Supervisor: Prof. Paola Viganò, Lab-U
Start date: October 2018. Defense date (expected): April 2023
Funded with an SNF doctoral mobility grant
Abstract
Well beyond the impact of climate change, territorial modifications of the Vietnam Mekong Delta’s (VMD) water ecosystems have resulted in environmental degradation and subsequent loss in ecosystems. This includes but is not limited to accelerated conditions in climate change i.e. sea-level rise, flooding and drought. Vietnam’s global move towards an export-oriented economy in agriculture has resulted in socio-economic disparity due to increasingly technological managerial dependency on hydraulic works, which have transformed its natural water ecosystems into a ‘Delta Machine’ (Brigg et al., 2012). Consequently, replacing centuries old ‘ecological wisdom’ (Ehlert, 2012) or local knowledge regarding land cultivation, once flowing with the slow seasonal rising levels of the delta’s natural floodplains.
Ecosystems threats in flooding and drought points the Mekong’s current state of the Anthropocene, as its deltaic territory and its water landscape has become an object of exploitation over decades; whereby water abstraction, allocation and use has created socio-spatial conflict, to meet industrialization and urbanization needs. Water ecosystems threats result from economic drivers led by powerful ‘Hydraulic Civilizations’ (Wittfogel, 1957; Evers et al., 2009) or stakeholders that influence water-oriented infrastructure processes. Hence, anthropogenic modifications in the delta’s landscape have shifted the ecosystem’s abilities to self-regenerate due to increased impacts in climate change, land salination, land subsidence and decreased sedimentation in the delta, ensuing socioenvironmental fragmentation.
To sustain its deltaic future of water-ecosystem services, a paradigm shift must be proposed for the VMD. Rather than exploiting the Mekong to meet ecosystem service needs, the perspective must be flipped whereby the question of coexistence in the Mekong must be reframed: The delta’s water ecosystem as an object of rationality rather than a subject of rationality must change, whereby water ecosystem becomes an agency, as a different way to address co-existence between human and water nature. The research aim is to build a deeper spatial understanding of the rationality behind the delta’s constructed social ecological relationship to water-ecosystem processes and subsequent impact, to challenge the state of the Anthropocene that has transformed the territory across centralized and decentralized processes. By deconstructing the complex social ecological interactions vis-à-vis key water ecosystems artefacts via a ‘palimpsest’ mapping over time (Corboz, 1983), the reconsideration of existing infrastructure, via the perspective of the need to produce a different kind of space between humans and nonhumans – a space for living, production, and natural processes – one better aligned to the VMD’s Political Ecologies, (Swyndegouw, 2003) is envisioned.
Key words: Vietnam Mekong Delta, Water Ecosystems, Climate Change, social ecologies, Anthropocene,