Southeast Asia Regional Program

The Greater Mekong Sub-Region Amid Globalization

The Mekong River, or “Mother of Rivers,” flows a distance of 4,800 kilometers from the Tibetan plateau into Southern China’s Yunnan Province, Myanmar, Lao PDR, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. These countries make up a developmental area referred to as the “Greater Mekong Sub-region” (GMS). The sub-region is vast, diverse and dynamic, encompassing more than 240 million people with a myriad of ethnicities and cultures.

Following decades of armed conflicts, relative peace in recent years has fostered economic liberalization, increasing inter-governmental cooperation in infrastructural development, and freer cross-border flows of labor, goods, and information. However, enhanced sub-regional integration, has also posed corresponding challenges to existing lifestyles and cultures, and serious health and environmental threats.

Many people in the sub-region are concerned that the market-oriented vision for economic development of the GMS has often not been balanced by social and human development. Shifting economic demands on transnational, shared resources like rivers and forests are altering delicate balances, often to the detriment of marginalized communities.

Plans to increase the navigability of the Mekong mainstream by the removal of rapids and the building of dams are opening up new possibilities for tourism and intra-regional trade. At the same time, these activities also destroy fisheries that people in the region have depended on for their food and livelihoods.


Industrialization and large-scale trade have further led to the targeting of mountainous border areas for road construction, logging and large hydro-electric dams. These rapid changes introduce long-term costs in terms of climate change and soil erosion, and unknown consequences due to a loss of habitat bio-diversity upon which upland ethnic communities depend.

Likewise, growing tourism provides windfall economic infusions, but simultaneously threatens deep-seated traditions and customs. As a reaction to this effacement of local cultures, identity politics based on ethnicity and religion are on the rise, and tensions are multiplying both within and across countries.

As a general trend, the unequal and asymmetric development in the sub-region is creating an unprecedented flow of people, capital and goods across borders, including illicit trafficking in labor, prostitution, arms, drugs and other contraband.

These multiple flows are inevitably linked to the spread of serious infectious diseases, such as dengue fever and malaria as well as SARS, and more currently avian influenza. The combination of high mobility, intravenous drug use, and unsafe sex practices has further caused many parts of the sub-region – Cambodia, Thailand and Yunnan – to become flash points of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.


Learning Across Boundaries (LAB)
Grant-making Approach

With the increasing interconnectivity and complexity in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, there is a pressing need to assess the impacts of globalization and regionalism on the lives of poor and excluded people, their social systems, cultures and environments. Development efforts ought to pay attention to changing dynamics and their trans-boundary ramifications, encompassing not only conventional geopolitical borders, but also the less tangible boundaries of gender, ethnic and religious identities.

Considering that trans-boundary trends cannot be addressed in isolation by a single actors, collaborations become essential in fostering comprehensive knowledge and effective responses to emerging cross-border and inter-cultural challenges.

Thus, the Learning Across Boundaries in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (LAB) strategy has been developed to promote a process of collective learning among individuals and organizations in the sub-region through provision of grant support to meet five synergistic goals:

1. Developing greater understanding of sub-regional dynamics.
2. Expanding the reach of institutional resources across Greater Mekong countries.
3. Advancing inter-institutional collaboration in the sub-region.
4. Enhancing communication and public information on trans-boundary trends.
5. Adopting model programs for sub-regional development.

Developing Greater Understanding of Sub-regional Dynamics

To attain greater understanding of complex trans-boundary trends and their causes and consequences, LAB places emphasis on supporting collaborative research and studies on regional integration among institutions and individuals in Greater Mekong countries.

Special support is provided for the development of new “indigenous” theories and methodological tools necessary to investigate the interconnectivity of sub-regional phenomena.

Expanding the Reach of Institutional Resources across GMS Countries

LAB provides support to institutions in the Greater Mekong Sub-region allowing them to become resources for neighboring countries by strengthening their capacity to manage sub-regional educational programs.

Support is provided to programs that specifically address trans-boundary regional issues from a variety of disciplines such as Southeast Asia area studies.

Efforts are also being made to strengthen institutional capacity to offer sub-regional training in established disciplines relevant to the Foundation’s themes, especially agriculture, public health and social sciences.

Advancing Inter-institutional Collaboration in the Sub-region

A focus on trans-boundary issues implies a need for greater interaction among institutions in the diverse Greater Mekong countries. LAB supports collaborative networks and consortia on relevant sub-regional issues, in the belief that such collaborative efforts have an important role to play beyond information and resource sharing. They provide participants with exposure to different management, research and intervention practices, and as such, contribute to building knowledge, capacity and trust among diverse constituencies.

Enhancing Communication and Public Information on Trans-boundary Trends

To help create greater public awareness of, and give local people a greater voice in sub-regional developments affecting their lives, LAB is attempting to foster better communication across boundaries at many levels. These include stimulating informed reporting by journalists, supporting academic fora on emerging trends in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, and facilitating exchanges among people from neighboring countries through language-interpretation services.

To promote sharing of information and knowledge beyond professional circles, special attention is devoted to encouraging production, translation and dissemination of books, newsletters and other relevant audio-visual material on trans-boundary issues.

Adopting Model Programs for Sub-regional Development

LAB supports the identification of intervention models that effectively address developmental challenges in Greater Mekong countries, and the assessment of opportunities for replication in other national or sub-regional settings. A proper analysis of innovative intervention models, and the conditions that allowed their success, can inspire other parties to adapt such models to local circumstances, thus shortening the trial-and-error phase and saving scarce resources.

 

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