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Ecological Governance as Niche Diplomacy: South Korea's Engagement with the Lower Mekong Basin

Authors

  • Luu Thuy Hong Email ORCID Faculty of International Affairs, Academy of Journalism and Communication, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
  • Nguyen Tran Hoai Dong ORCID Faculty of History, Geography, and Political Science, University of Science and Education, The University of Da Nang, Da Nang 550000, Vietnam
  • Phung Gia Bach Email ORCID Faculty of History, Hanoi Pedagogical University 2, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/re.v8i5.117244

Received:23 July 2026 |Revised:15 September 2026 |Accepted:23 September 2026 |Published Online:15 October 2026

Abstract

Drought, saltwater intrusion, and biodiversity loss are only part of the problem facing the Lower Mekong Basin. Layered on top is a scramble among external powers for regional influence. Has South Korea managed to carve out something distinct amid this competition—a functional niche built on environmental and technical cooperation, rather than the usual infrastructure-and-security playbook? That's the question this study takes up, using the Ecological Niche Diplomacy (END) framework to operationalize five features—niche breadth, resource partitioning, functional differentiation, adaptation, and governance embedding—as things one can actually observe in Korean-funded projects. The empirical base is the Mekong–Republic of Korea (ROK) Cooperation Fund (MKCF), cross-checked against Mekong Institute records, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Mekong regional reports, Korea Water Resources Corporation (K-water) technical reports, and Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) assessments. Each project gets coded by sector, environmental function, recipient country, funding allocation, implementation status, implementing institution, and stated activities, then run against the END framework. Approximately 30% of MKCF funding sits in environmental and technical work: water governance, climate and disaster-risk monitoring, biodiversity and forestry, sustainable agriculture, and digital environmental systems. A concentration that looks more like functional specialization than the broad infrastructure-and-security push typical of other external actors in the basin. But concentration alone can't settle the question of intent: the claim here stays narrower, an emerging functional niche, not demonstrated strategic autonomy.

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