POLICY BRIEF: "Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands"

Publication date:
July 2025

Publication: 
Walking Alongside Communities: Supporting Community-Led Adaptation Resilience beyond Climate Change in Northern Thailand’s highlands

Download the policy brief here.

Visit Just Futures Mekong Fellowship Program.

Author: 
SHAO Meng, Kassirin Phiboon

This policy brief examines how upland agricultural communities in Northern Thailand navigate climate-related and intersecting risks through community bonds that assemble existing resources and institutions, exploring the promises and pitfalls thereof. Findings from an Indigenous Karen community illustrate community-led adaptive responses oriented toward securing sustainable livelihoods. Recently this community has faced increasingly frequent weather changes and unstable water access, compounding existing vulnerabilities including insecure land tenure, limited community-based natural resource management rights, and barriers to access early warning systems and “damage and loss” compensation mechanisms. As climate change presents both slow-onset and abrupt changes while multiplying market and institutional risks, this research reveals that future climate adaptation policies should emphasize community characteristics and agency and avoid overly-centralized, top-down measures.

BOOK CHAPTER: "Dams, Flows, and Data: Topologies of Power and Volumetric Hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin"

Publication date: May 2025

Publication: Violent Atmospheres: Political Ecologies of Livelihoods and Crises in Southeast Asia

Chapter title: Dams, Flows, and Data: Topologies of Power and Volumetric Hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin

Authors: Carl Grundy-Warr and Carl Middleton

Editors: Wolfram Dressler and Mary Mostafanezhad

See more details on the book here.

In this chapter, we focus on “topologies of power” (Allen 2016) relating to hydrological knowledge and data about river flows, including the “flood pulse”, that is are being profoundly changed by hydropower dam operation in the Mekong Basin. There is growing evidence that flows and volumes are becoming intensified objects-of-concern in transboundary hydropolitics and water diplomacy. Through various international alignments, developmental regimes, and geopolitical relations within the Mekong Basin, there are power topologies at work, whereby metrics such as investment flows, revenue streams and profits, electricity trade and kilowatt hours, and various volumes—especially that of water both flowing and stored behind in reservoirs—take on growing significance relative to geographic issues of distance, proximity, and place. 

We argue that as hydropower expands, it produces new topologies and volumetric hydropolitics that tend to subsume the ecological and social dynamics of the flood pulse. Securing and managing the flows of the flood pulse has become a speculative scientific hydrological arena for “designing flows”, and ongoing engineered mitigation. Our analysis considers volumetric politics as they relate to notions of “securing flows” and how and why hydropower architectures should be understood as political features of power-laden landscapes relating to dominant capital-state-technological assemblages of resource control. We critically reflect on an emerging volumetric logic in the region around hydropower mitigation technologies, hydropeaking, and designed flows and geo-engineered hydrology for managing ecological traits of the river, such as commercial and wild-capture fisheries. Before concluding, we also link our analysis of volumetric geopolitics to narratives of “sustainable hydropower” and climate change.

Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.

Citation: Grundy-Warr, C. and Middleton, C. (2025) “Dams, Flows, and Data: Topologies of Power and Volumetric Hydropolitics in the Mekong Basin” (pp 141-159) in Dressler, W. and Mostafanezhad, M. (eds.) Violent Atmospheres: Political Ecologies of Livelihoods and Crises in Southeast Asia. University of Hawai’i Press: Honolulu. ISBN-13: 9780824898465