Search

The project Thai Health-Risk Transition: A National Cohort Study seeks to better understand the health implications of modernisation and globalisation forces impacting on Thailand. As part of its "look-back" component this paper seeks, using available life tables, to document the country's post-war mortality transition. The onset of transition through mass campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s is first discussed before attention turns to the life tables. They are predictably far from flawless, but careful analysis does permit trends that have seen around 30 years added to life expectancy to be traced, and age patterns of improved survivorship and their relation to initiatives to improve health to be examined. The broad benefits generated by mass campaigns, ongoing improvements in infant and early childhood mortality, and a phased impact of the expansion of primary health care in rural areas on adult survival prospects after the mid-1970s are demonstrated. The paper also investigates the consequences for mortality of a motorcycle-focused rapid increase in road fatalities in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the HIV/AIDS epidemic that developed after 1984.

As part of the Thai Government’s objective to increase energy security through biodiesel, oil palm was introduced to Northeast Thailand in 2005. Nong Khai Province was selected as a pilot project because of its suitable environmental conditions. This study assesses the acceptance of policy interventions and socio-economic conditions by adopters and non-adopters. We found that total farmland size was significantly higher among oil palm producers than among non-producers. Nevertheless, the area under oil palm cultivation did not increase in accordance with land size in the way rubber did. Oil palm and non-oil palm farmers had almost equal amounts of rice area thereby providing household food security. Oil palm did not replace food crops. Farmers investing in oil palm tend to base their livelihood around on-farm production, whereas non-adopters tend to diversify with off-farm income sources. Oil palm was found to be one component of a diversified farming system and an additional income source, albeit not the primary one. In conclusion, oil palm was a crop that had been tried by (wealthier) farmers with sufficient capital, and an aim to further diversify on-farm household income. Oil palm is certainly not (yet) contributing substantially to household income in Thailand’s Northeast.

This paper, by looking at the role of Taiwanese citizens in civic organisations for marriage migrants, explores how women's agency and negotiation occur not only against masculine dominance within patriarchal family arrangements, but also in alliance with it, when oppression is located somewhere beyond the family. In contrast to literature that depicts marriage migration as a women's and migrants' issue, this paper explores the role of Taiwanese citizens (often husbands in cross‐border marriages) in shaping the evolution of the phenomenon in both the private and public spheres. The aim of this paper is to fill a gap in empirical literature on marriage migration in Taiwan and East Asia, as well as contribute to feminist debates on women's agency in the context of masculine dominance. Building on ethnographic data collected through fieldwork in Taiwan, including in‐depth interviews and participant observation within civil society organisations for marriage migrants, this paper reveals how Taiwanese male citizens and Chinese female migrants responded to the challenges brought by their decision to engage in cross‐border unions by creating a new narrative that could explain their condition of shared oppression and by developing joint actions to address the structural discrimination they faced as cross‐border couples in Taiwan.

With large tracts of forested land planned for, or already converted to, industrial palm oil concessions, there is a need to better understand the gendered implications for, and responses by, communities affected by such landscape change. This paper examines the differentiated gendered responses and livelihood strategies of Dayak Modang women and men in a hamlet in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, surrounded by industrial palm oil plantations. Informed by feminist political ecology, we investigate how the compounding impact of industrial oil palm – the basis and outcome of enclavement – curtails livelihood options and reinforces gender differentiation in terms of access to and use of customary resources. Gendered inequalities and food insecurity dynamics emerge as a result. We show how, however, that despite gendered exclusions, Dayak Modang women use their own knowledge and practices to diversify livelihoods to negotiate emerging constraints over resource access and use. Our paper demonstrates that ways in which Dayak women ‘sustain livelihoods’ reflects forms of everyday negotiations and resistance to intensifying constraints over life and livelihood.

Increasingly the environment, and climate risks in particular, are influencing migration and planned resettlement in Vietnam, raising the spectre of increased displacement in a country already confronting serious challenges around sustainable land and water use as well as urbanisation. Planned resettlement has emerged as part of a suite of measures being pursued as part of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation strategies. This paper provides an historical, political, legal and environmental overview of resettlement in Vietnam identifying key challenges for framing resettlement as climate change adaptation. The paper outlines the scale of past resettlement in Vietnam, identifying the drivers and implications for vulnerability. Detailed case studies of resettlement are reviewed. Through this review, the paper reflects on the growing threat of climate change and the likelihood of increased displacement associated with worsening climate risks to identify some critical considerations for planned resettlement in climate change adaptation planning.

A diversity of place-based community economic practices that enact ethical interdependence has long enabled livelihoods in Monsoon Asia. Managed either democratically or coercively, these culturally inflected practices have survived the rise of a cash economy, albeit in modified form, sometimes being co-opted to state projects. In the modern development imaginary, these practices have been positioned as traditional', rural' and largely superseded. But if we read against the grain of modernisation, a largely hidden geography of community economic practices emerges. This paper introduces the project of documenting keywords of place-based community economies in Monsoon Asia. It extends Raymond William's cultural analysis of keywords into a non-western context and situates this discursive approach within a material semiotic framing. The paper has been collaboratively written with co-researchers across Southeast Asia and represents an experimental mode of scholarship that aims to advance a post-development agenda.

This paper addresses the growing phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism through a focus on the development of this industry in South Korea. Unlike many discussions of this topic, the paper decentres dominant narratives based on west-goes-east or north-goes-south journeys. Instead, we look at regional flows by exploring the experiences of Chinese patients travelling to South Korea in search of facial cosmetic surgery – procedures often referred to as the ‘Korean Look’ and associated with exported Korean popular culture. We focus on the contested understandings of the motives for and outcomes of this surgery between Korean surgeons and Chinese patients, documenting one example of the cultural investments and (mis)understandings that can impact on the experiences of medical tourists as they travel across national borders in search of treatment. We situate the development of cosmetic surgery tourism in Korea in the context of a discourse we call ‘medical nationalism’, showing how surgeons in particular reproduce this discourse in terms of pride in their contribution to the economic and reputational success of South Korea on a world stage. However, we demonstrate finally that, as a privatised, feminised and trivialised form of medicine, cosmetic surgery will always fail to deliver in this respect.

The idea that climate change may cause the loss of atoll countries is now taken for granted in much of climate change science, policy and media coverage. This normalisation of loss means atoll countries now face a future that is apparently finite, which is a grievous situation no other country has to contend with. This paper explains the dilemmas this presents to atoll countries. If there is a risk of forced migration, then strategic planning can minimise its social impacts. Yet, doing so may bring future dangers into the present by undermining efforts to facilitate adaptation to climate change, creating new identities and deterring investments in sustainable resource management. To overcome this dilemma, the paper argues for a more hopeful approach to the future of atoll countries, because for as long as the science of loss remains uncertain, and the limits to adaptation are unknown, forced migration cannot be taken as a matter of fact and could possibly be averted through emission reductions and a vastly improved and significantly more creative approach to adaptation.

This paper examines the influences of Malaysia's Federation Land Development Authority (FELDA) scheme in fostering inclusive rural development. Based on the model of holistic inclusive development, the paper investigates the performance of FELDA from four perspectives: social development, industrialisation, modernisation and basic needs. The main findings of the study indicate that, to a large extent, the scheme has successfully stimulated both the social and economic development of the community. Nonetheless, establishing a strong trust, social cohesion and rapport between the public authorities and community remain the main challenges in determining the success of this state-led agenda. Moreover, keeping traditional values in the modern system will be the key principle for the sustainability of the programme if plans are made to adopt the scheme in other regions.

In a time of increasing land enclosures sparked by large-scale environmental initiatives and agricultural expansion, this paper examines local and global contestations over the value of forest on an Indonesian forest frontier. Engaging with recent debates on carbon forestry, the paper problematises the emerging initiatives of ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation’ known as REDD+ in the province of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The paper argues that the general rush to implement REDD+ without intimate knowledge of the political landscape of resource struggle is in danger of generating new enclosures of land that may be easily appropriated by local elites, thus excluding less fortunate sections of local society. The paper shows how divergent interpretations of REDD+ are triggering land disputes, and how powerful actors readily appropriate REDD+ discourses as a tool to support divergent claims of land ownership. Government and villagers, through overlapping and contradictory engagements, negotiate REDD+ initiatives with global environmental actors and private plantation companies. The paper highlights the implications of these local realities for the successes of REDD+. The Kalimantan case highlights some of the dilemmas of carbon mitigation initiatives experienced in frontier regions throughout Southeast Asia, places that have become prime battlefronts of large-scale climate change initiatives and agrarian expansion.

The challenge of ensuring economic opportunities are made available to a country's population is a key function of any government. It is particularly acute in many developing countries where the subsistence economy is dominant and where limited formal employment opportunities exist. For such countries, reliance on cash cropping provides a central plank in earning foreign exchange. More importantly, it provides an important source of cash incomes for the largely subsistence-based population. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one such example with a significant rural population dependent on cash crops for their economic livelihood. This paper discusses the country's coffee industry in the context of its producers, most importantly the contribution made by small household growers, and the issues and challenges they face. The paper traces the emergence of coffee as a cash crop in the PNG highlands and discusses, among other things, recent developments in extension and points out possibilities for government intervention to ensure the continued viability of the highlands coffee industry. Conceptually, the discussion acknowledges the significance of relational economics and its underpinnings, particularly reflections of duality of labour, perceptions of coffee as cash crop and markets in the context of Indigenous growers.

This paper is concerned with food security and access to land for food crop gardening among first and second generation migrant oil palm producers in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. We examine changes in food security due to the rapid population growth in the presence of growing demand for land for oil palm production. Despite oil palm providing the major source of income for most migrant households, food crop gardening remains a primary livelihood activity, particularly for women, and especially so, during periods of low oil palm prices. Rising population and land pressures pose a threat to household food security and have implications for the supply of food to the rapidly growing urban population in the province. The paper begins by describing how household food security and access to land have changed over the past two decades. Then the paper examines how smallholder households are responding to shortages of garden land through the intensification of land use, intercropping immature oil palm with food crops and seeking access to land beyond the oil palm block. The paper also considers the role that research, agricultural extension and the milling companies can play in supporting strategies to promote food security among smallholders.

The project Thai Health-Risk Transition: A National Cohort Study seeks to better understand the health implications of modernisation and globalisation forces impacting on Thailand. As part of its ‘look-back’ component this paper seeks, using available life tables, to document the country's post-war mortality transition. The onset of transition through mass campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s is first discussed before attention turns to the life tables. They are predictably far from flawless, but careful analysis does permit trends that have seen around 30 years added to life expectancy to be traced, and age patterns of improved survivorship and their relation to initiatives to improve health to be examined. The broad benefits generated by mass campaigns, ongoing improvements in infant and early childhood mortality, and a phased impact of the expansion of primary health care in rural areas on adult survival prospects after the mid-1970s are demonstrated. The paper also investigates the consequences for mortality of a motorcycle-focused rapid increase in road fatalities in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the HIV/AIDS epidemic that developed after 1984.

Tertiary education scholarships for individual students from developing countries, including those in the Pacific Islands, are a key pillar of Australia's development policy. Understanding students' experiences of these scholarships are important in identifying both positives and challenges, which can help foster improved future opportunities. This is especially the case for Pacific Islander students engaging in the Australia Awards Scholarship programme for which there is limited understanding of experiences. As such, this paper identifies that although educational mobility programmes can offer a wealth of opportunities for students, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges of such programmes which can inhibit students from reaching their full potential. Educational mobility programmes that effectively address the needs of students and empower them to achieve their goals are required to better facilitate transformative development pathways for Australia's Pacific Island neighbours.

While the proliferation of gated communities worldwide has generated great interests and debates, the emergence of gated communities is by no means a ‘global’ urban phenomenon that displays uniform characteristics and genesis. Drawing on Singapore as a case study, this paper goes beyond the universalising and often polemical discourses on gated communities to provide a balanced account on how gated communities in the form of enclosed condominium estates are locally embedded in the city state where public housing dominates. As will be pointed out in the paper, gated communities in Singapore may be considered as a form of ‘club good’ that exists as part of the state's urban/national developmental agenda and are, arguably, less socially and spatially divisive than those depicted elsewhere. By teasing out the local specificities of gated communities, this paper underscores the need to read beyond the physical form of gated communities in order to understand the complex social and political production of housing landscapes.

Master-planned residential development has proliferated as a new residential phenomenon in metropolitan areas globally. The trend, the new governance mechanisms it entails and resultant forms of urban development have been critically theorised as products and vectors of neoliberalisation and iconic spaces of the neoliberal city. However, tracing the emergence and enactment of master-planned residential estate (MPRE) development in Sydney, Australia, this paper suggests that more contingent and contextualised theorisations of such spaces can reveal possibilities for animating a different politics of MPREs. Deploying theorisation sensitive to the multiple drivers, logics and political projects played out through MPRE development in situated contexts, the paper traces the political genesis of these developments in Sydney, outlines the multiple drivers and logics accounting for their growing popularity and points to the salience of the complex performance of land and housing markets in their production. The post-structural political economy approach used here to investigate MPRE development can overcome the politically constraining effects of the dominant neoliberal critique. It does so, first, by opening analysis up to the importance of logics, actions and contexts that are irreducible to neoliberalism and, second, by gesturing towards the potential for an alternative politics to be animated through mechanisms, techniques and processes of MPRE development habitually associated with neoliberalism.

This paper seeks to open up what economic geographers think they can do as academics engaging in the policy realm. It draws on the author's role as an academic and his policy persona as academic expert and academic with expertise that has been guided by post-structural political economy (PSPE) thinking. It is Auckland-centred, situated in three trajectories: PSPE thought and practice developing at the University of Auckland, the Auckland Regional Economic Development Strategy (AREDS) trajectory of the Auckland Regional Council and Auckland City Council's sustainability trajectory. The paper recovers in PSPE terms dimensions of two 2006 policy moments, those of the Metropolitan Auckland Project (MAP) and the Mayoral Taskforce on Sustainable Development (MTSD), in which the author participated. Placing intellectual (PSPE) and policy trajectories (growth and sustainability) into conversation allows a unique exploration of co-constitutive dimensions between academy and policy worlds. Conceptually and methodologically, the moments in the policy trajectories are accessed by (i) analytic description of the policy trajectory from the outside in terms of academic understandings of institutional processes and (ii) in-the-room deliberations about policy decision possibilities. New insights about academy-policy relations emerge from the PSPE focus on rooms and moments.

Te Runanga o Te Rarawa is the tribal council representing the interests of the marae (tribal commons) and hapu (a subtribal kin group) that make up the iwi (a Maori tribe) of Te Rarawa in the far north of Aotearoa/New Zealand. In April 2005, officials approached us to help them secure a valuable funding stream tagged to marshalling resources for material development in the area. They sought curriculum vitae and assistance in reframing the funding specifications. Intrigued, armed with a conceptual toolkit drawn from Gibson-Graham's ideas of post-development and asset-based community mapping, and confident that we could add value, we agreed to help. This paper examines the complex politics of our involvement and our changing positioning as researcher subjects. We argue that negotiating a politics of knowledge for projects of this nature requires engagement in complex representational politics of place and divisive identity politics that rage around it. There are no easy protocols for outside researchers, but with appropriate humility and sensitivity to these politics, we can rely on, and should stand up for, the value of our work, which lies in commitments to excellence in scholarship. We cannot and should not seek to control these politics, which will chew us up and spit us out – humanely and with good grace or otherwise. However, good academic work will recognise and adapt to them. In our particular case, we argue that our work had significant value; and in this paper, we trace the production of this value.

This paper explores the effects of different representations of informal economies in Third World settings. Both the neoclassical and political economy approaches have represented the informal economy as a transient entity, and the non-capitalist practices it comprises as being remnant economic forms, or as already capitalist. Mainstream development discourse (that reflects the neoliberal paradigm) continues to ignore the value and potential of non-capitalist practices and to represent them as inconsequential to development outcomes. Meanwhile contemporary livelihood studies across the social sciences have documented the continuing vibrancy of different and hybrid economic forms in the Asia Pacific. In this paper, I use a diverse-economies approach to explore the complexities of the village economy of Oelua in Rote, in the so-called lagging region of Eastern Indonesia. Drawing on anti-essentialist Marxist theory in economic geography, I describe the multiple, locally specific and coexisting practices that comprise Oelua's diverse economy, which include distributions of surplus labour to promote social and economic well-being. I argue that recognising informal village economies as an important development resource could begin a process of building diverse development trajectories in Eastern Indonesia, complementing mainstream development proposals to attract foreign direct investment, shore up development assistance and source out-migration.

The papers in this special issue are the product of a comparative interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Natural Resources and Violent Ethnic Conflicts in the Asia Pacific Region’ held in Honolulu, Hawaii, 18–20 March 2005. The workshop brought together scholars who study conflicts between ethnic groups and those who study conflicts over natural resource claims in order to examine the interplay of resources and ethnicity and to seek answers to the question of why violence occurs in some cases and not in others. Both sets of scholars agreed on some points but disagreed on others. They agreed that ethnic and resource grievances occur not so much out of objective deprivation but out of ‘relative deprivation’ when groups compare their situation with others, to the past, or to future expectations. They both stressed the role of democratic processes in alleviating resource competition and ethnic conflicts – but they did this in different ways. The perspectives and solutions offered by these papers sum to a deeper and more contextualised understanding of the cause of conflict and to mutually reinforcing solutions for resolving them.

Although India's Jharkhand movement resists classification as either an ethnic or an environmental movement, it has, at different times, mobilised clear elements of both with frequently violent outcomes. This paper examines the movement from a political ecology perspective and focuses on violence arising from natural resource-related grievances, notably land alienation, forest policy and employment from Jharkhand's mines. Drawing from political ecology's emphasis on the need to examine conflict from a range of different spatial scales, the paper emphasises the impor- tance of a micro-political ecology approach for understanding how locally based conflicts over natural resources can harden into more established grievances that can be mobilised politically as part of a wider and potentially violent protest movement. It is also suggested that micro-political ecology approaches can assist participatory resource management initiatives in ameliorating local conflicts over access to resources, thus helping to prevent them from escalating into more wide- spread violence.

This paper offers an analysis of the relations between youth and the socialist state in contemporary Vietnam, which sheds light on the wider state–society relations. Amid rapid social changes brought about by economic liberalisation, the Vietnamese Communist Party and socialist state may no longer be the sole driving force that motivates young people. As they seek to be both in control of and in touch with youth, the leaders of the Party and state find themselves negotiating between maintaining their ideological integrity and accommodating the changing needs and desires of youth. An analysis of recent events demonstrates that youth are no longer merely a subject of political propaganda and mass mobilisation, but instead they have evolved to become an important social actor urging the leadership to further reform itself. As young people express a desire to embrace socioeconomic and cultural changes wrought by processes of marketisation and globalisation, the Party and state are actively reforming themselves not only to respond to young people’s desires and aspirations, but also to strengthen their political authority and leadership, and to consolidate their control and management of youth amid the new conditions of a market-oriented society. Overall, this paper sheds light on the changes in what is considered to be the ‘strategic’ relationship between the state and youth, and the wider process of sociopolitical transformation in present-day Vietnam.

This paper explores the theme of governance as it relates to the evolution of global commodity chains in agro-industry and their incorporation of wine firms in two countries of the semi-periphery, New Zealand and Chile. The paper goes on to specifically examine the upstream and downstream relationships of selected New Zealand and Chilean wine firms to the wider commodity chains in which they are involved. Brief case studies will analyse the downstream and upstream links to the commodity chain of key wine firms in both countries. Such cases provide indicative evidence of the underlying processes of the commodity chain that are constantly changing.

Rarely does one come across critical analysis which looks at islands as the strategic and candid promoters of a role as political and economic usufructuaries over external resources. This paper is premised on the proposition that a small territory is especially obliged to use extra-territorial resources as its hinterland for economic success. Such resources extend over a whole range of goods and services and include access to investment, welfare, security, stable currency, international relations, specialised labour power, transfers, markets and higher education. The MIRAB syndrome is one way of articulating this condition. This paper proposes a second cluster of features that are, or can be, deployed by small territories in a manner somewhat different from MIRAB; this second cluster has a more proactive policy orientation and a disposition towards carving out procedural and jurisdictional powers. It is thus proposed to consider a small territory’s engagement with the external hinterland as a position on a sliding scale, a strategic mix of options located between two distinct development trajectories, of which MIRAB is one and the PROFIT model the other, peer-reviewed

This paper centres on analysing how return migrants' participation in online businesses impacts marital power dynamics in rural families alongside the rise of e-commerce in rural China. During 2016 and 2017, I conducted an ethnographic study in a Chinese ‘Taobao village’ which I have termed ‘Xinyi’ whereby the majority of villagers make their livelihoods by selling furniture via the online marketplace Taobao. The boom of e-commerce has attracted many migrants to return to the village and start their online businesses. Inquiring into whether and how rural women's increased access to online entrepreneurship challenges the gender norm that upholds male dominance in marriage, I delineate the power relations in ‘Taobao families’ within which rural women jointly operate online shops with their husbands. Drawing from my ethnographic data, I propose a conceptual framework incorporating the lenses of returnee entrepreneurship, flexible inner-outer boundary and performance of gender to examine discrepancies between the gender norm that upholds gender hierarchy, and the practice regarding the husbands and wives' equal engagements in online merchandising. This framework is developed to shed a more positive light on the nuances of women's exercise of agency that entails nominal conformity to the gender norm.

Vietnamese ‘blue boats’ – small wooden-hulled fishing boats – are now entering the territorial waters of Pacific Island countries and illegally catching high-value species found on remote coastal reefs. Crossing several international boundaries and traversing a distance of over 5000 km, these intrusions have alarmed Oceanic countries, including Australia. Lacking administrative capacity as well as jurisdictional authority to effectively control the vast stretches of island coastlines individually, governments and intergovernmental bodies in the region have called for strengthened coordination of surveillance efforts while also pressuring Vietnam diplomatically. This paper reviews these latest developments and is the first to provide a focused assessment of the issue. Through the lens of Copenhagen School of securitisation theory, we analyse responses of national and regional actors and their portrayal in online media to understand how blue boats are constructed as a security threat within a narrative of maritime, food and human security. Arguably, Australia together with the Forum Fisheries Agency, who advise on the governance of offshore tuna resources, have so far acted most decisively – in a way that might see them extend their strategic role in the region. We propose a comprehensive empirical research agenda to better understand and manage this nascent, flammable and largely unpredictable inter-regional phenomenon.

The global pandemic has adversely affected tourism globally, particularly in small island states heavily dependent on tourism. The closure of borders to regular flights for over a year in places such as Fiji, Samoa, Cook Islands and Vanuatu, where this research was undertaken, has resulted in massive job losses. Many tourism employees have left the once-bustling tourist hubs, returning to villages and family settlements. Such clear urban to rural migration behaviours do not dominate movement patterns in the Pacific, but are an important and enduring strategy when shocks strike. In the case of the pandemic-induced migration to villages, former tourism workers have had to engage in a complicated process of adapting to the communal setting, employing new - as well as traditional - strategies to sustain a livelihood. Thus, this paper will discuss how the pandemic has influenced return migration patterns in the Pacific, and the implications of this shift. Findings suggest that, despite their financial struggles, people have adapted to life in their ancestral homes by rekindling their relationships with kin and increasing their engagement on their customary land. They have relearned about traditional Indigenous knowledge, diversified their skills and reconnected with their social and ecological systems. This spiritual homecoming observed in the Pacific ultimately shows that there can be silver linings to the dark clouds of the current disorder.

With the expectation of adverse climate change impacts, some (often majority) Indigenous populations of the Pacific are expressing a preference to remain on Indigenous lands for cultural and spiritual reasons. In some cases, Indigenous people express preparedness to die on traditional territory rather than relocate, representing a new type of agency and resistance to dispossession. This is a prominent politics of place of relevance to emerging debates and decision-making around retreat and relocation. If climate change is experienced by populations as an existential threat to culture, identity and place-based connections, voluntary immobility can be an important adaptation strategy that helps to strengthen cultural and spiritual resilience among those facing the prospect of a lost homeland. This paper argues that voluntary immobility decisions need ethically robust and culturally appropriate policies and practices, particularly when a site is deemed by external experts to be no longer fit for human settlement. National governments, civil society groups, international organisations and donors will need to: engage in culturally meaningful dialogue with communities about relocation and immobility; respect, protect and fulfil the rights of ‘immobile’ people and those on the move; and confirm that in situ adaptation options have been exhausted.

Planned resettlement is being widely considered as a response to the impacts of climate change. As many millions of people are expected to be displaced in the coming decades, scholars and policymakers are searching for precedence to inform their research and planning, particularly from experiences of Development- Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR). Nowhere in the world is DIDR and other closely related forms of planned resettlement more prevalent than in China: an estimated 78 million people have been displaced by development projects over the last six decades. While planned resettlement has consistently been shown to cause impoverishment, the Chinese state views it as the answer to a multitude of social ills including poverty, environmental damage, low levels of domestic consumption, and most recently, climate change, providing impetus to the normalisation of resettlement as adaptation. This paper examines the prospects for just outcomes in resettlement projects by examining distributive justice at multiple scales in existing resettlement practice in China. It finds that due to the interplay between resettlement and questions of procedural justice, prospects for just outcomes are quite limited, and that in order to achieve fair adaptation, alternatives to planned resettlement should be emphasised.

In the Philippines, calls for creating ‘global’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘resilient’ cities are placing urban poor communities in increasingly precarious positions. These communities have long been the targets of urban development and ‘modernisation’ efforts; more recently the erasure of informal settlements from Philippine cities is being bolstered at the behest of climate change adaptation and disaster risk management (DRM) agendas. In Metro Cebu, flood management has been at the heart of DRM and broader urban development discussions, and is serving as justification for the demolition and displacement of informal settler communities in areas classed as ‘danger zones’. Using Kusno's (2010) interpretation of the ‘exemplary centre’ as a point of departure, this paper interrogates the relationship between DRM, worlding aspirations (Roy and Ong, 2011) and market-oriented urbanisation in Cebu, and considers the socio-spatial implications of these intersecting processes for urban poor communities. Through analysing the contradictions inherent in framings of certain bodies and spaces as being ‘of risk’ or ‘at risk’ over others, I argue that the epistemologies of modernity, disaster risk and resilience endorsed and propagated by the state are facilitating processes of displacement and dispossession that serve elite commercial interests under the auspices of disaster resilience and pro-poor development.

International medical travel may be viewed as an ‘assemblage’ of various components such as infrastructure, hospitals, finance, transport, technologies, staff, facilitators and patients. In this paper, we focus on the articulations of medical travel facilitators (MTFs) and private hospitals in producing international medical travel in the context of the neoliberalising processes that had led to the rise of corporate hospital care in Malaysia in the 1990s. We draw from three hospital case studies for a comparative perspective. We highlight the shifting, unstable and contingent relations and interactions of the MTFs, as one component of the assemblage of international medical travel, with hospitals and medical travellers. We identify the practices of MTFs in providing patients with information and advice about hospitals and doctors as efforts to shape patients' choices in the selection of health-care providers and in decision-making. The assemblage approach allows us to see how the MTFs emerge and stabilise as a collective identity for individuals and companies performing particular functions through their multifarious articulations with other components in various sites of assemblage.

Intra-regional medical travel by patients from Indonesia to Penang in Malaysia is embedded in and facilitated by regional circuits. Although such movement is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the health-care services offered in Indonesia, we argue that these contemporary movements for health care are also a continuation of existing exchanges for trade, education and cultural ties that have long existed. In the first part of the paper, we consider the historical interconnections between the locations of Medan and Aceh in Indonesia and Penang in Malaysia. Based upon fieldwork and interviews with 70 intra-regional patients travelling to Penang for treatment, we describe how these interconnections are now manifested in travel for medical care. We argue that the temporary exit from the Indonesian health system to pursue care in hospitals in Penang by some Chinese Indonesians and Acehnese follows patterns and logics based on social histories of discrimination and conflict as well as geographical convenience. This highlights the need to contextualise such travel not just as geographic movements across space but also through the depth of time and local histories.

Vietnam's uplands have been increasingly integrated into commodity production for global markets. This paper focuses on the role of the cassava trader in connecting upland villagers as cassava producers to an emerging global cassava market. In Vietnam's Central Highlands, ethnic minority villagers engaging in a mixed economy of subsistence and cash crop production still practice communal resource use and reciprocal labour arrangements – customs associated with the (contested) notion of ‘moral economy’. In this context, traders have strategically traversed the insider–outsider divide, enlisting trust and reciprocity to extend the patron–client relationship between traders and villagers. In the absence of state support for upland communities, these traders have embedded themselves within village social relations through the provision of multiple goods and services, including loans. Villagers turn to these traders during times of hardship through degrees of mutual dependence in often unequal trade relations. The ‘benevolence’ of the traders, however, is an explicit strategy to legitimise their economic benefits. The relationship is deepened because traders fill a vacuum in state services by providing technical support to farmers cultivating cassava. Beyond benefiting themselves, in their status as community ‘insiders’, traders promote market penetration into the uplands with associated social and environmental implications.

This paper draws on extensive island examples with a view to offer ‘creative’ solutions to the ongoing dispute over the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai/ Senkaku Islands between China (and Taiwan) and Japan in the East China Sea. In spite of the rhetoric and apparent intractability of island conflicts, there are various examples from the past (and the present) that suggest how island disputes may be decided, and in ‘win–win’ ways, to the satisfaction of the different parties involved. The resolution of island territorial problems can benefit greatly from a critical appreciation of how other small islands, also contested, have had their situation resolved in non-zero-sum ways. In such cases, sovereignty has been shared, split/divided or expunged; in other cases, sovereignty disputes have been put aside in order to co-develop and co-exploit natural resources. There is also one example of a UNESCO World Heritage Site consisting of a string of small islands and surrounding waters whose management is shared between three countries.

This paper provides a broad survey of existing literature on contemporary solid waste management (SWM) in the Pacific region to underscore an urgent and compelling need for improved SWM. Despite advances in waste management systems and funding for technical support and capacity building from a range of sources, waste continues to threaten public and ecological health and the economy in Pacific Islands Countries and Territories (PICTs). SWM in the Pacific requires innovative thinking in a challenging environment of remoteness, limited available land, fragile ecosystems, vulnerability to natural hazards and subsequent climate sensitivity. Many PICTs are under considerable pressure to open their markets up to trade liberalisation. Increasing links to the global economy through trade liberalisation could either further exacerbate waste management challenges in the Pacific or contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development goals. The authors argue that if the PICTs' urgent waste management challenges are to be meaningfully addressed, the region's leaders must ensure trading partners conform to local environmental protection policies and that trade agreements align with sustainable development goals.

The promotion of intensive farming through organic and fair trade certification appears contradictory to the increasing significance of non-farm income sources in rural Asia as well as in many other parts of the rural South. By observing a sugarcane producer co-operative comprising land reform beneficiaries in the Philippines, this paper explores the reality of livelihood diversification as practised by member households of the certified co-operative, focusing on the compatibility of certification-supported farming with diversified activities. In this case, diversification at the household level progressed both away from farming and into farming. Behind the long-term use of agricultural certification, there are compelling reasons for continuing both certification-supported farming and diversified activities, and for employing mechanisms that further the compatibility at all phases between the former and the latter, and maximising income-generating opportunities. The operation of communal land with agricultural certification may be an effective form of assistance to land reform beneficiaries who share a strong desire to be landowners.

Postdevelopment thinkers and writers have critiqued development discourse for its role in perpetuating inequality. In water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) literature and interventions, the discourse used perpetuates inequality through classing anything other than private toilets as ‘without sanitation’. This implies that the people who use forms of hygiene and sanitation relying on collective toilets and alternative strategies are somehow unhygienic. Yet residents of Xining (Qinghai Province, China) rely on hygiene assemblages that do not always include private toilets, but nonetheless still work to guard health for families with young children. In this paper, I develop a postdevelopment approach to hygiene and sanitation starting with the place-based hygiene realities already working to guard health in some way, then working to multiply possibilities for future discursive and material hygiene realities.

Based on interviews and participant observation conducted in the province of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, from 2008 to 2012, this paper examines why the agrarian reforms have failed to secure the land rights of local farmers. Since the fall of the authoritarian government in 1998, Indonesia has seen limited, but growing government recognition of customary land rights of local farmers living in forest areas. I present a case study of two villages, in which the greater discretion on the part of the local community to negotiate with large-scale oil palm estates has led to the abuse of power by local elites, as well as territorial tensions between local communities. The finding questions the optimistic view that state recognition of customary land rights of communities would automatically lead to the security of landownership of local farmers, and its underlying image of harmonious local communities in which members share coherent interests. The agrarian reform that has centred on communities' rights of control over land and natural resources is problematic. When local communities do not possess capabilities for resolving conflicts in an equitable and transparent manner, third-party intervention is needed to assist communities to strengthen local land rights.

This paper directly challenges the persisting argument that in the host–(uninvited) guest relationship of Kimberley coastal tourism in Australia's far northwest, Traditional Owners (the hosts) have a pedagogic responsibility to first educate the tourism industry (the guests) of their impacts on them in order to facilitate culturally appropriate and sustainable tourism experiences. We contend that such an argument reflects a deeply entrenched context of erasure and power imbalance between Australian Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. We highlight, using three decades of public records, the fact that government and industry have ignored and continue to ignore knowledge and learning shared by Kimberley Aboriginal peoples in attempts to rectify serious issues of cultural impacts and risks to visitors arising from unsanctioned tourism activities on Traditional Owners’ land and sea country. We argue for the possibility of tourism operating in a mutually satisfactory hybrid space in which acknowledgement, tolerance and respect discharges the need for understanding different ontologies that operate within that space but provides the potential for learning. Using Bourdieu's notion of transformative practice, we propose that the development of such a hybrid space could transform the problem of unsanctioned tourism access to the Kimberley coast into an iteration that could facilitate its taming and thus a shift towards sustainable practices based on mutual recognition and respect.

Recent evidence has linked illegal peat and forest fires in Indonesia to commercial oil palm plantations. Fire is the most cost-efficient way to clear land for planting, but these fires release smoke causing transboundary haze pollution. The countries worst affected by the haze are neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore. Malaysian and Singaporean investors control more than two-thirds of the Indonesian oil palm plantation sector and they have been implicated in the fires alongside local plantations. Using information obtained from interviews with individuals linked to the sector, this paper aims to explain why these companies continue to burn despite the dire consequences of the haze. It identifies patronage politics as a common business culture in Southeast Asia, and argues that because these Malaysian and Singaporean investors are already familiar with patronage practices at home, they have easily inserted themselves into existing patronage networks in Indonesia. Hence, these companies enjoy the protection of their Indonesian patrons during their operations. Furthermore, in a business atmosphere defined by patronage politics, clients are largely motivated by material gain. This explains why Malaysian and Singaporean investors continue to clear land by fire in the interests of cost-efficiency, despite their home countries suffering the worst effects of haze.

This paper argues that there is a need to better acknowledge and problematise themanner in which individuals,households,organisations and governments in small island jurisdictionsdevelop mechanisms that allow them to exploit the benefits, and/or minimise the losses, of episodiceconomic lurches. A ‘strategic flexibility’ approach is proposed to explain how actors practiseintersectoral migration: cleverly shifting focus, interest and scope, not just out of necessity (reac-tively) but in ‘smelling’ promising opportunities (proactively). In a scenario where change is taken asa given,managing and coping with such change become the hallmarks of economic survival:just likesurfers handling the ocean swell. Keywords: intersectoral migration , MIRAB PROFIT small islands states , strategic flexibility , vulnerability Introduction: Scripted jurisdictions Smallislandstatescomeacrossasthosejuris-dictionsthataretheeasiesttoconceptualiseandscriptasweakandvulnerable;theirverysmallness, self-evident scale and presumedmanageabilitymakethemtemptingprojectstoessentialiseandclassify.Theirremoteness,theirsmallerpopulations,theopennatureoftheireconomies,theirpronenesstoenvironmentalmishaps,theirlimitedlandareaandresourcebases,theirlackofindustrialclout,thehighercostsinvolvedindoingbothprivatebusinessandgovernment...alltheseandotherfeaturescollectivelymakethemhighlysuitedtothedis-courseofvulnerability,ofastructuralincapacitytoorganisetheirownfuture(e.g.AlesinaandSpolaore,2003;WintersandMartins,2004).Suchadiscourse–soreadilyvisiblefromaquickliteraturescan,punctuatedasitisbyref-erences to ‘problems’, ‘dangers’, ‘dilemmas’andnotionsof‘paradiselost’–hasofcoursebecome more politically correct since theacceptanceof‘smallstates’and‘smallislanddevelopingstates’(SIDS)aslegitimatepolicycategories:thefirstbytheCommonwealthSec-retariat since 1985 and the second by theUnitedNationsandtheWorldBanksince1992(Harden,1985;EasterlyandKraay,2000:2013).Thistransitionhashappenedparalleltotherec-ognitionoftheenvironmentaldangersposedbyglobal warming and sea-level rise: note thesettingupoftheAllianceofSmallandIslandStates(nowwith42memberstates)in1991;andthestrongvisibilityachievedbytheSIDSlobbyinrecentclimatechangenegotiations.‘Savingsmallislandstatesfromsinking’isacurrentandprobablythemosthighlyvisiblepolicyitemontheinternationalagendathatfeatures small island states today (e.g. Nath

This paper explores the relationship between beers and island development, using a global sweep but with a special reference to the insular Pacific. It adopts a discriminatory approach, touching upon the role and impact that niche and bouquet beer manufacturing can have on the socioeconomic development of small islands. It departs from a personal observation: many small island jurisdictions have their own brewery. Indeed, the brewery could also be the island territory’s largest indigenous manufacturing concern. While small islands are associated with low manufacturing capacity and diseconomies of scale, nevertheless ‘a local brewery’ comes across, in many cases, as a profitable and glaring exception that speaks to the attractions and virtues of locality branding., peer-reviewed

In the 1980s, rural settlements in the Northeast of Thailand were farming focused, and strategies of living were structured around the need to secure subsistence in the face of a capricious environment and a weak developmental state. More than half of households in the region lived below the poverty line, and the immediate prospects for 'development' were not bright. Drawing on a 25-year longitudinal study of two villages in Mahasarakham, the paper describes and reflects on how risk and vulnerability have been re-shaped during a quarter of a century of profound economic and social change. From largely environmental and local, the pattern of risk and opportunity have become increasingly economic and non-local as external events wash across the shores of rural settlements like Ban Non Tae and Ban Tha Song Korn.

The Republic of Kiribati is a small, highly infertile Pacific Island nation and is one of the most challenging locations to attempt to support dense urban populations. Kiribati, like other nations in the Pacific, faces an urban future where food insecurity, unemployment, waste management and malnutrition will become increasing issues. Homegardening is suggested as one way to address many of these problems. However, the most recent study on agriculture production in urban centres in Kiribati shows that, in general, intensive cultivation of homegardens is not a common practice. This disparity between theory and practice creates an opportunity to re-examine homegardening in Kiribati and, more broadly, in the Pacific. This paper examines the practice of homegardening in urban centres in Kiribati and explores reasons why change has or has not occurred through interviews with homegardeners and government/donor representives. Results show that homegardening has increased significantly in the past five years, largely because of the promotion of homegardens and organic composting systems by donor organisations. While findings further endorse homegardening as an excellent theoretical solution to many of the problems that confront urban settlements in Kiribati and the Pacific, it raises additional questions regarding the continuation of homegarden schemes beyond donor support programmes.

Increasing attention is being paid to how workers in the creative industries negotiate transitions from amateur to professional status and seek opportunities for work and spaces for expression that suit artistic desires. The settings have usually been large cities with populations that can support diverse and specialised audiences and subcultural scenes. In this paper, we discuss research where we participated in a music scene, and talked to dance music disc jockeys and venue owners in a small, regional university city – Dunedin. In Dunedin opportunities for musical work are comparatively plentiful but are constrained in a number of ways. Disc jockeys negotiate audience demands, distances from key musical centres and associated infrastructure, and the shifting venues available for performance. We emphasise the importance of an ethnographic perspective to the study of musical work that remains attuned to the manner in which urban spaces are created, transformed, challenged and remade in the musical nightlife economy.

The contracting out to private providers of services previously delivered within the state has been framed critically as ‘hollowing out’ and read for its erosion of social democracy, social justice and welfare, as well as its inefficiencies in practice. It is commonly dismissed as neoliberalism. In this paper, we highlight the gains made through this new contractualism by Te Oranga, the Family, Health and Education division of Te Runanga o Te Rarawa located in the Far North of New Zealand. Our aim is not to narrate the exceptional, but to point to the inherent resistances to totalising projects residing in agency and place. Placed at the service of a deep sense of community being and community good rather than self-interest, delivery contracts have enabled Te Oranga to pursue an alternative form of local development and craft a set of progressive spaces. Although highly contingent upon powerful Maori political projects, we argue that the case suggests that gains may be sought in other settings, albeit partial, temporary, and politically contingent. We thus offer a more nuanced account of neoliberalism by highlighting its agency, fractures, politics, and contradictions, and by demonstrating that actualised neoliberalisms are co-constituted with other political projects.

The aim of this paper is to explore the processes and outcomes of neoliberalism in relation to urban water supply in the city of Tagbilaran, the Philippines, in order to provide a nuanced account of (an) actually existing hybrid neoliberal space. Using Bakker's typology of market envi- ronmentalist reforms in resource management as a guiding frame to link this case to a bigger 'neoliberal' conversation, I distinguish how reforms to resource governance at the national level, coupled with changes in the ways in which resource management institutions and resource man- agement organisations function at the local level have acted to constitute local practices of neoliberal governance. Local articulations of (national and supranational) neoliberal and development dis- courses are revealed as a means for reconceptualising the role of the state and the emergence of new forms of hybrid governance in Tagbilaran. Analysis of the operation of BWUI, a public/private water utility, and the politics of privatisation/private sector participation enables a closer inspection of how water and water services are politicised and resisted by local publics.

This paper explores two issues. First, it focuses on the question of what is the most appropriate theoretical framework for the study of the urbanisation process in China and Vietnam over the last 30 years? It is argued that Le Fefebvre's theory of the ‘production of urban space’ offers the most useful approach because the political economy it adopts helps identify the major driving forces in the urbanisation process in these formerly socialist societies. The second issue involves the investigation of the differences and similarities in the urbanisation process in the two countries that are engaged in similar processes of structural economic transformation. The conclusion suggests that despite historical and cultural differences between Vietnam and China, the urbanisation process in both countries is exhibiting converging features as both countries are adopting a form of ‘hybrid urbanisation’ that involves a combination of socialist and market economies that does not involve an inevitable move to ‘capitalism’.

This paper examines the broad range of informal land transactions and arrangements migrants are entering into with customary landowners to gain access to customary land for export cash cropping in the oil palm belt of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea. Whilst these arrangements can provide migrants with relatively secure access to land, there are instances of migrants losing their land rights. Typically, the land tenure arrangements of migrants with more secure access to land are within a framework of property rights for social inclusion whereby customary landowners’ inalienable rights to land are preserved and the ‘outsider’ becomes an ‘insider’ with ongoing use rights to the land. Through socially embedding land transactions in place-based practices of non-market exchange, identities of difference are eroded as migrants assume identities as part of their host groups. This adaptability of customary land tenure and its capacity to accommodate large migration in-flows and expanding commodity production undermines the argument common amongst proponents of land reform that customary tenure is static and inflexible. Before such claims are heeded, there must be more detailed empirical investigations of the diverse range of land tenure regimes operating in areas of the country experiencing high rates of immigration.

This paper explores contrasting narratives of place meaning in a tourism site in Southern Thailand. Specifically, I analyse the parallel discourses of community change through tourism development embedded in international backpacker narratives, and those of the local Thai elite. By configuring identity and power around binary oppositional categories such as West as economically powerful and dominant/non-West as economically weak and subordinated, ‘traditional’ tourism studies often locate the dynamics of change in the international tourism industry. To date, there is little research on the very real and important ways that people working in tourism assert agency and understand their own identities in everyday contexts. I argue that local communities can, and often do, shape the changes that tourism development initiates in very creative and adaptive ways.