Despite experiencing systematic social, economic and cultural marginalization, women like Noon, Dao Prasuk and Pornpimol remain determined to assert their communities’ rights to existence and to protect rivershed commons for generations to come, contesting the widespread public assumptions that large-scale hydropower and water diversion infrastructure are required to propel the region’s development forward, write Pai Deetes, Phairin Sohsai and Tanya L. Roberts Davis of International Rivers (IR)
This weekend, urban centres across the country and beyond will be the sites of public gatherings commemorating International Women’s Day, celebrating hard-won legal advances while raising collective consciousness of the gendered injustice amidst economic and resource disparities, migration, war and militarization. Less visible yet no less important to highlight are the day-to-day efforts being led by women to challenge violence against the rivers, land, Indigenous Peoples’ cultures, their bodies and their very rights to existence. At a time when we must confront the realities of the climate crisis, compounded by a race to blast, mine and clear sacred lands surrounding the Mekong and Salween Rivers, listening to, learning from and working in solidarity with women of riparian communities is imperative.
Noon, a Karen ethnic woman from Mae Ngud, Chiang Mai – a village located at the edge of the reservoir of the Bhumibol Dam is one such individual. To date, residents of Mae Ngud have been relocated twice to make way for this project and the associated infrastructure, which was built six decades ago. Yet now, once again, Noon’s home and agricultural lands are at risk of inundation due to the proposed Yuam Water Diversion Project.
Intended to transfer water from the Salween River Basin – a shared waterway flowing through China, Thailand and Burma/Myanmar – to the Chao Phraya River Basin in Central Thailand, the project involves a dam on the Yuam River in Mae Hong Son province with a large pumping station from which 62 kilometers of underground tunnels through one of Thailand’s last remaining lush forests will connect to a reservoir at the Ping River, a major tributary of the Chao Phraya River. Despite spanning across three provinces of Chiang Mai, Tak and Mae Hong Son, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the project commissioned by the Royal Irrigation Department (RID) indicated that only a total of 29 people would be affected, with only two people considered as ‘affected’ in Mae Ngud.
The reality faced by villagers tells a starkly different story. As just one concrete example, in Mae Ngud, a longan orchard – from which villagers collectively harvest fruit and derive the majority of annual income, will be affected, not only depriving them of their main source of livelihood, but also tearing apart the social fabric of the community, leading to anguish and deep indignation.
Initially, Noon and other residents of Mae Ngud were unaware of how or where to bring forward their concerns. However, by participating in community-based participatory research processes supported by Chiang Mai University and local civil society networks, she and villagers were able to develop a clear evidence base to demonstrate the damages that would be inflicted on their lives and surrounding ecosystems. From this process, Noon and other villagers prepared information they had documented to present to senior government officials, asserting that the Yuam Water Diversion Project would lead to tangible losses for people and local ecologies.
As a result, in 2023, she along with over sixty other community representatives from along the Salween sub-basins of Yuam, Moei, and Mae Ngao in northwest Thailand took a principled stand to collectively file a lawsuit against five Thai state agencies, challenging the legitimacy of the Yuam/Salween Water Diversion Project and its EIA. They argued that the EIA, approved in 2021, was flawed due to inadequate public participation and failure to address drastic environmental and social impacts across 36 villages and overlapping conservation areas. After being accepted by the Chiang Mai Administrative Court, the case is now proceeding, marking a potential step in the future towards legal protection of community rights to existence and to protect the river as a commons with intergenerational, cultural, social and economic significance.
Another prominent Karen woman plaintiff in the case from Mae Ngao village is Dao Prasuk, who has also been collecting information on local knowledge of the river and forest with Chiang Mai University. Compiled information will be submitted to the court as a “People’s Environmental Impact Assessment”, intended to provide a more holistic analysis of actual project impacts from the perspective of community members. According to her, she saw a photo of herself in the project’s EIA documents, wrongfully claiming she had taken part in discussions about the project, and as a result has had to testify to government officials about this blatant instance of misinformation.
In doing so, Dao Prasuk also asserts that for generations, communities like Mae Ngao have sustained themselves within the watershed forests, preserving the source of water not only in the surrounding area but also with downstream residents. Considering the way they have lived from one generation to the next without destroying the land or water has made her and other villagers question the necessity of constructing such an ecologically and socially damaging water diversion project as currently proposed.
l Clockwise: Dao Phrasuk, an ethnic woman harvesting fresh water weed and non-timber products from the Salween river and forest; Noon, behind her is her village’s land inundated in the reservoir. Credit: CESD, Chiang Mai University
Meanwhile, large-scale dam development along the Mekong mainstream has wreaked havoc on ecologies and community well-being across the region. In both Thailand and Laos, tens of thousands of people who have made a living from fishing and subsistence agriculture along the river banks for generations are being displaced to make way for these projects. Nevertheless, local women continue to collaborate and speak out collectively, calling for participatory, inclusive management of the river, grounded in the needs of local people, and for their rights to livelihood to be respected.
It is along the shores of the Mekong that Pornpimol, a woman community organizer from Kokwao village, Pak Chom district, of Loei province is working to raise concerns about the construction of the proposed Pak Chom Hydropower Project (also known as Pa Mong Dam). For the past two years, she, along with other local women in the area, have consistently monitored the water fluctuations and measuring sediment levels around Kokwao on a daily and weekly basis in order to document and understand the changes to the river ecosystems attributed to the construction of hydropower and river-related infrastructure projects in upstream.
This information is then disseminated across a Mekong Community Network that has been established along the breadth of the Mekong River in Thailand, meaning that downstream communities remain informed and prepared to respond during major fluctuations on the river – especially when risks of flooding arise during the rainy season. It also means that they have a clear set of data demonstrating the decreasing levels of fertile sediments flowing downstream of hydropower projects, leading to serious implications for residents of villages along the Mekong who rely on harvesting subsistence vegetables from the banks of the river.
Despite experiencing systematic social, economic and cultural marginalization, women like Noon, Dao Prasuk and Pornpimol remain determined to assert their communities’ rights to existence and to protect rivershed commons for generations to come, contesting the widespread public assumptions that large-scale hydropower and water diversion infrastructure are required to propel the region’s development forward.
Their efforts in defense of rights to livelihood, land and water and against violence in the name of development are a testament to the strength possible when women collectively organize, and must also inform mobilizations of civil society allies in urban cores, not only on International Women’s Day, but also beyond.
International Rivers works to protect rivers and defends the rights of communities that depend on them.
Pai Deetes, Phairin Sohsai and Tanya L. Roberts Davis work at International Rivers’ Southeast Asia Program on issues related to energy, water and environmental justice and community resource rights.