Enclosing the Commons?: Hydropower Dams in the Lancang-Mekong River

Since the 1990s hydropower dams are increasingly being constructed on the mainstream of the Lancang-Mekong River to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. Hydropower dams are large infrastructures that bring forth implications to the environment, thereby contesting the Lancang-Mekong River as a transboundary commons. Transboundary commons such as the Lancang-Mekong River are not easily enclosed. Yet governance structures and spatial arrangements serving the interests of hydropower development may lead to the exclusion of riparian communities living along the river basin. By means of a thematic topographical map and document analysis, this paper argues how the building of hydropower dams in the mainstream Lancang-Mekong reconstructs the transboundary commons into a hydropower generating system in which the river functions primarily as a system rather than a watercourse that gives and sustains life.