‘Meetings, Meetings, Meetings, and Meetings’: Regional Governance, Cross-Border Environments and Sovereign Authority

Abstract

This working paper considers what regional meetings, such as the Mekong River Commission (MRC) Summit, accomplish in terms of transboundary environmental governance and reinforcement of sovereign authority, and what the implications are for who can speak on behalf of cross-border ecologies. The working paper introduces ‘summit ethnography’ as an approach for studying regional governance. This approach is positioned as a way of studying the elusive notions of regional environmental governance and regional governance community in a more embodied manner, emphasising that those who participate or are included/excluded as experts in regional governance are at stake in these meetings and the regional plans for development.