THE MEKONG RIVER Commission (MRC) does not have the authority to stop projects even if they have transboundary effects, delegates to the fourth Green Mekong Forum said on Monday, while the Thai Irrigation Department presented a water diversion project to fight poverty.
Around 100 delegates from Mekong River countries and international observers attended the forum in Bangkok to follow the latest developments in infrastructure and water resource management in the Mekong River Region.
Early last year, when the United States’ Western European allies began eagerly signing up for China’s nascent Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as founding members, it seemed as if Washington was confident that the AIIB would emerge as a poorly governed tool of Chinese geoeconomic statecraft, beholden to lower standards than the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the highly experienced international development banks. At the core of these concerns was a perception that the AIIB would be supplementary instead of complementary to existing development banks–both in terms of its governance and the projects it selected.
A year and a few weeks ago, the AIIB’s 57 founding members finalized its charter; in the final days of 2015, the members ratified the bank’s Articles of Agreement. Finally, early in the new year, the AIIB opened its doors for business. Now, just over three months into its operations, the AIIB has decided on its first projects. As I’d briefly discussed in April, the AIIB’s first projects have demonstrated that concerns a year ago in Washington and Tokyo may have been overstated. For now, the bank appears to be pursuing a modest and complementary approach in selecting its projects.
The Thai government hopes to ease its public debt burden by luring the private sector to invest more in multibillion-baht infrastructure projects, especially in telecommunications and transport, through public-private partnerships (PPPs).
Looking out at bumper-to-bumper Monday morning traffic crawling along the Philippine capital’s main avenue, taxi driver Ranilo Banez shook his head in frustration.
