INTRODUCTION

Urban Southeast Asia is experiencing an environmental crisis in which there have been few triumphs. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) considers Southeast Asia's water pollution to be “severe”, more severe than China and East Asia. In particular faecal coli forms, low levels of oxygen and high levels of lead are seen as very severe; suspended solids as severe; and nitrates as a moderate but rising threat. ASEAN too sees “the management of environmental problems arising from a rapidly expanding and highly diversified industry sector is one of the most important issues confronting ASEAN today”.

Despite widespread concern over water pollution by governments, donors and civil society there have been few examples of partnerships developing to turn the region's cities into more sustainable entities. Instead, there have been acknowledged failures in both state-led and private sector strategies. The limitations of past and present responses have resulted from, and also now contribute to discord over an urban vision and disaffection over who is responsible for pollution and what actions need to be taken. These conflicts, in turn, are the product of economic and social polarization in many Southeast Asian cities, which makes consensus over issues such as pollution and policy responses increasingly difficult. As a result, environmental conflict is becoming a new social and political fault line in the region's industrializing cities.

In surveying a number of policy responses to environmental problems in urban Asia, an inherent tension is immediately evident between the science and the politics of pollution. While pollution lends itself to measurable and quantified data, the causes and solutions are to a great extent more socio-political in origin and nature. As such, there are clear limitations in government and development agencies approaching urban pollution with immediate technical solutions. McGranahan has remarked that “the notion that local environmental problems can be engineered away” is a convenient fiction, suppressing the inherent tensions between social groups around the framing of environmental problems and their resolution.