Project Background
The Indo-Burma region has been identified as one of the most threatened global biodiversity hotspots. The region’s natural resources are at risk and this is driven by pressures of economic development and the needs of a rural population with high levels of poverty. The Mekong River and its major tributaries is one of the most critical riverine ecosystems in Indo-Burma. People protecting their Ecosystem in the lower Mekong (PEM) is a 10-year collaborative program bringing together development and conservation efforts to reduce threats to biodiversity and livelihoods posed by large scale development projects in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam.
Project Overview
Given decisions on how resources are shared, developed and managed occur at community, national, and regional levels, PEM seeks to bring about change at the community and policy levels by employing four linked intervention strategies:
- Empowering Communities through a rights-based approach to community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) and sustainable livelihoods.
- Cross-cutting: Promoting women and youth participation and leadership at CBNRM initiatives and networks; and policy dialogues.
- Convening and brokering Strategic Alliances to strengthen networks at multiple levels. For villages involved in CBNRM to meaningfully contribute to protection of Key biodiversity areas and priority riverine corridors; and for different conservation and development NGOs supporting CBNRM initiatives and networks for policy advocacy.
- Creating an Enabling Environment, for civil society organizations to engage in policy development and dialogues that promote environmental and social considerations in the planning, development and operation of large-scale projects.
Project Objectives
- Promote multi-stakeholder dialogues and strengthen civil society organisations engagement to increase social and environmental consideration in extractive resources development in the Lower Mekong.
- Promote youth leadership and meaningful participation in consultation regional workshop through tailored approaches.
Project Activities and Results
Community Group Support
Funding for this project has enabled Oxfam to support members of the regional ‘Save the Mekong Coalition’ who coordinate activities such as strategy meetings and information sharing among its members. A significant community level achievement was the first ‘Mekong People’s Forum’ which has was held in An Giang Vietnam and attended by dam-affected communities from Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. The forum enabled affected communities to share information and raise joint concerns over dams planned and under construction on the Lower Mekong mainstream.
Raising Awareness
Oxfam’s partnership with youth groups has enabled young women and men from urban areas and rural communities to access space to raise awareness about hydropower dam development in the Mekong and for formal stakeholders to understand that youth are interested in these issues. Through workshops, fora, debates, and key international days, young people discussed the potential social and environmental impacts of dams on communities and the need for young people to engage in water decision making.
Oxfam’s support to the group, Social and Environmental Protection Youth (SEPY) in Cambodia enabled SEPY to utilize social media channels such as Facebook and radio to raise awareness of the potential impacts of dam building on key biodiversity areas in the Mekong as well as the impact on the livelihoods of communities who are dependent on resources in the river for their survival. SEPY’s campaign centred on sharing community experiences and submitting a petition to the company and Cambodian National Assembly to demand a halt in construction. Their strong voices were heard and the third Committee of the Cambodian National Assembly responded positively, promising that the Government will conduct visits to affected communities and further study the causes of water pollution in that area.
Youth Training Program
Oxfam started a youth training program on ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’. These techniques have been found to be culturally appropriate, effective and particularly popular with young activists. The aim is now to develop a regionally based core group of facilitators or ‘jokers’ (as the key facilitator is referred to in Theatre of the Oppressed methodology). The tools and techniques empower communities to identify their problems and possible solutions by creating participatory theatre. The initiative aims to raise funding for subsequent workshops to be held in Myanmar, Lao PDR, and Vietnam so that ‘joker’ trainees learn about each other’s country and sharpen their skills to facilitate these techniques. Once trained, these young people will have the skills to take the methodologies back to their respective countries and communities and mobilise affected communities to engage and find solutions to their problems.
Community Advocacy
Oxfam supports two community advocacy placements, one in Cambodia and one in Vietnam, who are the alumni of EarthRights Mekong School. The placement in Cambodia focuses on working with youth groups and affected communities to assist in a range of areas such as providing training on human rights, free prior and informed consent or hydropower and its impacts; awareness raising amongst urban and rural youth; and supporting communities affected by specific dam projects to make petitions and statements. The placement in Vietnam aims to raise communities’ awareness around the potential impacts on local livelihoods of large scale hydropower projects. This is achieved by the alumni working closely to educate and mobilize communities (farmers, fishers, and women’s associations) to advocate to government and developers on these issues. The placement approach is effective by locating the support within the affected communities and providing technical support to facilitate trans-boundary cooperation between the communities.
Thank you so much for your support. Without you this vital work would not be possible.
Project Background
The Indo-Burma region has been identified as one of the most threatened global biodiversity hotspots. The region’s natural resources are at risk and this is driven by pressures of economic development and the needs of a rural population with high levels of poverty. The Mekong River and its major tributaries is one of the most critical riverine ecosystems in Indo-Burma, supporting the largest inland fisheries in the world. Maintaining the annual flood pulse, conserving key habitats such as floodplains and deep pools, and maintaining connectivity of key migration corridors is essential to the continued productivity and diversity of the Mekong’s ecosystems.
Project Aim
Dams, mining, agro-industrial development projects, and land use change due to deforestation continue to pose great threats to the Mekong ecosystem and watershed. The cumulative impacts of this development will be the reduction of fishery resources and increasing unreliability of water quality and water flow, on which millions of people depend for their nutrition, jobs, and farming. Our quest is to build capacity of local communities so that they not only cope with these challenges but are able to assume stewardship roles in the protection of the ecosystem on which they rely.
Development Pressures
These key biodiversity areas are facing multiple pressures that threaten their integrity. A primary threat is the large-scale resource development and infrastructure projects such as large-scale hydropower dams, agri-business and mining which characterize the current model of economic development. For example, in PEM II target areas there are proposals to build the Sambor and Stung Treng dams on the Mekong mainstream in Cambodia, which according to the 2010 strategic environmental assessment of mainstream dams, “would inundate one of the richest and most biologically diverse areas of the entire Mekong system” and “involve the loss of rare and endangered aquatic species e.g. the Mekong Giant catfish, and, combined with Don Sahong [dam in Southern Laos], would most probably be the final threat to the Irrawaddy Dolphin” (ICEM 2010). With Lower Sesan 2 Dam, which will pose a major barrier between Srepok and Sesan rivers to the mainstream, now under construction, it is even more critical to ensure connectivity between critical habitats are maintained on the mainstream in Northern Cambodian. Similarly, there are several mining concessions near – and in some cases overlapping with – PEM II target protected areas (PAs), which if developed, would have adverse impacts on the KBAs. The protected areas also face pressure from large scale economic land concessions and illegal or commercial scale extraction of resources, such as fishing, logging and hunting.
Indigenous Impact
Many indigenous people living in the proposed project locations are vulnerable due to their traditional reliance on locally available natural resources for their livelihoods and their limited participation in decision-making processes. Oft times, their home ecosystems including forest and wetlands have been depleted or lost while they and their leaders remained uninformed of the pending impacts on their livelihoods and their environment. In part this is because they are not positioned to adapt their livelihoods or to respond to the social and environmental impacts of development projects that are taking place in the region. Moreover, they are even less aware of how their home ecosystems connect to larger Mekong ecosystem; and how they could network in order to foster the skills, motivation, and collaboration to participate in the stewardship of key biodiversity areas.
Oxfam believes that by supporting the affected communities, particularly indigenous peoples at the grassroots level, these women and men will have greater opportunity to adapt livelihoods and to embrace their role in implementing sound natural resource management, ultimately making choices and advancing positions that ensure healthy ecosystems are protected for future generations. We also believe that these communities are acting as critical ‘buffers’ for core conservation zones otherwise vulnerable to development pressures. Their securing access to their ancestral lands and resources located inside Community Protected Areas (CPAs) or in the proximity to CPAs affords a level of protection to CPAs and the ecosystems they represent. Conversely, not supporting these communities may lead to their circumstance deteriorating so that they are compelled to take up options that encroach on the integrity of the very same CPAs and the ecosystems within.
Project Overview and Outcomes
In Phase I of this project, we learned that creating long-lasting solutions requires time and sufficient support in building capacity and finding solutions to ensure sustainability after the project completion. In Phase II, we will continue financial and technical support for initiatives such as community fisheries, community protected areas and communal land tenure. This support will seek to address the following issues:
- Capacity building. Phase II will continue to invest in building capacity in these groups, but will increase focus on the understanding of the linkages between communities and ecosystems, as well as increasing awareness of practical measures for protection of key biodiversity areas. This will be done in collaboration with conservation allies such as WWF and BirdLife International.
- Scaling up. To meaningfully contribute to the protection of key biodiversity areas and priority riverine corridors, there is a need to increase the number of – and coordination between – villages involved in community initiatives. For example, maintaining connectivity between key aquatic habitats (such as deep pools) in the Lower Mekong and the 3S is critical to maintaining aquatic biodiversity. Thus efforts to link different community fisheries initiatives, including across national borders, can contribute to protecting larger parts of the corridor.
- Cross-organisation collaboration. Lack of coordination, reflections and learning is contributing to duplication of efforts and to a loss of opportunity to increase impact which could emerge by developing collaborative strategies when working in the same area. Linking different initiatives and communities across catchment areas will provide the basis for a landscape and catchment-wide approach.
- Empowering Women. Roles and responsibility of men and women are shaped by socio-cultural norms and their involvement in different kinds of resource use activities. Their different roles and responsibilities compel them to adopt different livelihood strategies, which can result in positive or negative impacts on the natural resource. At the community level, it is common to see low participation of women in decision-making over natural resources which leads to poor conservation outcomes [women can be powerful advocates for sustainable resource management as they more typically foster stewardship over exploitation values given their focus on their children’s future]. Low participation of women in decision-making, especially in the Mekong countries, is further marred by culture and attitudes, lack of education and technical skills affecting confidence and a general lack of resources and opportunity to participate. This requires attention to structural, social, cultural and economic barriers so that women’s participation can nurture good development outcomes. There is increasing recognition from conservation organizations that integrating gender into conservation projects can improve conservation outcomes.
- Youth engagement. Youth, especially young women and indigenous youth, require a safe and enabling environment, free from social and cultural barriers that otherwise prevent young people from voicing their concerns and influencing decisions that affect them and their communities. This project also sees the opportunity to foster an urban-to-rural aspect of inter-generational stewardship of the country’s natural heritage.
Oxfam will help to facilitate community dialogues in order to emerge livelihood options that enable them to adapt to changing conditions and to reinforce the importance of their stewardship of natural resources, particularly their participation in conservation of key biodiversity areas. This requires building local capacity as well as working to create an enabling environment that supports and recognizes people’s rights to access and manage natural resources sustainably.