When Sumernet was first conceived in 2005, many regional development projects were under way. Major roads and other infrastructure projects, as well as bilateral and multilateral economic /trade agreements were in progress, and were vigorously debated in meetings and in the media. There was a generally acknowledged gap between the pro-development perspectives of governments in the Mekong region, supported in many cases through multilateral donor organisations and fuelled by trade liberalisation, and the perspectives of NGO campaigners, in many cases representing pockets of local resistance to specific development projects.
Many development agencies voiced their concern that an integrated approach was needed, for a greater diversity of views and perspectives on development to be incorporated in regional planning and policy. Yet, at that point, mainstream development views and alternative ones appeared to have reached an impasse.
Sumernet was established to support and promote the use of scientific evidence in policy making, and thus contribute to sustainable development as an over-arching goal.
In the four years since its inception, Sumernet has responded to the demand for ‘policy-relevant knowledge’ by creating an enabling environment among partner institutions, in which different perspectives and frameworks have been brought together in a synergistic manner through the identification of themes of common interest and the support of research that could not otherwise have been accomplished.
Meanwhile the dynamic policy environment in the Mekong region has overtaken many of the initial aims of Sumernet. Views that were once considered ‘alternative’ have been absorbed into mainstream perspectives, including – to cite just two examples - the centrality of public participation to a vision of sustainable development and the importance of demand-side management in energy planning.
The Sumernet secretariat, hosted at the Stockholm Environment Institute, is playing an integrative role in this process, by modelling and enabling the use of scientific knowledge in policy development, and through a programme of capacity building and networking amongst partner institutions.
