Why Sand Mining Governance Remains Challenging in the Lower Mekong Basin: The Need for an Integrated Driver‐to‐Management Perspective

ABSTRACT Sand mining is widely recognized as one of the most significant threats to river health in the Lower Mekong Basin, where intensive extraction interacts with sediment starvation, hydropower development, climate variability, and delta subsidence to produce complex, transboundary environmental impacts. Yet despite expanding scientific evidence on channel incision, bank instability, salinity intrusion, and socio‐ecological risk, governance interventions remain largely reactive and unevenly effective. We argue that this limitation stems from a fragmented treatment of sand mining, in which demand‐side drivers, extraction extent, impacts, and management responses are addressed separately rather than as an integrated socio‐geomorphic system. Using the Lower Mekong Basin as the broader governance setting and the Vietnamese Mekong Delta as the principal case where impacts and data are most clearly documented, we present an integrated Driver‐to‐Management perspective that explicitly links construction demand, the observable footprint of extraction, river‐health impacts, and governance responses. We define effective and credible governance as management that is evidence‐based, spatially attributable, enforceable, socially legitimate, and responsive to sediment‐budget and river‐health constraints. Building on this perspective, we outline three interdependent governance levers: moderating demand pressure, making extraction spatially visible and traceable, and aligning extraction limits with sediment budgets and river‐health outcomes. Treating sand mining as a coupled socio‐geomorphic and common‐pool resource problem is necessary for durable river stewardship in the Mekong and other rapidly developing Anthropocene rivers.