Opening Tenasserim: Governance models for frontier infrastructure

Abstract

This paper examines corollaries and strategies for complex land planning and governance along the Dawei-Kanchanaburi road corridor between Thailand and Myanmar. The relatively short 138-kilometer Burmese alignment crosses diverse geographies, ethnic minorities, aggressive agroindustry, and fragile biodiversity. Media and reports, both those policy-driven and CSO-produced, too often collapse the spatial complexity of land uses and conflicts of this dual-administrative area. Current attempts by international conservation NGOs to reign-in developmental pressures (such as rubber plantations and land banking) take the form of customary village mapping, village conservation, and green economies. To illustrate potential ways forward, parallels are drawn here between the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) and the Initiative for Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), using the Dawei road link and conservation economies from Peru's northern and central transcontinental highways. Each offers models of decentralized governance in a maturing state of rural economic restructuring not seen in other parts of Myanmar. A relatively strong base of three international conservation NGOs and cross-border CSO networks is trying to prepare for the wide range of indirect effects of road-building in this frontier region. Traditional EIAs and SEAs however are weak without phased plans specific to the region's unique conflicts, including extremely recent histories of human rights abuses, land security, and ongoing repatriation efforts. Strategies will be discussed that use the highway and its operator to strengthen environmental and community governance in places where the state has little influence. It is argued that the effectiveness of resource valuation and green economies can be greatly improved by critical scope and category-setting through an iterative process of conflict narration, agent definition, spatial modelling, and visualization to galvanize support.