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Climate change and its consequences,
ranging from increased water variability to more extreme
weather events and from sea level rise to ecosystem changes,
introduce new challenges to transboundary watercourses,
which already face a variety of collective action problems
due to their border-crossing nature. Other changes occurring
in river basins, such as changing water-use patterns,
development of large infrastructure schemes, and changing
socioeconomic development levels of riparian states also
challenge the institutional capacity of current cooperative
management mechanisms. Thus, River Basin Organizations
(RBOs), which manage the river basins, must be highly
adaptive to ensure not only resilience to change but also
long-term sustainable development of the basin and its
people. This paper examines the 'adaptation
capacity' of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), which
manages the Mekong River Basin, a river basin particularly
vulnerable to challenges related to climate change as well
as to human-caused change. Resilience may be encoded in
treaty provisions, but in practice it depends on a broad
array of factors, most importantly the capacity of the major
institution established by the riparian states to
cooperatively manage the river basin. Several key points
have been identified regarding the contribution of the MRC
to increasing resilience to environmental and human-caused
change in the Mekong River Basin. The aim of the paper is to
assess the adaptation capacity of a particular RBO, the MRC,
and the related resilience of the Mekong River Basin with
regard to climate change but including other challenges such
as hydropower development and the related change induced in
the basin. This assessment is based on an analytical
framework developed with the overall aim to provide a means
for assessing the adaptation capacity of RBOs and thus apply
it to other river basins as well.
