With an estimated length of 4,909 kilometers and passing through six countries (China's Yunnan Province to Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam), the management of the Mekong River is demanding more land-water linkages and integration across all sectors, disciplines, and institutions.

Three focal areas of discussion were designed for learning and recommendations: first, what are the good watershed management practices; second, the functional governance and institutional framework for interrelating watershed and river basin management, and third, the economic and financing tools for such resource management.

The focus of the meeting was obviously the Mekong, but examples were brought in from across the world. Some of these were the Rhine in Europe that passes through nine countries, the state of rivers in the United States and the history of pollution and ignoring the problem since the time of Rachel Carson (who wrote Silent Spring in 1962 and widely credited to have launched the environmental movement), the Murray-Darling River Basin Plan and recent problems of flooding and the limitations of the Landcare program in Australia. It would have been good to have had the story of the Indus River that runs through Pakistan and India and which has an amazing political history well established since 1960 when the two countries signed a water control treaty.

The Mekong River culturally binds many peoples together but politically it crosses the boundaries of many countries and requires much joint understanding. Management actions in watersheds affect downstream areas and the cumulative effects in the Mekong context lead to effects beyond national boundaries, hence regional collaboration in watershed and river basin management is critical.

Good practices making a difference

Cultural landuse practices and landcare initiatives of recent decades have tried to meet demographic and economic drivers of change and now have to contend with climate change. Externally driven development and community needs and responses call for a better balancing and cautious tradeoffs. Sound science-based evidence is required to support and inform the decision making process at local, national, and international levels.

The management that is immediately visible in a landscape approach and balances livelihood needs and approaches are important in sustaining the watershed. Today the challenges of fertilizer, herbicide, and pesticide use, along with necessary adaptations to climate change, are most demanding.

Certain truths held at one scale of operation cannot be simply scaled up for the entire river basin and similarly, broad-scale findings cannot be absolutes for local management. Much importance was given to base flow rate, flooding, and sediments, and the effects of deforestation, reforestation, and regeneration. All of these vary across scale and call for adaptation.

There are many cases of coordination between stakeholders and sectors at local and watershed levels but these collaborations on the whole are an exception and need institutionalization for future continuity and accountability. Within countries, this is generally piecemeal. National coordination is needed, but not a simplistic institutional one-type-fits-all design. Much information and trust is needed in building an institutional body to coordinate and administer the overall implementation.

Governance and institutional frameworks

In watershed management, "governance starts where the raindrops fall." In reality, governance must start even before, given the contribution of landuse change to climate change. There is a need to enlarge the participation-with-decision to those who are managed and not simply those who manage. Consensus tends to be messy where often consultation is exaggerated while development takes over. Local institutions are necessary but not enough due to external pressures and impacts.

Starting from the numerous local successes, there is a need to scale up from watersheds to sub-basins and river basins to make management work. We should not just copycat situations from other watersheds. The relationship between the organizations operating at different scales is critical where the characteristics of governance are vital: transparency, accountability and legal recourse to compensation.

Economic and financial mechanisms

Economic data are a powerful way to present evidence and influence decisions, but all stakeholders and sectors need to be convinced of the benefits to them from watershed management. For the longer-term strategy of sustainable watershed management to work, it has to be done collectively and with accountability on all sides to gain their support.

Funding is short for integrated and sustainable watershed management approaches despite the demonstrably high economic values that these generate. Various forms of payments for ecosystem services (PES) are emerging though these are at early stages yet. PES will become an important mechanism for mobilizing financial resources for watersheds but there are fears that PES mechanisms will absorb the income on the level of management and not compensate people for their actions on the ground.

There is an urgent need to diversify watershed funding beyond traditional bilateral agreements. Much more proactive and accountable schemes are needed: market-based mechanisms, fiscal revenues, PES and other user/polluter fees, as well as contributions from both the private sector and the general public. The tradeoffs have to be made visible from the start. The poor have to be engaged and have a secure process of understanding the possible changes where these will influence the decisions they make and the viable compensation to be negotiated where it is to their loss.

The meeting was organized to make recommendations to the MRC and included the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as well as some of the international NGOs and technical institutes: World Agroforestry Center (ICRAF), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), International Water Management Institute (IWMI), German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), International Union for Conservation on Nature (IUCN), Global Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) Mekong, Mekong Water Dialogues, and the Mekong Program on Water Environment and Resilience (M-POWER).

For a summary of the conference, please go to the MRC website .