The River of Life explores how riparian communities have changed their livelihoods to adapt to state-led development and resource enclosures in the Mekong Basin. Yos Santasombat presents a compelling argument in his introduction for why the region needs an alternative development model rooted in local knowledge and transnational civil society in order to resist the degradation of the Mekong Basin's river and forest resources. He weaves together three well-worn ideas within development literature—transnational enclosure, civil society, and local knowledge—to make his argument. The concept of transnational enclosure focuses on how centralized decision-making processes enable “state and commercial interests to gain control of territories that have traditionally been used and cherished by local peoples in the Mekong Basin, transforming these areas into expendable resources for exploitation” (p. 8). Santasombat claims that a cross-scalar and well-networked civil society (led by NGOs) that draws upon riparian communities' local knowledge can mitigate impacts of river and forest enclosures. He draws upon the famous work of Harold Conklin in order to theorize local knowledge, which Santasombat defines as a dynamic and situated body of knowledge intimately connected to the ethnoecology of riparian communities. To illustrate his argument, he presents ethnographic research about riparian communities from Laos, Thailand, and Yunnan Province, China.
Santasombat lays out his argument in three sections comprised of seven chapters. He begins in chapter 1 by describing the biogeography of the Mekong Basin. Most importantly, he explains how the basin's ecosystems and fisheries rely upon annual flood cycles, which are seriously disrupted by hydroelectric dams. In chapter 2, he introduces the major causes of transnational enclosures in the region (such as dams, transportation infrastructure, and agro-industry plantations) and shows how these are driven by a neoclassical, growth-oriented development ideology. He describes how these enclosures will impact riparian livelihoods by reducing fisheries and destroying riverbank gardens.
In the second section, Santasombat explores the livelihoods, development history, and adaptive strategies of local communities within three different regions of the Mekong Basin. Chapter 3 focuses on the history of Chinese development policy and its impact on forest conservation and wild-caught fisheries in the village of Manfeilong in southern Yunnan. In chapter 4, he turns to the environment and development challenges confronted by three villages in Luang Prabang Province of northern Laos, exploring at length the problems caused by the government's resettlement and hydropower projects. The last chapter of the section describes how fishing communities in Chiang Rai Province in northern Thailand have adapted to a decline in wild-caught fisheries caused by Chinese dams on the upper Mekong.
The book's final section consists of two chapters that echo the arguments made in the introduction. In chapter 6, Santasombat again presents his case that by using local knowledge, riparian communities have been able to adapt to environmental and socioeconomic changes caused by rapid state-led development in the Mekong Basin. For example, villagers in the Ing River Basin in northern Thailand have used local knowledge of fish spawning and migrations to create seasonal fishing limits for inland water bodies. The last chapter concludes with a call for transnational civil society to mobilize local communities to push for more bottom-up planning processes in the development of rivers, wetlands, and upland forests in the Mekong Basin.
In general, readers new to the development issues within the Mekong Basin will find this book useful because of its rich detail of local communities' livelihoods and adaptive responses to change. More importantly, Santasombat's analysis of how Chinese dams have already impacted downstream, riparian communities provides much needed information for activists, policymakers, and scholars as other riparian states in the region, such as Laos, develop their hydropower resources.
Development scholars will find this book lacking in several key areas. First, Santasombat provides no discussion of his research methodology. His rich ethnographic data thus loses some credibility because of this opacity. Moreover, he does not engage with the critical development literature about local knowledge and participatory development. He thus overlooks how civil society organizations frequently co-opt, misrepresent, or exploit local communities' ethnoecological knowledge. For example, he concludes his book by offering Thai Baan research as a model for future transnational activism informed by local knowledge. Thai Baan was a grassroots project in the early 2000s that sought to incorporate local knowledge into decision-making processes regarding the Pak Mun dam in northeastern Thailand. However, Santasombat does not mention that the Thai Baan movement experienced significant financial, organizational, and political challenges when civil society organizations tried to scale it up to include regional projects. Lastly, many of the book's sources are from before 2003 even though it was published in 2011. Some of the book's information is therefore outdated given the rapid developments within the Mekong Basin in the last decade. Nonetheless, as riparian states in the region charge ahead with new transnational enclosures, The River of Life helps to keep the spotlight on the communities most impacted by this development, which is crucial for understanding and responding to social and environmental injustices in the Mekong Basin.
