Governing International Rivers: Polycentric Politics in the Mekong and the Rhine by Tun Myint (review)

A photographer can draw attention to a subject by zooming in with the lens, sending the extraneous details of a scene into the background. For the scholar trying to present a clear picture of transnational environmental governance, the multiplicity of relevant actors means that sharpening the focus on one set of actors risks distorting the reality of how their interconnectedness shapes governance processes. Tun Myint highlights the significance of these relationships by analyzing cases of institutional transformation in the Mekong and the Rhine river basins, showing how local communities and non-state actors gained legitimacy and political authority in their push for institutional change. These cases provide the empirical foundations for Myint’s call for a more polycentric approach to the study of global environmental politics, which seeks to include traditionally unrecognized actors in more dynamic analytical frameworks of international relations.

The nascent theory of polycentricity that Myint introduces “treats multiple centers of decision making that are formally independent of each other and influence one another in governance processes as having explanatory power” (p. 199). Myint’s primary analytical contribution in support of this new theory is to develop the issues, interests, actor network (IAN) framework, which is then applied to each layer of governance (local, national and transnational) in the cases. He argues that these three institutional drivers (issues, interests, and actors) combine to generate dynamic political processes within and between the layers. If one of the drivers is weak (e.g., low interest), there will be less dynamism within the social and political processes. The power of the IAN framework is that it draws from the study of rules-based governance processes as well as values- based social processes, showing how both combine to shape the behaviors of human actors.

The cases that Myint selects are a double-edged sword in terms of demonstrating the relevance of polycentric governance. On the one hand, by selecting the Mekong and Rhine river basins he has chosen cases in dissimilar regions, composed of countries with starkly different regime types, development trajectories, and environmental challenges. Showing how such divergent cases benefit from a polycentric analysis does demonstrate the wide applicability of the approach, perhaps even more so to regions that lack a highly developed civil society and where the risk of overlooking such actors in institutional analysis may be greater. A weakness of this case selection, however, is that the relative importance of each layer of governance is still highly situational. Some realities of governance in the Mekong case in particular have been glossed over in the eagerness to dismiss state-centric approaches. For example, the transnational layer of governance in the Mekong is still relatively weak. The total absence of the Mekong River Commission (MRC) from the case study on the construction of the Pak Mun Dam reveals a lack of interplay between governance layers that remains unacknowledged. Also, the degree to which the Thai state was influenced by local actors reflects a level of political openness that is not characteristic of the region, where environmental activists have been silenced by regimes that still retain firm control over policy-making and political participation. The recent controversies over the Xayaburi Dam in Laos, for example, challenge the degree to which states in the region are constrained by political pressure from within and outside of the state. Myint does include a measure of political freedom as one of three factors (along with knowledge and assets) that establish the power of local actors, but he weakens his argument when he tries to apply the same framework to the Rhine case to account for the early policy failures in addressing water pollution. He argues that “the Chemical and Chloride conventions allowed political freedom only to states. Other actors, such as industries, citizens and NGOs, were not considered legitimate and viable actors in decision-making processes” (p. 215). This lack of formal representation of non-state actors during international treaty-making is not comparable to the...