By Pichai Uamturapojn, M-POWER Fellow Presented at the Mekong Forum on Water, Food and Energy Phnom Penh, Cambodia December 7-9, 2011 Session 8a: Presenting the work of the M-POWER Fellows

1. Organizational Resilience in RBOs
Evidence from Lao PDR and Thailand
Pichai Uamturapojn

2. Today’s Agenda
• What is an organizational resilience? and Why?
• Why RBOs?
• RBOs in Lao PDR and Thailand
• ‘In’ and ‘Between’ Discussions

3. Interim Research objectives
• Understanding the causes and processes of organizational
changes in and/or between RBOs in Lao PDR and
Thailand.
• Working on how organizational changes of the RBOs in
terms of mandate, authority and capacity.

4. What is ‘organizational resilience’?
• one another concept? or just a new trend?
‘Organizational resilience’ is defined as a function of the
overall vulnerability, situation awareness and adaptive
capacity of an organization in a complex, dynamic and
interdependent system (McManus et al. 2008).
‘Organizational resilience’ is also seen as a system’s capacity
to maintain or restore an acceptable level of functioning
despite perturbations or failure (Robert et al. 2010).

5. Why organizational resilience?
• ‘Organizational resilience’ allows flexibility characterized
by the informal work practices, local autonomy of action,
management systems for feedback, learning and continual
improvement (McDonald 2006).
• Does it sound appropriated to so-called our “Mekong way”
of practices?
To regain a dynamically stable stage, and thus to be resilient,
an organization necessarily needs to be adaptive.

6. Why RBO?
• Water resources management are traditionally dominated
by sectoral activities as common of irrigation, forestry,
hydropower, mining, rural & urban water supplies, etc.
• It is geographically and politically in the hands of
upstream-downstream institutions - recognizing the
introduction of the RBOs towards cross-sectoral & co-
management approach.
• RBO is to promote awareness and strengthen stakeholder
participation and involvement in water resources
management and decision making throughout the basin.

7. What is RBO?
• By operational criteria (Mostert, 1999)
‣ hydrological
‣ administrative
‣ coordinated
• By interdisciplinary coordination
‣ IWRM? through RBO?

8. Interim Research Questions
• How is the structural organization of the RBOs in Lao
PDR and Thailand? and why they were/are framed in
those ways?
• How are they coordinated linkages among negotiated
actors?
• How do the RBOs prepare and respond to variety of
cross-sectoral & cross-functional scopes?

9. Research Methodology
Collection of
RBO reviews
& case studies
RBO in Laos:
Case - Num
Ngum RBO
Formulation of
Cross-case
‘organizational Research
comparison of
resilience’ in Discussion
findings
RBOs
RBO in Thailand:
Case: Bang
Field-based Prakong RBO
interviews
with RBOs &
stakeholders

10. RBO in Lao PDR
• RBO was first established in mid 2001 under the Water
Resource Coordination Committee (WRCC - currently
merged to WREA) with inadequate resources and
mandates.
• It gradually became functional during the preparation of
the Nam Ngum River Basin Development Sector Project
(2004-2010).
• In June 15, 2010, the establishment and activities of River
Basin Committees was passed by a Prime Minister’s
Decree.
• RBO is operated under the LNMC for national-wide water
resources management as well as with Mekong Basin.

11. RBO in Lao PDR
At Ministerial level, there are various ministries involved in
water resources management as:
• Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF)
• Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MPWT)
• Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM)
• Ministry of Health (MoH)
At Prime Minister’s Office, there are:
• Water Resource & Environment Administration (WREA)
• Lao National Mekong Committee Secretariat (LNMCS)
• Science Technology & Environment Agency (STEA)
• National Tourism Authority (NTA)

12. RBO in Lao PDR
• At Organizational level, the WRCC secretariat and the
LNMC secretariat were merged into a new WREA which
included a new Department of Water Resources (DWR) in
mid 2007.
• WREA included Department of Meteorology and
Hydrology (formerly under MAF) and other environmental
responsibilities (formerly part of STEA).
• On June 24, 2011, the MoNRE was established by merging
National Land Management Authority (NLMA) with WREA
and several portfolios from departments of Geology and
Forest Management and Protection.

13. RBO in Thailand
• 7th National Plan (1992-1996) had provided incentive to
water resources management in all 25 basins.
• A main key challenge was/is the bureaucratic balance
among water-related agencies.
• In 1997, a new constitution had determined roles of
people in protecting & managing natural resources, where
gave authorities to local administrative bodies.
• In 2002, the MoNRE was established with DWR tasked
with IWRM-based, guided the RBO by Office of the
National Water Resources Committee (ONWRC).
• Over 30 water-related laws, with responsibilities shared by
more than 30 departments, overseen by 9 ministries.

14. RBO in Thailand
• RBO is (still) practically a top-down decision making
throughout the mandate, authority & capacity of DWR in
particular - who’s acting as the Secretariat channelling all
the needed budgets.
• RBO is stated nature of parallel processes with no clear-cut
spatial coordinates by several administrative agencies,
particularly with the Royal Irrigation Department (RID).
• This competition creates an unnecessary attrition with
other water-related agencies, especially in the provincial
and local scales.

15. ‘In‘ Discussion
• RBO itself is created by increased cooperation and even
more networked partnerships, with lack of adaptive
capacity in secretarial management towards emergence of
complex.
• RBO is heavily influenced by each traditional top-down
sectoral bureaucratic experience in a hierarchical context,
where existence of varying degrees of development in
different government agencies could be implied that the
adaptive management of RBO necessarily increase the
resilience in organization’s changes.

16. ‘Between‘ Discussion
• What we see ‘difference’ between Lao PDR and Thailand
is a process of trade-off between functionality & authority
in RBOs’ capacity adaptation.
• IWRM-based networking is applied & practiced across
transboundary basin-wide scale, challenging new balance
of geo-politics priorities.
• Need to further examine on-going administrative and
policy contexts towards changing decision making
mechanisms.

17. ‘In’ & ‘Between’ triggers towards RBO changes
‘In’
• memberships structure
• functional scope
• decision making process
• information sharing & management
• dispute resolution mechanism
• financing
‘Between’
• decentralization
• public-private partnerships
• influence of NGOs
• transboundary agreements

18. For Academic Challenges
• Its challenge is to apply resilience concept & framework
towards reinforcing the adaptive capacity of RBOs in
organizational level.
• Complexity of water resources management is to evaluate
towards functional scopes of the RBOs.

19. Thank you very much for sharing water.
pichai.uamturapojn @ gmail