Diana Suhardiman – författare

Collective Action is now recognized as central to addressing the water governance challenge of delivering sustainable development and global environmental benefits. This book examines concepts and practices of collective action that have emerged in recent decades globally. Building on a Foucauldian conception of power, it provides an overview of collective action challenges involved in the sustainable management and development of global freshwater resources through case studies from Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. The case studies link community-based management of water resources with national decision-making landscapes, transboundary water governance, and global policy discussion on sustainable development, justice and water security. Power and politics are placed at the centre of collective action and water governance discourse, while addressing three core questions: how is collective action shaped by existing power structures and relationships at different scales? What are the kinds of tools and approaches that various actors can take and adopt towards more deliberative processes for collective action? And what are the anticipated outcomes for development processes, the environment and the global resource base of achieving collective action across scales?

Collective Action is now recognized as central to addressing the water governance challenge of delivering sustainable development and global environmental benefits. This book examines concepts and practices of collective action that have emerged in recent decades globally. Building on a Foucauldian conception of power, it provides an overview of collective action challenges involved in the sustainable management and development of global freshwater resources through case studies from Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Latin America. The case studies link community-based management of water resources with national decision-making landscapes, transboundary water governance, and global policy discussion on sustainable development, justice and water security. Power and politics are placed at the centre of collective action and water governance discourse, while addressing three core questions: how is collective action shaped by existing power structures and relationships at different scales? What are the kinds of tools and approaches that various actors can take and adopt towards more deliberative processes for collective action? And what are the anticipated outcomes for development processes, the environment and the global resource base of achieving collective action across scales?

Rethinking Environmental Governance brings to light the pluralistic views, diverse forces, and multiple realities (re)shaping formal and informal decision-making structures, processes, and power interplay in environmental governance. Linking socio-economic drivers with the evolution of cultural norms, the (re)shaping of institutional arrangements, and ever-changing power relations, the book looks at processes of institutional emergence across spatio-temporal scales. Through case study illustrations from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it illustrates how actors and institutions (co)produced political spaces of engagement as an integral part of their livelihood (re)making.

Mainland Southeast Asia's great river systems sustain the world's largest inland fishery and provide food security for over 60 million people. Yet these extraordinary systems are being fundamentally transformed by hydropower development, with consequences that will reverberate for generations. Hydropolitics in the Mekong offers a critical analysis of how this transformation is unfolding across the region — not as an unfortunate byproduct of progress, but as the deliberate outcome of power relations operating across multiple scales. Drawing on political ecology, hydrosocial theory, and critical work on development narratives, this volume demonstrates that the rivers of mainland Southeast Asia are being perpetually reconstituted through hydropolitical processes that pattern space, determining what flows and what is blocked, who benefits and who bears costs. The contributors show how narratives do not merely describe these transformations but constitute the very spaces within which they proceed. Terms like 'sustainable hydropower,' 'win-win cooperation,' and 'the Battery of Southeast Asia' function as nirvana concepts — future-oriented promises that cannot be falsified in the present, directing attention toward luminous horizons while costs accumulate unremarked. Spanning empirical cases from China's Yunnan Province to Vietnam's Mekong Delta, from Myanmar's Salween to Cambodia's Tonle Sap, the chapters examine how provincial interests complicate narratives of Chinese state hegemony; how 'hydrocorruption' drives Lao dam-building regardless of economic rationale; how state capture shapes Tonle Sap fisheries governance; how sediment has only recently entered regional discourse despite its profound ecological significance; and how Karen communities are constructing alternative territories of life through the Salween Peace Park. Throughout, the volume traces how regional institutions like the Mekong River Commission have been simultaneously conserved and dissolved — maintained in form while emptied of regulatory content. By revealing how hydropolitical assemblages are produced and operate across the region, by attending to whose voices are amplified and whose silenced, Hydropolitics in the Mekong provides essential reading for scholars and practitioners seeking to understand — and challenge — the politics of water in mainland Southeast Asia.