Is Irrigationalism a Dominant Ideology in Securing Hydrotopia in Mekong Nation States?

ABSTRACT

For over six decades, grandiose proposals calling for significant expansion of public irrigation schemes have been commonplace throughout the Mekong region, irrespective of the political configuration or developmental stage of each state. From Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea to Thailand’s military and quasi-democratic regimes, irrigation has figured prominently on development agendas. Mainstream narratives around irrigation are embedded in a technocentric, developmental and nationalistic discourse, incorporating socially pre-conditioned beliefs and values that closely reflect the rhetoric of state-linked elites. This article critically examines some of the narratives employed by key actors and groups to justify ongoing practices and processes of irrigation development, focusing on Thailand and Cambodia. It seeks to look beyond conventional econometric and instrumental drivers, to consider other socio-political factors that may account for irrigation’s critical role as a “technology of control,” but which are rarely examined across comparative national contexts. Further, it proposes a dominant ideology of irrigation developmentalism or “irrigationalism” as a useful concept in explaining certain aspects of contemporary social power in these nations. State-led irrigation may be perceived as a utopian intervention that aids in the emergence of an effective monopolistic authority and control by bureaucracies and other powerful groups over development decision-making processes and silencing opposition.

KEY WORDS:

• Irrigation
• nationalism
• social engineering
• Thailand
• Cambodia
• hydrotopia

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge that much of the original intellectual inspiration for this article arose from discussions with my main doctoral supervisor, Professor Bruce Lankford at the University of East Anglia; with additional helpful early draft reviews provided by Dr John Dore, Dr Nate Matthews and Associate Professor Tanya Richardson.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a comprehensive treatment of relationships between water, infrastructure and political rule in light of Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” and some of the debates it has precipitated, see a recent special issue of Water Alternatives (Obertreis et al. 2016).

2. For Cambodia, see, for example, CEDAC (2009); de Silva, Johnston, and Sellamutu (2013). For Thailand, see, for example, Fan, Somchai, and Nuntaporn (2004); Songkhram and Pacharee (2003).

3. Hirschman (2015, 47) described the RID as a “kingdom within a kingdom” due to its exceptional power within the Thai bureaucratic system, significant budgetary and material control and concomitant lack of accountability to external actor groups.

4. This scheme has been mooted for years by successive governments dating back to General Prem Tinsulanonda’s regime of the late 1980s. In 2016, RID claimed that the Mekong diversion will benefit 1.24 million households who will earn on average an extra 199,000 baht per year (Bangkok Post, May 8, 2016). In 2018, a 20-year water management plan announced by the Office of National Water Resources promised to make the country’s irrigation system “more efficient” by developing a “new system” that will “divert water” and link up “all water resources to increase water volume to 2.5 billion cumecs” (Bangkok Post, December 7, 2018).

5. The Mekong Committee was the institutional forerunner to today’s Mekong River Commission, established by a coalition of United Nations and Western government interests seeking to influence the geo-political landscape of the region through hydraulic development processes.

6. The term “hydrotopia” can be credited in part to Steve Burian and Ed Barbanell who used it to describe the utopian visions adopted by settlers and later planners in the development of the arid western USA in transforming the region into “a new Eden, a hydraulic society made possible through engineering” (see http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/workshops/sustainability2012/courses/barbanell.html).

7. The Angkar, translating as “The Organisation,” was a term used by the CPK to refer to the ruling authorities in communist-controlled areas after the 1975 revolution (Ablin and Hood 1990).

8. Tyner and colleagues (2018) have calculated that the Democratic Kampuchea regime constructed over 7,000 km of canal and over 350 reservoirs and suggest that the irrigation programme was more systematic and less ad hoc than most critics acknowledge.

9. This date may mark the anniversary of General Vo Nguyen Giap’s orderly withdrawal of Vietnamese military forces from Cambodian territory following a brief incursion, which Pol Pot claimed as a great “victory” over an invading army (Ross 1987).

10. For example, reference is made to thirteenth-century laws supposedly laid down by King Mengrai (known as Mengrai Sart) and credited by the bureaucracy for codifying twentieth-century small-scale, muang fai irrigation in northern Thailand (Vanpen 2006).

11. The notion of “false consciousness,” a term sometimes ascribed to Marx, was actually first used by Engels (Heywood 1998). It suggests that those subject to ideological domination are deflected from the perception and pursuit of their own class interests by hegemonic forms of thought. Although it can take many forms, Lukes (2005, 149) suggests that it is best understood as “a cognitive power of considerable significance and scope: namely the power to mislead.”