In addition to the already constructed Yali Falls dam, a cascade of dams are now mostly completed on the Sesan and Srepok Rivers in Vietnam and proposed for the Sekong River in Lao PDR. A number of these dams are either currently in a state of construction or operation and were planned without people’s participation nor adequate or complete Environmental and Social Impact Assessments. Dam-affected communities have yet to receive mitigation or compensation for the impacts that they have suffered from Yali Falls dam despite communities’ best efforts to bring this issue to various responsible authorities including, governments, dam builders and stakeholders.
The entire 3S area is a mosaic and a mixture of different and over-lapping land-utilisation, land tenure, and user rights regarding natural resources. The political will of governments in Cambodia to sustainably management Ratanakiri’s natural resources and effectively protect the environment and the people that depend upon it for their survival is questionable. Whilst Cambodia has legislation that should safeguard the environment and ensure adequate protection for affected communities, in practice their effectiveness is limited due to inadequate resources and institutional disincentive. Cambodian politicians regularly endorse extensive hydropower development plans indicating that these projects should be pushed through approval processes without full, participatory, or transparent Environmental (EIA) or Social Impacts Assessments (SIA) being completed.
Given the trans-boundary nature and damaging effects of hydropower dams on the 3S Rivers and its communities, combined with the lack of a proper regulatory and legal framework that effectively balances power production with ecological and social needs, the policy and practice of constructing hydropower plants on Mekong tributaries should be reviewed. Moreover, it should be done within the context of global best practices and state responsibilities under the Mekong River Commission’s ‘1995 Agreement on Cooperation for Sustainable Development in the Mekong River Basin’ and acknowledging the World Commission on Dams guidelines.
Overall, details on hydropower development decisions are not clear, complete, nor made readily available by the respective stakeholders. Cambodia still places large hydropower development as the primary solution for meeting its energy generation needs with the disregard for smaller scale projects or even more decentralised renewable energy generation methods or the opinions of local community whose lives will be hugely negatively impacted should these large developments go ahead.
3SPN’s role as a civil society organisation is to work closely with government, private sector and other stakeholders to provide feedback and ultimately reach a group consensus in order to ensure that best practice policies for environmental and social development are fully respected and implemented.