In the Mekong region, there are two innovative, but almost diametrically opposed responses to the demands for knowledge production to meet the challenge of sustainability. One approach, which is favoured by international financial institutions such as the ADB, seeks to develop better (and neutral) decision tools for use by governments, including the proper evaluation of full costs and benefits, and the explicit incorporation of potential trade-offs between environmental, developmental, and social concerns. This approach is both important and useful, and has resulted in the production of a variety of sophisticated instruments for integrated decision making. However, their deployment has been less than effective; the bulk of policy and planning continues to rely on narrow, one-dimensional, and myopic approaches; tools for integrated assessment are often not ready for integration into governmental procedures; many public officials lack the capacity even to use less sophisticated tools; and the capacity is weakest precisely at the most critical point, namely at local levels, where the combination of poverty, illiteracy, and absence of recorded rights expose indigenous communities, as well as fragile ecosystems to misuse.
A contrasting approach, pioneered by a number of international or regional civil society organizations (including TERRA, IRN and WRI), is to build stakeholder networks to influence policy making through public advocacy, especially on matters of governance, participation, and transparency. The most vocal of these groups explicitly reject the underlying basis of the technocratic approaches, namely the analysis of trade offs and the comparison of costs and benefits, on the grounds that these are veiled political instruments, used most often to justify actions that lead to inequality and degradation. While governments and funding institutions have often challenged the underlying assumptions of this approach as well as the quality of the analysis, it is difficult to conceive of a process in which such a mobilization of stakeholders would not play an essential role in the progress towards sustainability. On balance these advocacy initiatives are both admirable and necessary. Yet, there is an impasse between the two existing approaches, which can be broken only through dispassionate and independent research and analysis.
Independent research is, in a sense, the third and missing piece of this puzzle. It can, on the one hand, help operationalize the analytical tools and approaches that have been developed through technocratic approaches, by bringing in broader social and environmental analyses and perspectives; and on the other hand, supplement advocacy-driven positions with independent assessment of the issues.
The Mekong region has a high concentration of academic expertise and institutions, including a number of active networks. However, with a few outstanding exceptions, (e.g. TDRI) the bulk of the research activity is not directly aimed at the policy process. Policy research is being done mainly in the form of short term consultancies, with all the efficiency advantages that it entails but often at the cost of the independence, perseverance, public dissemination, and integration needed for the purpose. More importantly, this research continues to be somewhat fragmented in nature; and in the area of sustainable development in particular, the research activity is divided along traditional disciplinary lines. Consultancy reports are generally not in the public domain, and even the myriad of research outputs have not resulted in creating a robust knowledge community that shares a common understanding of the sustainability challenges faced by the region, the kind of solutions that could address these challenges, and the potential impact as well as limitations of these solutions.
