Hydropower and Environmental Justice in Southeast Asia: examining social justice and adverse impact in the pursuit of new sources of energy

The rapid and dramatic economic advances made in Southeast Asia over the past decade have accelerated the need to find a sustainable and plentiful supply of energy for the region. Hydropower has been regarded as a central solution to this problem. According to the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems, there are 364 dams on the Mekong River, 241 of which are already complete; Vietnam has the highest number of existing hydropower dams at 20, but Laos plans to build 61. Many advocates regard the building of these dams as a boon to the region through job creation, the improvement of industrial infrastructure and the secure supply of electricity. In particular, new energy projects in Laos have reaped hundreds of millions of US dollars in foreign investment (Foreign Affairs 2016). But this rapid dam building is resulting in the displacement of millions of people; the loss of ancestral lands and rights, damage to ecosystems and their wildlife and fauna; the exacerbation of the already severe effects of climate change; and the potential destruction of most significant inland fisheries in the world.

Much of the complexity of the issues surrounding water security along the Mekong is premised on the juxtaposition of state-based economic development with environmental security. For the latter to be achieved, water has to be regarded as an inalienable public good for all inhabitants, whereas the former imposes artificial barriers, posing a threat to neighbours and downstream communities. This doctoral project would examine the spaces for advocacy engaging with these issues, at national, regional and international levels, seeking to test the ways in which citizen activists seek social justice claims in the face of the adverse impact on the lives of millions of people of dam building in pursuit of new sources of energy.

The resulting PhD will draw knowledge from the expertise in International Relations and Human Geography at Birmingham and further advance the relationship. The three states of Vietnam, Laos and Thailand offer valuable foci for research into the form of complex spatiality outlined in the previous section, making a single-country or comparative analysis equally valuable as test cases for this intellectual cross-fertilisation. The fieldwork will analyse the ways in which different agents of advocacy engage with and articulate the space for contestation over hydropower in the region, offering important insights into the contemporary strategies and discourses of activist movements in the face of a seemingly inexorable onslaught of state-sponsored dam building in the name of sustainable development.

The successful candidate must have a proven track record in the study of advocacy or social justice and a background within International Relations, Political Science and/or Human or Political Geography, at a minimum level of a good Masters’ degree. It would be preferable for the student to be proficient in at least one of the following three languages: Thai, Vietnamese, Lao. However, a region-level approach to advocacy is also possible through the medium of English. The successful candidate must be willing to conduct fieldwork and must show a desire to work across the relevant disciplines to advance interdisciplinary knowledge.

For more details on the scholarship, please visit our University webpage: http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/postgraduate/pgr/global-challenges-scholarship.aspx