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Aspirations for sub-regional, regional and global cooperation at a bi-lateral and multilateral level over water security are strong and yet often a real or perceived gap exists between intentions and the workings of institutions. In the area of water security difficulties are often premised on tensions between national territory and national sovereignty. As a result, emphasis has been placed by decision makers on how to most effectively classify the ‘most at risk’ areas from water security issues. However, this objective itself is often separated from wider issues of economic land ownership. Yet stakeholders paradoxically have both similar and yet different understandings of what counts as territory and sovereignty. A majority of stakeholders continue to pursue a ‘realist’ or liberal approach to the spaces of national sovereignty and territory as water course or water basin. This binary assumption of territory as a specifically bounded political space is given here as a reason for limited concrete results on water security governance. Recalibrating this understanding of sovereignty, territory and security through a sociology of materialism might therefore open alternative spaces for ensuring issue-specific governance in spaces now impacted by the dynamics of infrastructure and sub-regional connectivity. By framing these tensions through the issue of territory and materialism the paper identifies gaps and strategic opportunities emerging that might potentially recalibrate the conceptual and policy debate on water security and its territorial assumptions.

Materiality, Territory and Sovereignty: Responding to Contradictory Water Security Issues in the Mekong Region