![People working in the Mekong River near Luang Prabang, Laos, March 2, 2012 (photo by Flickr user wileyb-j licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.)](https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/l_mekong_03252015.png?w=519&h=259&crop=1)
Last year, Laos announced it would go ahead with the second of two massive, controversial dams on the Lower Mekong River, over the strong objections of its downstream neighbors, Vietnam and Cambodia. Despite the contentious decisions to build the Xayaburi and Don Sahong dams, however, the widespread and well-founded fear that a series of dams along the Mekong is fated to destroy a uniquely productive ecosystem may be overly pessimistic—not because the impact of the dams themselves has diminished, but because there are more reasons to doubt whether all of them will actually be built at all. Up to 11 […]