Governance and policy blog posts

China's Agriculture Investment Bank plans to inject USD $450 billion into agriculture over the next four years. If this colossal investment is put towards projects that rely on the current agroecological research, it could spur an environmentally sustainable future for Chinese farmers.

Faced with the pressure of finding new ways to feed its massive population, China has decided invested $450 billion into farming. While the exact uses of this cash injection remain mysterious, the move represents a massive shift back towards domestic food production.

In 2015, China initiated the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism (LMC). One year later, at the 2016 Greater Mekong Forum, LMC insiders reflected on what the LMC has accomplished, and how to move beyond the political aspects of the mechanism to focus on water issues and environmental questions.

In June, WLE-Mekong published a series of maps identifying a massive range of dams across the major rivers of the Greater Mekong Subregion. In this interview excerpt, the second in a series of two, Thrive discusses how strong partnerships led to the creation of these maps and continues to identify hot spots and spaces for new research.

To maximise downstream water quantity, you remove vegetation—all of it, including the trees. To counter rising carbon dioxide levels, you plant trees—lots of them. How should we do both? Reblogged from the Global Water Forum.

The average farmer has forty years' worth of planting seasons: forty chances to improve on his or her last harvest. If farmers cannot access the finance necessary to purchase irrigation systems, that number begins to shrink.

A recent research publication covering two similar catchments in upland Laos and upland Vietnam found a striking different hydrological situation in each place. What accounts for the difference, and what are the implications for forest management policy?

Mekong region governments promote foreign direct investment (FDI) as a path to various development solutions. However, despite FDI's success stories, the benefits of FDI are unevenly distributed and tangled up with a variety of tradeoffs.

Ecomodernism embraces agricultural intensification as one of the primary means of decoupling humanity from the environment. However, ecomodernism relies on some problematic assumptions about the division between humanity and nature and the nature of human use of rural spaces.

In order to understand how women participate in water governance, it is crucial to identify and then challenge our assumptions about women's involvement with both formal and informal community-based resource governance systems. This "Science on the pulse" draws on recent literature to clarify the challenges and consider new directions in women's participation in water governance.

At a recent roundtable discussion, members of WLE and UNESCO-IHE discussed the future of agriculture. Participants identified the complexity of incentivizing a sustainable food system and highlighted the importance of collaborating across sectors to change entrenched ways of thinking about sustainable agriculture.