Chapter 4: The Impact-Science Policy Stream
5. Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Further Research
While this study has made some important contributions, it has also some important limitations. First and foremost, it fails to draw from interviews directly with actors within the government and hydropower sector, as well as with some prominent actors that oppose some hydropower development, like Yu Xiaogang. This is due to my failure to secure an interview with those actors during my two-week field research trip to Kunming in the summer of 2013. While I was able to get interviews with several
researchers at the AIRC, WWF, and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), ultimately only the interviews and connections made at the AIRC offered relevant insight into downstream impact science and its relationship with decision-making. Unfortunately, the information I received in those interviews did not really go beyond what I had previously learned or would later find from published articles and statements. As such, a more direct and concrete connection between the selection of science and its role with decision-makers could be made. Therefore, my findings offer a more “either/or” conclusion, rather than a more definite connection. With that said, in my interviews with other foreign researchers examining hydropower development on the Upper Mekong, they stated that at times researching the impacts of dams on the Mekong can bear frustratingly little, as with much of the hydrological and sediment flow data being considered a state secret, along with a general wariness to share information on a sensitive topic that may yield a negative backlash from the government, meant that at times much of the explicit information gathered in interviews was generally confined to that which had already been concluded to be safe to share. As such, more specific information into the behind-the-scenes
decision-making process remained, for both another research and myself, either anecdotal or gleamed from secondary sources.
With that said, however, while Darrin Magee (2006a) stated similar troubles in his research, he did meet with some success through extensive interviews the course of a
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year. It could be considered, then that some of the limitations of my research derive from a combination of a lack of means, resources, and at times adequate Chinese language skills, as well as the general difficulty of a foreign researcher examining a politically sensitive topic in China.
It would be worth examining, through extended field research, the viewpoints of engineers at Hydrolancang and their more nuanced views of impacts from dams. Given the limitations of my research, I primarily had to rely on the statements from the head engineer at the company, Ma Hongqi, and other lead engineers to determine their views of downstream impacts. A more in-depth field study would be able to determine a greater understanding of the role of engineers as an epistemic community, and their role in the perception and interpretation of science on downstream impacts and hydropower itself.
While undoubtedly the AIRC is a key player in the understanding of science among decision-makers in China, the most influential EC seems to be the engineers within both the hydropower companies and the government. I am confident that my research offers a broad understanding of the science used by engineers hydropower companies, extended field research and interviews with the engineers and researchers at Huaneng and
Hydrolancang, and the research facilities they consult with, would yield a much more nuanced and profound understanding of the role of science. Insomuch that for the Upper Mekong Huaneng and Hydrolancang are for the foreseeable future one of the primary decision-makers for hydropower development, a nuanced look into their framing of downstream impacts could yield better comprehension of future development projects.
In addition, during my research into the use of science with decision-makers, I primarily relied upon a qualitative look into statements from relevant sources in the media and government websites and publications. In order to avoid redundancy, I chose fewer articles that seemed to represent general trends within the much larger body of media reports, government statements, and hydropower company statements and press releases. As such, this research does not offer a more in-depth, quantitative look into the number of publications on downstream impacts over time, and their direct number changes in relation to significant changes in the policy stream. While I am confident in this research showing the major changes within downstream impact science discourse
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among decision-makers, a quantitative analysis would offer an interesting, and nuanced look at response trends.
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