FRANÇOIS MOLLE, TIRA FORAN and MIRA KÄKÖNEN, eds. Contested Waterscapes in the Mekong Region: Hydropower, Livelihoods and Governance. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd., 2009, xviii+426 p.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most important undertakings of this book is that it seeks to understand critical issues of livelihood, development, and governance in mainland Southeast Asia through a focus on both water and land resources, in relationship to one another and in their relationship to societies in the region.This de-centers what I would argue is a focus in a large amount of academic literature that, through an explicit focus on "land"-and to a lesser extent "water"-essentializes these categories as distinct resources rather than questioning their division and exploring their connections.The concept that draws this out and binds the book's chapters together is the "waterscape": "landscapes viewed through the lens of their water resources, taken as a defining element of both ecosystems and human life" (p.2).I believe the concept has been inspired by Erik Swyngedouw's (1999) important work on the Spanish waterscape where the term is developed as a critique of long-standing academic scholarship that separated the social and natural elements of water (instead of seeing them as connected).However, the term also functions as a critique of the more traditional understanding of scale in water resources analysis by questioning the naturalized scale of the "water basin" or "watershed."I would also argue that this innovative focus on waterscape owes much to the team of editors and authors that put Contested Waterscapes together.The authors are part of the Mekong Program on Water, Environment and Resilience, or M-POWER, network, which combines both activists and academics (and activist-academics) in the Mekong Region which includes Cambodia, Lao PDR, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam and China's Yunnan Province.Rather than offer pessimistic conclusions, the authors "invite the reader to explore more thoroughly how waterscapes have been, and are being, transformed" (p.13) through economic change, environmental uncertainty, and grassroots resistance.Contested Waterscapes is divided into three parts, respectively focused on "Hydropower Expansion in the Mekong Region," "Livelihoods and Development," and "Institutions, Knowledge and Power."Readers already familiar with hydropower development in the region may find the information in Part I increasingly dated in the three years that have elapsed since the book's 2009 publication date. 1) However, these chapters do provide essential historical background combined with informed analysis of local and region-wide hydropower development and governance issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".