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Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range of actors, including variants of care. To illustrate this, I draw on longstanding research along the Salween River, the 120 km stretch where the river forms the Thai–Myanmar (Burma) border, to reveal the ways in which borders as rivers can provide new insights into socio‐natural bordering processes. In particular, I illustrate a range of ways local residents are caring for a river‐border, and how even an ‘exploding’ or ‘hungry’ river‐border can be a fragile space for care and for non‐state actors to enact the border ‘differently’ in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what "counts" as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when "under the radar". These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have Thailand's environmental politics changed across the last five decades? How have they remained the same? What role do environmental movements in Thailand play in the country's current moment of extended military-led rule and global environmental change? This article addresses these questions by presenting a critical genealogy of Thailand's environmental politics. It begins with a larger framing of environmental movements within the context of Thai history and then traces these struggles through to the twenty-first century. Rather than argue that environmental politics are distinct from other forms of politics, we contend that environmental struggles should be understood as unfolding within and shaping Thailand's changing social, economic, and political landscape. Although Thailand's environmental movements have opened new pathways towards more just politics, they have also re-entrenched old political orders and, at times, deepened political divisions. By attending to these complex effects, this article highlights the ambiguous relationship between environmental politics and pro-democracy mobilisation. Rather than assume that environmental activism is inherently progressive, it demonstrates how Thailand's environmental politics are complex, neither linear nor determined in their relationship with democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theories of 'post-politics' provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this 'age of post-politics' are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the future of the project uncertain, our research conducted in 2019 revealed similar dynamics at play to those described more broadly in the literature on post-politics. We highlight familiar processes of delegation of decision-making, a proliferation of governance actors and an individualisation of policy issues. What is distinctive in Myanmar is the way a coalition of elite decision-makers have diluted and defused policy disagreements through the construction of a utopian vision of a modern international city. We see this imaginary of the modern city as a tactic to support the broader efforts of depoliticisation. This diverges from arguments that the imagination of social change is curtailed through the pragmatic post-political notion that 'there is no alternative'. Instead, in the context of New Yangon City, utopian vision is integral to depoliticisation and limiting dissent. We conclude that attention to processes of depoliticisation is crucial in relation to mega project planning in Asia, and that a productive way forward for studies of urban development is not wholesale acceptance or dismissal of the notion of post-politics, but robust engagement with its critiques and promise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microfinance has attracted increasing attention, not only for its goals to empower the poor but for its potential negative effects that can serve to undermine that core goal of empowerment. In this paper, we examine microfinance debt in the context of Cambodia's cassava boom and its particular history of resource extraction. Focusing on cassava farmers in Pailin province, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia, we find that post-conflict Pailin cassava farming is linked with indebtedness to microfinance institutions. As the burden of debt erodes community life and heightens individual anxiety, our analysis of interviews conducted in 2018 shows that Pailin's small-scale cassava farmers lose capacity to build the solidarity necessary to address problems collectively. Drawing on critical work on debt and historically-situated political ecology, we see a situation shaped-but not determined-by a history in which local elites have controlled significant portions of the local economy, extracting personal benefits. We argue that, in this context, microfinance initiatives extend this longer history of resource extraction as concentrations of power and wealth go unchallenged. Microfinance loans are thus better seen as part of a system of depriving marginalized farmers of choice, rather than empowering them, as part of what Silvia Federici terms the financialization of reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fishing constitutes a key source of income and food for rural communities worldwide. This is the case in predominantly rural Myanmar (World Fish, 2019), particularly in the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River Delta. Fishing has long been a central livelihood strategy and valuable source of food security in the Delta, and now also generates a substantial contribution to the gross domestic product. However, the livelihood practices of the fishers, particularly small‐scale fishers, are largely 'invisible' in the literature and policy. In this article, we advance understanding of the significant but understudied livelihoods of small‐scale fishers through interviews with fishers and a range of other actors in 2018. Taking a careful examination of the challenges, practices and responses of fishers in the Delta, our research underlines that fishers are important actors in the 'making' of the Delta as a geographical scale and concept, yet they are being pushed out of the very landscape they have helped co‐create and have lived in for generations. At this crucial point in Myanmar's development and change, we contend that a better understanding of the livelihoods of fishing households, as some of the nation's most vulnerable, is important for inclusive policy development, economic reforms and research strategy going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Southeast Asia, how flooding is named or studied is not only a matter of fact, but distinctions of flooding as 'beneficial' or 'disaster' elicit specific reactions from city management, government and residents. This is particularly true in cities across Myanmar, which have been chronically under-resourced to deal with flooding. This paper investigates the overlooked informal work of residents to manage flooding in urbanising Hpa An, a secondary city located along the Salween River. I draw on a hydrosocial approach and emphasise the practices of residents in local water management and responses to flooding. This contributes to our knowledge about flooding in Myanmar, as at present attentions have focused on large-scale, top down plans for water infrastructure in the country. I argue that close analysis of these practices in Hpa An reveals local hydrosocial relations as dynamic, locally embedded and responsive to change, but in ways that do not necessarily privilege the governance of water as development intervention or a centralised, statist endeavour. Without this knowledge of local responses and management of flooding, we are in a poor position to understand their impacts and interactions with broader changes in Myanmar and in a changing climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue lays out the key themes and arguments across the five research papers and Viewpoint. Foremost, we highlight how by bringing this research across diverse Asian cities together into one special issue, the work reveals how water is foundational to the city. To illuminate how our work on water urbanisms in Asia has the potential to 'rethink the way in which cities operate' (Xiao, 2016, 3367), this special issue examines the central paradigms of 'water and the city' by emphasising the 'water work' of multiple actors, to identify possibilities and opportunities, in addition to 'governance failures' in the production of the urban form (Bakker et al., 2008). In particular, these papers provide compelling evidence that to comprehend fully the future of Asian cities in the Anthropocene, it is necessary to understand their related topographies, their water systems and, also, their practices and politics of water distribution. These contributions are thus well positioned to contribute to engaged debates in geography and planning on development, water and the 'urban condition' as linked to environmental change and social justice, through a range of disciplinary approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geography—two literatures rarely in conversation with one another—we reveal the links between new, globalized, cross-border articulations of poverty and prosperity and the sand trade. We situate our sand case in Southeast Asia across three sites, namely, in Singapore, the world's top sand importer; Cambodia, a top-ten global exporter of sand; and an emerging exporter, Myanmar. We examine how sand mining affects, directly and indirectly, a range of livelihoods, specifically fisheries in Cambodia, riverbank agriculture in Myanmar, and migrant labor in Singapore. Drawing on our empirical work, we argue that linking these two literatures with empirical data on sand provides an approach that is broad in its connections and simultaneously grounded in specific practices, places, and people. This enables us to better account for often overlooked aspects in the production, erosion, and transfer of value. Key Words: global production networks, livelihoods, precarity, sand mining, Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how local knowledge about riverine ecologies influenced the production of expert, gendered, and ethnic identities, and interrogates how these identities and knowledges are 'co-produced'. Drawing on work in feminist political ecology and science studies, I highlight the links between the production of knowledge and identity. Research was carried out through fieldwork in two villages along the Salween River, at the border between Thailand and Myanmar (Burma), where residents participated in 'Villager Research'. Here, residents identify as members of ethnic minority groups, mainly the Karen, and undertake a variety of livelihood activities, including fishing, swidden agriculture, rice farming, and entrepreneurial trade. Much of the impetus for residents to undertake the work of local knowledge production was to have a say in the decision-making processes of large-scale developments proposed on the river which would impact these livelihoods. What I examine is how these efforts also obscured women's participation in fishing and in research because their predominant practices associated with fishing involved income-producing activities instead of romanticized subsistence activities. I also consider some of the critiques from the Karen women's group who identified subsistence-focused work as 'not enough' in that it does not generate much needed income and is 'not secure'. These efforts accomplished a particular kind of village expert, to the exclusion of Karen women in its documentation, even in a project led by villagers and situated within an ethnic minority community which is matriarchal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged 'critical hydropolitics' as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on 'the state' as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang‐Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo‐Brahmaputra and Nu‐Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date ‐ the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change ‐ and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine‐grained analyses of power, control and contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines how Thai–Burma border residents are enrolled and engaged in remaking the political border through their knowledge practices and performances, or their own “borderwork”. Border residents do not perform this work alone, but in connection with other actors including environmental consultants. In order to highlight this co-production of the political border, I bring together border studies scholarship that see borders as process and performance with work in science studies that has highlighted the way that knowledge and order are co-produced. The importance of this approach is that it facilitates an understanding of the multifaceted and contradictory work to remake the border by multiple actors, a way to study “borders from the bottom up” that illustrates how the border is continually enacted. While this article puts forth the notion that the border represents an important site and process of struggle and negotiation in which marginalized communities invest, it also questions the assumption that because residents are engaged in remaking the border, the border is necessarily more ‘democratic’. The discussion and empirical data presented in this article also speak to broader debates in political geography about how borders are remade through practice and performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for urban water management seek to harness natural processes and (re)connect diverse flows in the urban water cycle for increased ecological sustainability. Developed in Australia, the US and Europe, the application of these approaches for urban water management tends to focus primarily on improving the environmental sustainability of grey water infrastructure. In many Asian cities, where the coverage of existing grey infrastructure is partial, and in some cases declining, the applicability of such approaches seems limited. That said, an engagement between NBS and the urban water challenges of Asian cities offers good reasons to expand NBS to address conditions of water vulnerability. In this Viewpoint, we take a particular interest in how NBS principles related to natural processes and alternative water supplies might be directed toward mitigating environmental harm in circumstances where urban residents are already reliant on non-networked and 'natural' services for water supply. We argue that improving infrastructure for sustainability in such cases requires thinking about how to limit the impacts of infrastructure inequalities on vulnerable residents and providing low-cost innovations that can work to protect and stabilise the non-networked ecological services on which millions of urban residents already depend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]