3S Rivers Protection Network (3SPN) is a Cambodian local civil society organization, which was founded in Banlung Town, Ratanakiri Province in 2001 (as the Sesan Protection Network) and registered with the Ministry of Interior (as 3SPN) in 2005. The network was founded as a local coordinating body in the form of a civil society organisation in order to assist dam-affected communities living alongside the Sesan River in Cambodia after serious impacts occurred along the river caused by the hydropower dam construction upstream in Vietnam. 3SPN has since expanded its activities due to requests from villagers to cover and assist all villages situated along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers and works with partner organisations to assist communities living along the Sekong River.

The major focus of 3SPN’s work has been the establishment of a grass-roots community network, which covers all 74 villages along the Sesan and Srepok Rivers in Ratanakiri province, and its subsequent work in strengthening the capacity of network representatives to engage in advocacy, dialogue, information collection, research, monitoring, information awareness activities, and capacity building of their respective communities.

The core objective of the network has been to empower community representatives to advocate on their own behalf, in order to seek remedy and resolution for past, present and future impacts of hydropower and to become part of the decision-making process for future development activities in the region.

Over the past ten years, 3SPN has grown into a strong community rights-based network campaigning for the rights of thousands of indigenous people living along the Sesan, Srepok and Sekong Rivers. The network that has developed is made up primarily of men and women from 7 different ethnic minority groups, who have relied on the river’s natural resources for their livelihood and cultural activities and who have been marginalized from social services such as education and health care. 3SPN has been instrumental in linking various ethnicities and communities together and helping to promote women’s involvement in order to work towards gender equity. Through capacity building activities, the network has learned more about their human rights and the importance of protecting surrounding natural resources.

The network has also given them the tools they need to advocate on their own behalf on various issues affecting them and have been identified as important community leaders in their respective villages. This has made them focal points for other community members, who need assistance on various issues such as hydropower impacts, land-grabbing cases, illegal fishing, and logging, in the form of helping to bring people’s issues up to local authorities or writing letters of petitions. The building of the network has also helped produce some local authority support even when the issue has been perceived as a sensitive issue or against the development plans of the government.  3SPN has documented and produced reports on a variety of relevant issues including, but not limited to;

• economic costs were evaluated to demonstrate the scale of losses that Yali Falls dam caused in terms of damage to property and reduced livelihood activities in Ratanakiri province;
• a quantitative and qualitative fisheries study on the Sesan River, which documents changes to fisheries in terms of species and catch, along with other aquatic life, since the Yali Falls dam was built in Vietnam;
• various water quality testing studies looking at health-related parameters in the dry and rainy seasons, in order to better understand the link between upstream hydro activity and downstream water-related illnesses;
• field research of Sesan River communities who were abandoning their homes and villages in order to live on higher grounds in search of a better life due to fear of flooding caused by upstream dams and fear of dam breaking

Through our long-term advocacy work, 3SPN has also increased the capacity of local communities, the democratic space in which they work, and resulted in positive progress from government officials, including the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and Electricity of Vietnam (EVN), who have publicly acknowledged the negative downstream impacts experienced in Cambodia. The 3S Network aims to continue to support their dam-affected communities until their aims are realised.