Hydropower is one of the biggest controversies in Vietnam in recent decades because of its adverse environmental and social consequences, especially negative impacts on displaced people who make way for hydropower dam construction. This book explains the controversies related to hydropower development in Vietnam in order to make policy recommendations for equitable and sustainable development. The book focuses on the analysis of emerging issues, such as land acquisition, compensation for losses, displacement and resettlement, support for livelihood development, and benefit sharing from hydropower development. The analysis emphasizes the role of different stakeholders in the decision-making process for hydropower development in Vietnam as a means to find a better governance model.

The Mekong Basin is home to some 70 million people, for whom this great river is a source of livelihoods, the basis for their ecosystems and a foundation of their economies. But the Mekong is also currently undergoing enormous social, economic, and ecological change of which hydropower development is a significant driver. This book provides a basin-wide analysis of political, socio-economic and environmental perspectives of hydropower development in the Mekong Basin. It includes chapters from China, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Written by regional experts from some of the region's leading research institutions, the book provides an holistic analysis of the shifting socio-political contexts within which hydropower is framed, legitimised and executed. Drawing heavily on political ecologies and political economics to examine the economic, social, political and ecological drivers of hydropower, the book's basin wide approach illuminates how hydropower development, and its benefits and impacts, are linked multilaterally across the basin. The research in the book is derived from empirical research conducted from 2012-2013 as part of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food's Mekong programme.

Increasing energy demands and concerns about global warming call for an increase in energy generation from renewable sources. Small hydropower plants represent a significant contribution to meet this demand. But the optimal use of this resource in a sustainable manner still remains a challenge. A cascade of small dams may have detrimental impacts on the environment and water use without implementation of proper mitigation measures and planning. To obtain more insight in the consequences of hydropower cascades and possibilities to improve the cascade planning process in order to reduce such impacts, the Vietnamese Ministry of Industry and Trade and the World Bank jointly initiated the study on cumulative impacts and joint operation of small-scale hydropower cascades Supported by the Renewable Energy Development Program (REDP) in Vietnam. Chapter two provides a brief background on the small-scale hydropower development in Vietnam including its current planning procedures, while Chapter three provides a description of the six studied river basins. Chapter four describes the approach, methods and definitions of the study. During the first phase of the study all six rivers were screened for potential significant cumulative impacts. The results of this screening were presented in a separate report, of which the summary is given in chapter five. This screening showed that for four of the rivers significant cumulative impacts can be expected, which merited further detailed analysis. These four rivers are Ngoi Xan, Nam Tha, Nam Chien and Sap. For each of the four detailed study cases a description of the river basin and hydropower cascade has been made, the hydrological and environmental impacts were assessed and opportunities for joint operations quantified. This report presents summaries of the cumulative impact analyses (chapter six) and draws general conclusions with respect to present and future environmental conditions (chapter seven). It also summarizes the results of the optimization modeling for each cascade (chapter eight) and provides recommendations for future planning and cascade operation (chapter nine).

The work is a methodological framework for public involvement in the process of hydropower development. The framework evaluates the importance or preference of various stakeholders (actors) to the factors & sub-factors leading to the decision on the alternatives of hydropower development. The objective of this work is to recommend the most appropriate scale of hydropower development for Nepal which will minimize conflict and controversies. The framework is developed on Analytic Hierarchy Process, taking care of major actors, factors and sub-factors with the alternatives of range of the scale of development. Subjective value judgment is carried out from the stakeholders on structured pair-wise comparison questionnaire based on the procedure of AHP. Processing of the responses is conducted using the AHP based software called Expert Choice. The approach of public involvement and conflict management is new in the area of hydropower development management. The result of the study shows that the most appropriate scale of hydropower development in Nepal is Medium Scale. The result also indicates that government and political people are the most sensitive among the seven actors considered.