[1] Its mission is "To promote and coordinate sustainable management and development of water and related resources for the countries' mutual benefit and the people's well-being".

[5] and "one of the UN's earliest spin-offs",[6] as the organization functioned under the aegis of the UN, with its Executive Agent (EA) chosen from the career staff of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

[9] However, Makim[10] argues that the committee was "largely unaffected by formal or informal U.S. preferences" given the ambivalence of some riparians about US technical support, in particular Cambodia's rejection of some specific types of assistance.

However, the fact remains that "international development agencies have always paid the bills for the Mekong regime," with European (especially Scandinavian) nations picking up the slack left by the United States, and then (to a lesser extent) Japan.

[17] The 1987 Revised Indicative Basin Plan—the high-water mark of the Interim Committee's activity—scaled back the ambitions of the 1970 plan, envisioning a cascade of smaller dams along the Mekong's mainstream, divided into 29 projects, 26 of which were strictly national in scope.

Cambodia's readmission was largely a side-show which masked the true issue facing the riparians: that the rapid economic growth experienced in Thailand relative to its neighbors had made even the modest sovereignty limitations imposed by Mekong agreements seem undesirable in Bangkok.

[19] Article 10 of the Joint Declaration, requiring unanimous consent for all mainstream development and inter-basin diversion proved to be the main sticking point of Cambodia's readmission, with Thailand perhaps prepared to walk away from the regime altogether.

[5] The conflict came to a head in April 1992 when Thailand forced the executive agent of the committee, Chuck Lankester, to resign and leave the country after barring the secretariat from the March 1992 meeting.

[20] This prompted a series of meetings organized by the UNDP (which was terrified that the regime in which it had invested so much might disappear), culminating in the April 1995 Agreement on the Cooperation for the Sustainable Development of the Mekong River Basin signed by Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam in Chiang Rai, Thailand, creating the Mekong River Commission (MRC).

"[5] On paper, the Work Programme represents a rejection of the ambitious development schemes embodied by the 1970 and 1987 Indicative Basin Plans (calling for no mainstream dams) and a shift to a holistic rather than programmatic approach.

"[24] Similarly, the 2001 MRC Hydropower Development Strategy explicitly disavowed the "promotion of specific projects" in favor of "basin-wide issues.

[35] The ability of upstream nations to undermine downstream cooperation was perhaps best symbolized by an April 1995 ceremonial boat trip from Thailand to Vietnam—to celebrate the signing of the 1995 Agreement—which ran aground mid-river as a result of China filling the reservoir of the Manwan Dam.

[38] Critics noted that the emphasis on "flood control" rather than dry season flows represented an important omission given the concerns prioritized by the Mekong regime.

[40] One area in which China has been particularly reticent is in providing information about the operation of its dams, rather than just flow data, including refusing to join emergency meetings in 2004.

For example, in a letter to the Bangkok Post, MRC CEO Dr. Olivier Cogels in fact argued that Chinese dams would increase the river's dry season volume as their purpose was electricity generation and not irrigation.

[46] While such dams certainly could increase dry season flows, the only certainty about future Chinese reservoir policies seems to be that they will be crafted outside of downstream cooperation regimes.