Hydropower development in the Mekong River Basin is occurring at a rapid, though controversial pace, pitting a variety of stakeholder groups against each other at both intranational scale and international scale, and affecting state relations across scales. In this paper, we explore the narratives surrounding hydropower development in this basin, while referring to the concept of hydrosocial cycles as the central tool in our analysis. These look at the processes of socio-political construction of nature, viewing water as a medium that conveys power, and thus sources of both collaboration and conflict. While the Mekong hydropower narratives do, indeed, attempt to conflate the massive regulation of hydrological systems with large-scale social and economic ambitions, they are also intended to obscure a widespread and systemic effort to control and alienate the region’s waters via engineering at multiple scales.

湄公河流域的水电开发正在快速但有争议的速度进行，在国家内部和国际范围内各种利益相关者团体之间相互竞争，并影响了各个规模的国家关系。在本文中，我们将围绕流域水电开发的叙述进行探讨，同时将水社会循环的概念作为分析的中心工具。他们着眼于自然的社会政治建设过程，将水视为传递力量的媒介，从而将其视为合作与冲突的源头。虽然湄公河水电的叙述确实的确试图将对水文系统的大规模管制与大规模的社会和经济野心混为一谈，