The social impacts of large dams have been studied extensively. However, small dams' social impacts have been largely neglected by the academic community. Our paper addresses this gap. We examine the social impacts of multiple small dams in one upstream and one downstream village in Thailand's Ing River basin. Our research is based on semi-structured interviews with beneficiaries, government and NGOs. We argue that small dams' social impacts are multi-faceted and unequal. The dams were perceived to reduce fish abundance and provide flood mitigation benefits. Furthermore, the dams enabled increased access to irrigation water for upstream farmers, who re-appropriated water via the dams at the expense of those downstream. The small dams thus engendered water allocation conflicts. Many scholars, practitioners and environmentalists argue that small dams are a benign alternative to large dams. However, the results of our research mandate caution regarding this claim.

Environmental change and governance operate across multiple, interconnected scales. In Southeast Asia, there are calls to broaden the study of transboundary environmental governance to address the range of scales, actors, and flows in analysis. In response, we propose a framework to move beyond statist framings of ‘transboundary’ in the region by drawing on van Schendel's proposal for flow studies on the one hand, to overcome the ‘geographies of ignorance’ that stem from fixed studies of nation‐states, and mobile political ecology on the other, to emphasise the role of resource users and their mobilities in environmental governance. We focus on transboundary sand and sediments in rivers, the rise in sand mining in the region, and its impacts on livelihoods and cross‐border flows. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2019 along the transboundary Salween River in the Myanmar‐Thai borderlands. This research shows that sand extraction not only impacts existing sand‐based livelihoods, like riverbank gardening, but also intersects with migration patterns. Migration here is being exacerbated by sand mining alongside processes of environmental and political‐economic change, but these intersections would be overlooked in a fixed or statist approach. We illustrate these complex changes by presenting two ‘sand stories’ that emerge from our research. This primary research combined with a novel conceptual framing expands our analysis of transboundary by revealing and highlighting the linkages between mobilities and transboundary resource flows. In doing so, our analysis brings people, livelihoods and mobilities to the centre of transboundary environment governance and opens scholarly and practice‐based discussions to the range of actors, scales and resource regimes involved.

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when “under the radar”. These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin.

For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang‐Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo‐Brahmaputra and Nu‐Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date ‐ the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change ‐ and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine‐grained analyses of power, control and contestation.