Linking environmental security to transboundary water governance to manage the Mekong River

Since the 1990s, as global economic development has become increasingly integrated and environmental problems have worsened, perspectives on resource management that link social and ecological problems have become more influential (Ostrom, 1990). Over this same period, understanding of security has also evolved. Driven by environmental and economic change in an interdependent world, state security considerations are expanding from the traditional focus on maintaining borders through military means to begin to include nontraditional elements of security such as ecological degradation, resource scarcity, and human well-being (Floyd & Matthew, 2013). As this broadening evolves, scholars and experts have used the phrase “environmental security studies” to capture some of these developments. Floyd and Matthew (2013, p. 2) point out that environmental security encompasses “a wide range of analytical and normative meanings and positions”. For the purposes of this chapter, environmental security represents efforts to inject interdisciplinary understanding of ecological and social concerns into international deliberations with the goal of influencing states toward more adaptive, transboundary behaviour. A major goal would be the creation and implementation of policies to reduce risk and maintain critical ecological functions while supporting human capacity to adapt to change.

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