Southeast Asian Seminar: Law, governance and justice in the Mekong region, Friday 25th May

What role do laws and lawyers play among technologies of governance operative in the Mekong River Basin today? What might "enviornmental justice" imply in the interplayof those technologies? When and how does "justice" become a concern in cultures of legality oriented around the Mekong RiverBasin? This presentation addresses these questions with reference to the pulurality of laws and governance techniques to which stakeholders appeal in the context of water resources development in the Mekong Region. Our research spans legal knowledge practices both public and private and private and focuses on the articulation of national and international law regimes in this international river basin. The presentation is based on document reviews, interviews and associated fieldwork in Cambodia,Laos, Thailand andVietnam. More specifically, we takethe cases of the Xayaburi Dam, the Sesan RiverBasin and upper Sekong tributary dams as contexts in which toexplore the complex webs of law and governance at different scales in the Mekong.