Cambodia has too much water during the wet season, and too little water remains in the dry season, which drives a relentless cycle of floods and droughts. These extremes destroy crops, properties, infrastructure, and lives and contribute to poverty. Thus, water management is key to the development of Cambodia. This article seeks to answer the question why Cambodia is vulnerable to floods and drought and how these conditions undermine the country’s development. It also examines what can be done to improve the country’s water resource management and the livelihoods of its population. The article examines water resource availability in Cambodia, its management regimes, and the policy implications in answering these research questions. The article looks at three case studies: first, the Stung Chreybak irrigation scheme in the Tonle Sap region; second, the Lower Sesan 2 Dam (LS2) in the Sesan, Srepok, and Sekong (3S) basin in Cambodia; and third, the transboundary water management in the Mekong Delta. It concludes that water management has been equated to irrigation management. However, the irrigation system in Cambodia has been inadequate to cope with the tremendous volume of water. Furthermore, water management has been complicated by the hydropower dams in the Upper Mekong region and the rubber dams in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. These contribute to high water insecurity in Cambodia.

Cambodia has abundant water resources in the wet season and a scarcity of water in the dry season. These phenomena undermine the development in this country and pose a threat to long-term development. Hence, the governance of water becomes critically important for the current and future development of Cambodia. Thus, this study is undertaken to understand the current water governance practice, challenges and constraints that prevent Cambodia from managing water effectively, and identify opportunities to improve it. In doing this, the study examines the water governance in Cambodia from a large-scale water management system and three community-based water resource management systems and farmer water user communities (FWUCs) in three provinces around Cambodia. It concludes that the current water governance practice in Cambodia is still too weak and fragmented to address the water security issues affecting the country, and thus, reorganization of the current structure and system of the water governance framework would be required to address long-term water security issues.

State security is a key concern for countries when dealing with transboundary river governance issues. While there is a considerable amount of literature on transboundary river cooperation in general, there has been little on transboundary cooperation and the damming of shared rivers in terms of their impacts on state security. As a result, this article seeks to answer the following questions in relation to the lower Mekong basin: (i) How is the damming process embedded in transboundary cooperation? (ii) How does this type of cooperation contribute to peace and security in the study area – the 3S river basin? And, (iii) how can transboundary cooperation be improved so as to address state security issues? To answer these questions, this study reviews the relevant literature and uses two case studies, one of the Yali Dam in Vietnam and the second of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam in Cambodia. In doing so, the article examines dam developments in the lower Mekong basin, their environmental and human security impacts, and how they contribute to or threaten state security in Cambodia. It concludes that dams on international rivers induce insecurity among states downstream and that cooperation between riparian states is key to addressing this insecurity.

Water security is a key governance challenge especially in relation to transboundary rivers. While the literature elaborates on the water security concept, there is very little on how to operationalize it in the transboundary context. Hence, this paper addresses the question: How can the governance of transboundary rivers be operationalized to deal with national water security concerns? It uses a literature review and a case study focusing on dams in the Mekong tributaries, namely the Sesan, part of the 3S Basin, in Vietnam and Cambodia. The paper describes the damming process in the 3S Basin and how it threatens water security for downstream states in terms of securing the flow, volume, quality, space, and the temporal variations of the rivers and the livelihoods of river dependent communities. It examines how the Mekong River Commission (MRC) members address these issues, balance their interests and secure the free flow of the Mekong River and its tributaries. It concludes that the MRC Agreement of 1995 is an inadequate mechanism to regulate the developments of hydrological infrastructure on the shared international tributaries, and that further operationalization of the concept of water security is necessary to enable the improvement of existing cooperative regulations and mechanisms.