issues, Interests, and Actor Networks framework (IAN), which draws heavily from the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) and the Policy Sciences (PS) approaches championed by Elinor Ostrom and Harold Laswell, respectively. According to Myint, “the power of the IAN framework is that it enables analysts to connect institutions (rules-in-use and rules-in-form in the IAD sense) and values (base and scope values in the PS sense) as structural components that shape dynamic relationships among issues, interests and actors in governance processes” (p. 16).

Myint presents five case studies in two of the most important international river basins in the world: the Rhine in Europe and the Mekong in Southeast Asia. In the Rhine, he analyzes the Convention for the Protection of the Rhine against Chemical Pollution, the Convention for the Protection of the Rhine against Pollution from Chlorides (both signed in 1976), the International Water Tribunal (IWT, launched in 1983), and the Rhine Action Program for Ecological Rehabilitation (AP, put in place in 1987). Myint describes the evolution of the governance process, from the design of the two state-centric 1976 conventions (with no non-state actors input) to the more inclusive AP (in which non-state actors were engaged as partners to implement goals). Key for this development, Myint claims, was the establishment of the IWT in 1983, a non-governmental effort that brought together a myriad of non-state actors with a clear pro-environment agenda and that helped open the “policy window” that resulted in the design and implementation of the inclusive AP.

In the Mekong, Myint studies the controversy over the construction and operation of the Pak Mun Dam, located on the Mun river about 4 miles upstream from its confluence with the Mekong river (in Thailand). Construction of the dam—financed by the World Bank—started in 1990 and concluded in 1994. From the very beginning, the project stirred national and international debate when villagers, whose livelihood depend on fishing upstream from the dam, protested its construction. Villagers found a strong ally in the Assembly of the Poor (AOP), and Myint describes in detail how members of this coalition increased their clout in the long process leading to the Prime Minister's decision in 2003 to open the gates of the dam four months every year to restore the livelihood of villagers along the river.

Through a careful analysis of these case studies, Myint shows that non-state actors can help achieve the interconnectedness of issues, interests, and actors at the local, national, and transnational levels (thus improving the governance processes in these international arenas) by generating their own knowledge, wisely mobilizing their human and financial resources, and taking advantage of political freedom whenever it exists.

Overall, Myint furnishes engaging accounts of historical events that mix conflict and cooperation between state and non-state actors. It is rare to encounter a book that so effectively captures the attention of the reader from start to finish. Furthermore, Myint's central argument is spot on—governance processes are inherently complex, and adequate assessments of these processes must account for the interactions of different actors, issues, and interests located at local, national, and transnational levels,

At the same time, like all books, this one is not above criticism. Perhaps the most important limitation in this work is that the value of the IAN framework to advance our understanding of how governance processes unfold remains unclear. Myint asserts that the framework is useful to understand the dynamic relationships of issues, interests and actors, but he furnishes no clear propositional statements about the nature or character of those relationships. Given that Myint explicitly claims that his goal is to advance the empirical foundations of a theory of poly-centricity (p. 211), I was hoping to see at the end of the book a more precise explanation of the ways that specific instances of the interplay of interests, issues, and actors affect governance. The lack of such a precise model represents a missed opportunity to make this potentially useful framework more attractive to scholars interested in the topic of environmental governance.

I was also puzzled by how Myint operationalized some of his framework's central concepts. Take for instance, his distinction between “interests” and “issues.” When describing the issues and interests of actors at the local level in the case of the Chemical convention in the Rhine, Myint locates “recreation” as an interest (table 4.1, p. 91). Yet in his description of issues and interests in the Rhine Action Program, he considers “demand for recreational activities” as an issue instead (table 5.4, p. 115). Myint does not explain why recreation changes its status from interest to issue, and so it is impossible for the reader to evaluate whether the choice made by the author makes sense or not. Overall, I suspect that the IAN needs considerable refinement if it is to become a widely-used theoretical tool in the discipline.

It is also worth noting that the book omits discussion of some important and relevant literature, including Sidney Tarrow's book on social movements, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's classic on transnational networks and global environmental governance, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. (Cornell University Press, 1998); and Ken Conca's Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (MIT Press, 2005). These omissions would not be too troublesome were it not for the fact that some of Myint's statements about the novelty of his work would have to be toned down if this literature was referenced in the book. When Myint claims, for example, that “theoretical understanding of the roles of non-state actors and local citizens lags behind the practices of world politics” (p. 5), he neglects to notice that Conca (2005) has specifically examined international networking among water experts and the opposition of social movements to the construction of large dams as alternative types of informal institutions to shape environmental regimes. Linking his work to this important literature would have allowed Myint to engage in a productive dialogue with some excellent scholarship in this area of study, to the benefit of readers.

Despite these weaknesses, Governing International Rivers is a book of value to both practitioners and scholars interested in the politics of water management. Myint's focus on the Rhine and Mekong makes the book especially relevant, since there are few basins in the world that have been more contentious for longer periods of time than these. For those who study these two basins in particular, Myint's book will contribute to a better understanding of the effect that political disputes have on policy-making processes and thus will retain its scholarly value for years to come.