Final Workshop

On 18^th December 2020, IRD, AFD and WANASEA⁽¹⁾ organized the workshop of the research program: Inequalities and Environmental Changes in the Mekong River Basin⁽²⁾. This one-year project is part of the European Facility for a research program on Inequalities in Developing and Emerging Countries, which is coordinated by the AFD⁽³⁾.

The workshop gathered participants from development, research institutions, and NGOs, both in Hanoi and through video conference. Project researchers presented the structure of the project, and on-progress results of the systematic analysis of the inequality-environmental change nexus in 5 countries of the Mekong region including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. By collecting comprehensive database and transparent and systematic mapping, the program provides a pool of resources for future analyses, identifies uninvestigated research questions and will provide scientific base for policy action on the theme of tenure rights and inequalities (systematic review with narrative synthesis).

The collective book with case studies on the link between environmental changes and inequalities is introduced. It is planned to be published in the first quarter of 2021.

The workshop also took the change to introduce and discuss with the stakeholders the proposal for a project: Environmental Transition and Inequalities in South-East Asia (ETIS, 2021-2027), developed under the collaboration of CREED and WANASEA. The objective of this research and capacity building project is to contribute to building the next generation of policymakers for the environmental transition, as well a network of leading sustainability science experts in South East Asia. It aims at building local interdisciplinary scientific knowledge, guide evidence-based public policies, and foster scientific and policy regional coordination that ultimately bring about the socioeconomic conditions for ecologically resilient economies in Southeast Asia. Drawing on the lessons drawn from 15 years of experience in research and capacity building programs, this six-year project aims to contribute to the design of a groundbreaking, virtuous and sustainable model of development for the region⁽⁴⁾

Mekong Research Project Final Restitution – Dec 2020

MATERIALS FOR DOWNLOAD

Introduction Activities (ppt)

Mekong Equality (ppt)

Collective book (ppt)

ETIS – Concept Note (pdf)

A research facility – To better understand inequalities (English)(pdf)

A research facility – To better understand inequalities (French)(pdf)

¹ WANASEA – “Strenghten the Production, Management and Outreach Capacities of Research in the Field of WAter and NAtural Resources in South-Est Asia
² https://www.afd.fr/en/carte-des-projets/inequalities-and-environmental-changes-lower-mekong-river-basin
³ https://www.afd.fr/en/une-facilite-de-recherche-pour-mieux-comprendre-les-inegalites
⁴ ETIS will be implemented by the Center for Research and Expertise on Education and Development (CREED, Bordeaux, France, www.creedev.org), a private organization that promotes research for
development. ETIS will be coordinated jointly by Benjamin BUCLET in Europe and Stéphane LAGRÉE in
South-East Asia.

EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities

The Research Facility on Inequalities, a partnership between the European Commission (DevCo) and AFD, has launched its series of weekly webinars. After three years of research aiming to understand and address inequalities in developing and emerging countries, it is now time to share some of the results.

Join us for the seventh session of the EU-AFD Research Facility on Inequalities’ webinars to be held on Monday, July 6^th at 11.00 am CEST, dedicated to the project Inequalities and environmental changes in the lower Mekong river basin.

Huynh Thi Phuong Linh, researcher at French Institute of Research for Development (IRD) in Ha Noi, will present the paper “Inequalities and Environmental changes in the Mekong region: a scoping review”, co-written with Stéphane Lagrée, Etienne Espagne and Alexis Drogoul.

WEBINAR 7 │ Monday, July 6^th 2020 11:00 CET

“Inequalities and Environmental changes in the Mekong region: a scoping review”

Huynh Thi Phuong Linh⁽¹⁾, Stéphane Lagrée⁽²⁾, Etienne Espagne⁽³⁾, Alexis Drogoul⁽⁴⁾

Click here to watch

Rising inequalities and accelerating environmental changes are two of the most significant and intertwined challenges of the twenty-first century. The Mekong River basin is both a crucial ecological constituent of the South-East Asian Region and a driving force of its economic dynamics. Numerous studies have tackled one specific aspects of the relation between environmental changes and inequalities in the region, but no holistic assessment has been conducted so far.

It is thus essential to conduct scoping and systematic reviews on the topic to help sort out the consolidated results which is useful for policy makers; then to identify from the topics where more research would be needed. The environmental aspects investigated include (but are not limited to) dam construction, pollution, resources over-extraction, land degradation and climate change impacts; their impacts vary from one group of population to another and are strongly informed by social inequalities.

This presentation covers the result of scoping review in which scientific, institutional and gray documents are scoped and filtered according to criteria of inclusion and exclusion. 14.407 studies from five countries including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam are investigated. The results will produce a systematic map of the different manifestations of environmental changes and inequalities relation studied and their distribution across countries and knowledge realms, identify gap of knowledge, and provide foundation for systematic review.

Keywords: Inequalities, Environmental changes, Mekong countries, Scoping review, Systematic mapping.

¹ French Institute of Research for Development (IRD). Contact: huynhtplinh@gmail.com, linh.huynhthiphuong@ird.fr
² Nantes University – ERASMUS+ WANASEA project
³ French Development Agency (AFD)
⁴ French Institute of Research for Development (IRD)

Call for contribution to a collective book on:

“Inequalities and environmental changes in the Mekong River Basin”

Co-editors Alexis Drogoul¹, Etienne Espagne², Linh Huynh Thi Phuong³, Stéphane Lagrée⁴

AFD Editions

Rising inequalities and accelerating environmental changes are two of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. But how do they relate to each other? Do they have common drivers? As stated in Hamman et al (2018), most research is one-directional, i.e. focusing on the specific effects of social inequalities on the environment (Cushing et al., 2015) or vice-versa (De Laubier Longuet, 2019), and fails to take into account a more complex understanding of how inequality and the state of the environment interact with each other.

Throughout South-East Asia, and especially in the least advanced countries, socio-economic inequalities, relating to income, employment, education, access to land, as well as demographic differences, such as age or gender, are more and more associated with unequal exposure to environmental risk factors (Bangalore et al., 2016). These factors can represent direct threats to people’s lives (landslides, flooding, etc.), or contribute, in an indirect way, to the degradation of agricultural land, propagation of diseases, or, more widely, health issues (air pollution, etc.) (Narloch and Bangalore, 2018). They most often put already disadvantaged people at significantly higher risk regarding environmental effects. Environmental risk factors are not only consequences of global climate changes. They are also (and, until now, most often) consequences of the growing pressures of human societies on their ecosystems. As shown in Inghals et al. (2018), the Mekong region has been radically transformed in the last ten years by the pace and scale of large-scale land acquisitions through foreign and domestic investments, leading to growing inequalities, rural unrest, and a process of simplification and commodification increasingly replacing traditional and natural systems.

In an attempt to gather evidences and works on this topic, we call for contributions to a collective book. We specifically look for manuscripts that illustrate the inequality – environmental nexus in the region (Mekong/Southeast Asia covering one the five countries) as a whole or in one/some of the following five countries: Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. The research should cover one or several environmental elements, including land, water, air, agriculture, climate, ecosystem, biodiversity, forest, mining, in relation to one or various dimensions of inequality, including but not limited to economic (eg. Access to various needs for life), social (eg. Identity, class), cultural (eg. Perspective, belief), political (eg. Participation), spatial (eg. Geography), environment (eg. Environmental Justice) and knowledge (eg. information, education) inequalities. Among others, we specifically put priority on researches that include comparative elements: e.g., comparisons before and after social or environmental changes, or between social groups, communities, places or countries.

This book comes as a by-product of an ongoing systematic review of the inequality-environmental changes nexus in the Mekong region, which will propose, through an exhaustive and qualified search in both the scientific and grey literatures, and critical appraisal in assessing the quality of the collected documents. A synthesis of this systematic review will appear in the book, together with an operational conclusion relative to the state of the current knowledge. One of the main aims of this call for contributions is to illustrate the complexity of the nexus with different case studies, and also propose the broadest possible coverage in terms of geographical and thematic scopes. We therefore reserve the possibility to suggest narrowing or enlarging, when necessary, the scope of the proposals.

Timeline:

• 29^th of February 2020: submission of an extended abstract (three-page minimum) including a description of the research objectives, the methodologies, some preliminary results, and bibliography.
• 13^th of March 2020: notification of acceptance (for both the conference and the chapter)
• 1^st of July 2020: submission of the full chapter
• 3^rd of August 2020: reviews due by the editors and anonymous referees
• 14^th of September 2020: final version of the chapter due
• November 2020: first pdf version of the book

Language: English

Contact persons:

Huynh Thi Phuong Linh, huynhtplinh@gmail.com
Etienne Espagne, espagnee@afd.fr
Stéphane Lagrée, stephane.lagree@univ-nantes.fr, fsp2s@yahoo.fr
Alexis Drogoul: alexis.drogoul@ird.fr

¹ Senior researcher at IRD (French Institute of Research for Development), representative for Vietnam and the Philippines.
² Senior economist at French Development Agency (AFD).
³ Researcher in Social Sciences at IRD.
⁴ International coordinator of the ERASMUS+ WANASEA project: “Strengthen the Production and Management and Outreach Capacities of Research in the field of WAter and NAtural Resources in Southeast Asia”, Nantes University.

From 01/09/2019 to 01/08/2020

Partners:

AFD
WANASEA (Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union)
IRD

Contacts:

Etienne Espagne, Senior Economist, AFD
Stéphane Lagrée, WANASEA, International Coordinator
Alexis Drogoul, Representative of IRD Vietnam – Philippines

This project proposes a systematic analysis of the inequality-environmental change nexus in the Lower Mekong River Basin Region. It aims at building scientific base for policy action as well as identifying uninvestigated research questions. In addition, case studies on relevant fields in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, representing existing or ongoing researches undertaken by the research network (WANASEA – “Strengthen the Production, Management and Outreach Capacities of Research in the Field of Water and Natural Resources in South-Est Asia” – and IRD) will form a collective book on the topic, together with the systematic review.

Context

Mekong River Basin is crucial for the livelihoods of millions of people of six countries: China, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The last four countries are categorized as the Lower Mekong Basin, where two thirds of the population rely on the water resources for subsistence agriculture and fisheries as well as to develop other activities such as transport and tourism. The current anthropogenic causes for environmental degradation in the region include the construction of dams, over-extraction of underground water, pollution from fast developing cities, deforestation, sand extraction, and other activities which create risks to human settlements that were even unheard of ten years ago. More often than not, the impacts of changes vary between groups of people and strongly informed by the social inequalities. Climate change adds to this ongoing environmental degradation by increasing the region’s fragility. For example, one meter of sea-level rise would cause displacement of 7 million inhabitants and flood the homes of more than 14.2 million people in the Mekong Delta.

These major anthropogenic degradations take place in a specific regional and global socio-political context. On the one hand, an accelerated rural transition has been pushed by national governments with the idea of integrating the agricultural sector into the global markets, but also under the pressure of global financial markets searching for returns in the aftermaths of the financial crisis. This rural transition occurs at a pace that fragilizes the economies when they cannot absorb the workforce in excess into the developing industrial or services sectors. In this respect, the Mekong region is a spectacular example of the economic and environmental consequences of the 2008 financial collapse on developing and emerging economies. On the other hand, the countries of the Mekong region are also subjected to the geopolitical shift putting China in the center of a new globalized system. Most of them contribute heavily to this new dynamic, which also severely impacts their environment and inequalities altogether.

For years, international and local organizations, South-East Asian governments as well as bilateral and multilateral development banks have been working to help the Mekong countries mitigate these impacts. However, the lack of a systematic review of existing knowledge in the Mekong makes it difficult to evaluate the impact of specific actions on inequalities and environmental quality. At a moment when governments (both regionally and globally) call for urgent actions, it is time to consider a systemic approach to the environment – inequality nexus in the region.

Objectives

Rising inequalities and accelerating environmental changes are two of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. But how do they relate to each other? Do they have common dynamic factors? This research project proposes a specific regional study on how these multidimensional variables of inequality and environmental changes relate and interact with each other. It aims at building scientific base for policy action as well as identifying uninvestigated research questions

Throughout the region, socio-economic inequalities relating to income, employment, education, access to land and other services, as well as demographic differences, such as age, gender, ethnic, and so on are more and more associated with unequal exposure to environmental risk factors. These factors can represent direct threats to people’s lives (landslides, flooding, etc.), or contribute, in an indirect way, to the degradation of agricultural land, propagation of diseases, or, more widely, health issues (air pollution, etc.). They often put already disadvantaged groups at significantly higher risk for environmental effects. Besides, the existing inequality might also contribute to the environmental changes.

Environmental risk factors considered in this project are not solely linked to global climate changes. They are also (and, for the moment, most often) the direct consequences of the growing pressure of human populations and the economic dynamics on the ecosystems. This is particularly visible throughout the Mekong River Basin. The Mekong region has been radically transformed in the last ten years by the pace and scale of large-scale land acquisitions through foreign and domestic investments leading to growing inequalities, rural unrest, and a process of simplification and commodification increasingly replacing traditional and natural systems. The spatial scope of analysis cannot thus remain purely national.

At this stage however, it seems difficult for the local or national decision maker, let alone any regional institution, to take science-based action, as long as no mapping of this scattered knowledge exists, highlighting the diverse quality of the studies, their data sources, their representativeness, the needs for further studies or on the contrary the well-established results. Scoping and systematic reviews, a technic initially coming from the field of medicine, can provide with such a dashboard instrument.

Beyond the project, an objective would be to build a research and capacities research project mobilizing the main academic and non-academic actors in the Southeast Asia region on the research directions which would have emerged from this systematic study.

Method

Scoping the existing knowledge on inequalities and environmental change in the Mekong region

First, we will conduct a preliminary scoping review of the related scientific and grey literature on inequalities and environmental changes in the Lower Mekong region. The resulting literature and data repository created by the review can be of use to researchers and stakeholders interested in the topic. As such, it represents a scientific result and output that can be published in a first scientific paper. It also represents a crucial first step for the two co-implementing partners in the region, who represent a broad network of interdisciplinary researchers in the four countries of the Lower Mekong River basin, and who intend to develop broader research programs based on this scoping review.

Building a dashboard for operational recommendations through a systematic review

Second, we will develop a systematic review. In this second step, quality filters apply, it involves data extraction as well as quantitative analysis. This step requires the work of a full-time post-doc, helped by experts in the different fields represented in the scoping review, and possibly the help of documentalists from the different represented countries. It is thus crucial to be able to gather the expertise of a network of researchers and operational experts already working in the different dimensions of the subject. This is what the WANASEA network, combined with the IRD network in South-East Asia as well as experts from AFD in the region, the Mekong River Commission (MRC), the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the IUCN will allow to convey. This expert committee will commit to contribute a few days in the year to help the post-doctoral expert taken the right decisions in the filter of data, methods and papers.

Integrating case studies illustrations in the general framework

As a third step of the project, we propose to develop four case-studies which would shed the light on different existing research programs which already studied some aspects of the relation between inequalities and environmental changes along the lower Mekong river basin, from Laos to Vietnam.

Results

The first results of the project will be presented for the international conference on “Climate impacts in South-East Asia” in Quy Nhon (Vietnam) in march 2020. They will lead at least two research papers and a collective book.

The final results will be presented at the ASEAN Water Platform (WANASEA) in the summer 2020 in Chiang Mai University (Thailand).

The project information is also available on AFD website at:
https://www.afd.fr/en/inequalities-and-environmental-changes-lower-mekong-river-basin

Kick Off Meeting

MATERIALS FOR DOWNLOAD

Meeting Minutes