Qualitative study examines Vietnam's strategies against hydro-hegemonic challenges in the Mekong Basin, suggesting implications for downstream states.
Background and objective: The Mekong River Basin faces growing ecological and strategic pressures, intensified by upstream hydropower development, particularly China’s dams. As the last downstream country, Vietnam bears severe risks of water insecurity and livelihood disruption. This article examines Vietnam’s responses from 2010 to 2025, focusing on how it navigated hydro-hegemonic challenges and leveraged soft power and multilateral diplomacy to transform its geographic disadvantage into strategic advantage.Methods: Adopting a qualitative single-case study design, the research employs the Hydro-Hegemony Framework to examine Vietnam’s strategic behavior in transboundary water governance. It draws on a comprehensive review of policy documents, regional institutional mechanisms (e.g., MRC, LMC), and Vietnam’s discursive interventions at bilateral and multilateral levels to track shifts in its normative agency, coalition-building, and adaptive strategies.Results: The findings reveal that Vietnam did not passively accept its vulnerability but actively engaged in multiple counter-hegemonic tactics. These included: (1) advocating for inclusive data-sharing and joint environmental monitoring; (2) internationalizing the Mekong issue through legal, diplomatic and scientific channels; and (3) building coalitions with civil society, development partners, and like-minded riparians to push for accountability and sustainability in upstream operations. Vietnam also invested in domestic adaptation measures in the Mekong Delta, including strategic land-use changes and climate-resilient agriculture.Conclusion: While Vietnam’s influence remains constrained by the power asymmetry embedded in the basin’s hydropolitical order, its case demonstrates that even structurally weaker downstream states can deploy soft counter-hegemonic strategies to partially rebalance transboundary dynamics. Vietnam’s experience contributes valuable insights into adaptive agency, soft balancing, and norm entrepreneurship in global environmental politics and offers lessons for other downstream countries confronting hydro-hegemony under climate stress.
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Tien et al. (2026) studied this question.
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