The Prek Multiple: Doing Difference Together for Incremental Policy Changes in Cambodia

As can be inferred from its title, this paper is inspired by the work on multiplicity conducted by two scholars in science studies. We turn towards these scholars as calls for interdisciplinary research practices to support decision making are increasingly pervasive in the field of sociohydrology and, more broadly, in the field of Sustainability Science. We find these calls are grounded in the assumption that the raison d’être of interdisciplinarity is to provide an “integrated understanding” on the basis of which decisions to solve ‘wicked problems’ -such as the search for sustainability- can then be made, granted adequate involvement of decision makers in the processes.

We argue that the search for a “better understanding” of sociohydrological processes through integration is unlikely to yield the much hoped-for changes in water management in the real world and offer an alternative, the ‘cloud of representations’. More specifically, we describe activities conducted by a small collective of researchers and practitioners on the Cambodian preks. These are earthen channels dating back almost two centuries that can be found in the Cambodian Upper Mekong delta south of Phnom Penh. They connect rivers to their adjacent floodplains through breaches in the river levees. In this paper, we further describe the making of a multi-level case study area from the deltaic floodplain to the banks of specific preks. We recount how the preks have been conceptualized as key outcomes of negotiations between foreign development agents and ministerial staff, as channels conveying water and contaminants, or as key to agricultural practices. We further describe how these different conceptualizations informed each other yet yielded independent research results. We argue that highlighting the co-existence of these results, including in handling their respective uncertainty and contradictions, increased their respective legitimacy beyond the ‘research realm’, ultimately leading to changes in the ways rehabilitation of preks was envisioned in the context of specific development projects.

More generically, we argue that learning to accommodate differences in approaches and representations of a given “object” may be a more conducive approach to strengthening the water science-policy interface through incremental changes in practice and policy.