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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Confusion over land rights issues and opportunities created through communal titles may just be rhetoric to some, but for the poor rural communities, it is a matter of survival. As this paper reveals, this may be due to contradictory interpretations between native communities and state agencies of what constitutes native customary rights. The methods and materials used are based on case studies in the state of Sabah, Malaysia with regard to the policies, programmes and projects that have been implemented in rural areas. This was made possible through interviews with key informants, textual analyses and state documents, and through observations of projects implemented in the rural areas of Sabah. Based on the information gathered, this paper reveals a worrying pattern of state and peoples' interactions over the provision of communal titles and state projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the coexistence of competing and contested interests in intercultural natural resource management ( NRM) systems in Australia and Malaysia, this paper explores the ways in which ontological pluralism and the interplay of socio-cultural, political-economic and biophysical influences shape NRM systems. We aim to foster a discursive space in which to reframe the challenges of capacity building in the rapidly changing spaces of intercultural NRM systems. The paper synthesizes the conceptual arguments of field research to conclude that capacity deficits of dominant institutions, processes and knowledge systems drive many systemic failures in land and sea management affecting Indigenous peoples. We advocate urgent action to build intercultural competence and new capacities and competencies in those institutions. The paper reframes intercultural NRM in terms of coexistence and invites wider debate about these 'new geographies of coexistence' in intercultural NRM systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia is one of Asia's major sources of international contract labour. However little is known about the patterns, causes and consequences of this movement. The present paper sheds some light on one of the major flows of undocumented migration out of Indonesia, from the island of Lombok to Malaysia. The paper examines the process of movement and the causes underlying it. Attention is paid to the role of social networks in that movement, as well as some of the effects of the movement on the migrants themselves, their families and villages of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tropes of borderlessness are pervasive both in discourses concerning the spread of HIV/AIDS and the Growth Triangle, a transnational economic zone that ideally binds together the Indonesian island of Batam, the Malaysian province of Johor and Singapore. This paper considers how the emergence of HIV as a problem in the Growth Triangle, and on Batam in particular, has been framed as a problem to be addressed in context of the nation-state rather than as a transnational problem that demands cooperation across borders. In conjunction with this, it focuses on further attempts to create boundaries around HIV, through the identification of risk groups, the localisation of prostitutes and the distribution of condoms. The paper focuses particular attention on the relationship between Batam and Singapore, and how non-governmental organisations and governments have dealt with HIV/AIDS issues in both places. Furthermore, it problematises these activities by paying ethnographic attention to other forms of cultural and economic logics that often are odds with prevention models. This raises important questions concerning, most specifically, the problems of HIV prevention and cross-border cooperation, and, more generally, the regulation and formation of new kinds of borders in a‘borderless world’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

>Although Sarawak has a rapidly growing economy, the benefits of growth have been focused largely in the urban centres. However, the majority of the population lives in rural areas, where poverty, although on the decline, prevails. Attention is given to the role of rural roads in countering remoteness and, hence, promoting more equitable development. To assess the impact of rural roads, two roads were used for comparison. One provided Iban communities with access to Betong, a small district town. The other provided Bidayuh communities with access to Kuching, the capital city. This paper focuses on three economic impacts of roads – agricultural production, employment, and household income. Findings show that the impact of roads varied within an area (a function of remoteness) and between areas (also a function of remoteness). Impacts were considerably greater when roads provided communities with access to a major urban centre compared with a small town. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the government's strategy of rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of an international branch campus established through a partnership between a Malaysian property development conglomerate, the Sunway Group, and Monash University, an Australian university known for its global aspirations. Using Lefebvre's concept of social space we analyse the perceived, conceived and lived spaces that constitute the campus of Monash University Malaysia and its urban setting in the township of Bandar Sunway. Dramatically transformed from a disused mining site and showcased as a 'progressive' urban project, the township symbolises the Sunway Group's commercial success and political pragmatism in managing the dynamics of Malaysia's ethnicised political economy. The broader student experience suggests that the configurations of power that shape ethnic and class relations at the scale of the national are reproduced in the composition of the student body, in students' on-campus interactions and in the rhythms of their everyday lives within the township. By attending to the material, symbolic and imaginary dimensions of one international branch campus, we provide a more nuanced and textured understanding of the globalisation of higher education, highlighting different forms of agency exercised by key actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Medical tourism' has frequently been held to unsettle naturalised relationships between the state and its citizenry. Yet in casting 'medical tourism' as either an outside 'innovation' or 'invasion', scholars have often ignored the role that the neoliberal retrenchment of social welfare structures has played in shaping the domestic health-care systems of the 'developing' countries recognised as international medical travel destinations. While there is little doubt that 'medical tourism' impacts destinations' health-care systems, it remains essential to contextualise them. This paper offers a reading of the emergence of 'medical tourism' from within the context of ongoing health-care privatisation reform in one of today's most prominent destinations: Malaysia. It argues that 'medical tourism' to Malaysia has been mobilised politically both to advance domestic health-care reform and to cast off the country's 'underdeveloped' image not only among foreign patient-consumers but also among its own nationals, who are themselves increasingly envisioned by the Malaysian state as prospective health-care consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long borderland in Kalimantan between Indonesia and East Malaysia is partly mountainous and environmentally unique, its three national parks forming the core of a tri-nation ‘Heart of Borneo’ initiative proposed by environmental NGOs and ratified in 2006. More accessible lowlands in West Kalimantan and the north of East Kalimantan constitute a typical ‘resource periphery’ in which strategic considerations, persisting through the Suharto years, now intersect with a range of new political, economic and cultural demands. A perception by the central government of increasing lawlessness in the borderlands arose in the turbulent years following Suharto's fall, during ‘reformasi’ and the beginnings of decentralisation. In addition to smuggling and illegal logging, contests over land use erupted at various scales. Proposals to construct an oil palm corridor along the border, begun by the Megawati government and extended by some sectors of the Yudhoyono regime, were part of a quest for greater legibility and control on the part of the central authorities. The paper specifically examines the power struggles that arose over that project and its inevitable outcome, a central government back down. However, the current palm oil boom is bringing new corporate planting, which may eventually succeed in ‘taming’ the borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2001, two indigenous Orang Asli communities living in Peninsula Malaysia were forced to leave their homelands to make way for the Sungai Selangor dam. The dam, built to resolve water shortages in Kuala Lumpur, came with a comprehensive compensation package designed to alleviate the hardships faced by the displaced communities. This paper explores the discursive and material impacts of these compensation packages. We argue that the emerging literature on compensation for displaced people values the same sorts of economic and social criteria as the Malaysian government does in its pursuit of modernising the Orang Asli. Their shared belief that effective compensation would improve the quality of life for affected communities above pre-displacement levels helped to publicly legitimise the dam-building project. Interviews with the displaced communities, however, found stark differences in community satisfaction which have more to do with losses of intrinsic place-based cultural and spiritual values, for which there may be no effective or adequate compensation, than social and economic criteria. We conclude that compensation programmes will always struggle to effectively cope with these less tangible place-based values and that open acknowledgement of this weakness is required if alternatives to displacement-inducing development projects are to be more readily considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Producer services growth can change the character of a metropolitan region. Achieving that outcome may require the intervention of government, which is not necessarily a simple process as it creates tension between regulatory and developmental roles for government. This paper will address three interrelated issues in connection with the above-mentioned core idea in the context of the city of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: first, the extent to which the evolution of the Malaysian economy has been felt in the growth of the service sector; second, the way that evolution has led to change in the sectoral and spatial character of Kuala Lumpur; third, government’s responses in terms of spatial planning and management in order to accommodate producer services growth. The experience of the Kuala Lumpur region shows how global market forces and national development policies that influence producer service location and growth can reshape the spatial arrangement of a metropolitan region. Managing the growth of producer services calls for new approaches to manage metropolitan change. An ‘enabling’ model is proposed to replace the present ‘policing’ model of spatial planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ongoing biographical research of Indonesian migrant workers in the oil palm plantations of Malaysia, this paper explores their different strategies of survival in a sector characterised by an ongoing precarity of livelihoods. The life stories of six workers from Sulawesi, Flores, Java and Sumatra are used to illustrate a tentative typology of migration experiences. As the workers set out from their own specific context of 'surplus population', they are confronted with a migration labour regime that is based on the social and political precarisation of the workers. However, in order to achieve their development aspirations, the workers find different ways of adapting to or circumventing the precarious labour regime. In particular, flight or absconding (lari) is used to change employers, to find better working conditions and to increase wages. Another key strategy is to increase the permanence of their stay, either by choosing illegality or by negotiating retrospective documentation. These strategies lead to the emergence of long-term transnational networks that change the social reality of the migration regime in the oil palm industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oil palm in Sabah is grown in large plantations or smallholdings, the latter mostly managed by indigenous peoples on untitled customary land. Government development agencies have long focussed on improving the productivity of smallholders for poverty alleviation. For most smallholders, the main issue is tenure insecurity: as long as lands remain untitled they are subject to changes in land allocation and land use at the discretion of the State Government. Indigenous claimants seek recognition of the right to use and occupy ancestral lands via individual Native Titles ( NT), as provided for in the Sabah Land Ordinance ( SLO). Recent official push for converting such 'idle' customary lands by promoting large scale joint ventures between customary landowners and oil palm companies is creating anxiety among many indigenous groups. The joint-venture approach has been enabled through a crucial amendment to the SLO that promotes the granting of communal titles ( CT) with conditions attached. This tenure instrument empowers state-appointed trustees to make key decisions concerning land use where commercial crops (especially oil palm) are favoured and on the eligibility of descendants (pewaris) to participate in the joint venture or not. The complexity of local concerns and official responses is captured via a case study at Lalampas in the Tongod District of Sabah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The corporatisation of Port Klang from the mid-1980s onwards was a significant moment in the history of Malaysia's political economy and generated considerable momentum for the changes that were to occur in this late industrialising nation under the leadership of the Barisan Nasional government. In particular, the restructuring of how labour was organised in Malaysia's most significant port became frequently cited both within and outside the country as a model for tripartite labour privatisation and the well-managed divestment of state-owned enterprises. However, in the past decade, the organisation of labour in the port has again changed dramatically. Migrant labour from some of the poorest parts of Asia now makes up the majority of semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Based on fieldwork carried out during 2009 with workers from Bangladesh and Nepal who are employed in Port Klang, this paper suggested that a regulatory vacuum now exists in the port, which means foreign workers are often treated badly and have few avenues for dissent. An analysis of the changing labour regime in Port Klang over time can assist in understanding the contemporary political economy of Malaysia as well as illuminate debates about the spaces of migrant labour more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the thesis of‘deagrarianisation’ of farming economies, work on sustainable rural livelihoods (SRL) has successfully captured the agency of rural producers as they diversify their livelihoods to minimise risk. SRL captures a complex interplay of local and global factors, as well as the synergies emanating from natural (environmental), economic and social capital that underpin diversification. The framework has been found useful for analyses of change in coastal, marine-based livelihoods. However, agency at the local level implies equal power to accept and reject development interventions. The way groups diversify or use the options open to them depends as much on access to resources (the means), as on how that access is interpreted (the meaning), and the latter dimension is a creative (unpredictable) one. New introduced forms of economic activities, in this case seaweed farming, can be assigned meaning by participants that were unanticipated by change agents. Livelihood diversification through seaweed cultivation on Banggi island off Kudat, northern Sabah (East Malaysia) is not attained by economic factors alone but also by the meaning attached to the activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immigration control constitutes a particular technique for regulating urban space and for controlling and disciplining migrant subjects within it. Unlike other manifestations of state power in exemplary urban settings, the architecture of urban immigration control is not recognisable through grand buildings or walls, but rather through its momentary presence and continuously shifting location: ad hoc identity controls in public spaces, roadblocks in neighbourhood streets or raids against workplaces. Building on fieldwork conducted in the Malaysian city of George Town, this article takes an interest in how migrants navigate this urban borderscape in order to avoid exploitation and encounters with the police. Read through Asef Bayat's notion of 'street politics', the article shows how migrants use the means (made) available to them in order to extend their room to manoeuvre. While such tactics are often driven by the force of necessity, they do nonetheless cumulatively encroach on the state's ability to produce migrants as (un)wanted or even (il)legal subjects in the city. Through this, migrants also challenge the very notion of what an exemplary urban space is as well as who is considered a legitimate part of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sabah in Malaysian Borneo contains a range of diverse ecosystems and some of the richest concentrations of biodiversity in the world. Yet the state's existing protected area network is too fragmented and of insufficient size to safeguard biodiversity in the long term. Experts have emphasised the need for a landscape level approach to shore up conservation areas through the creation of ecological corridors of compatible mixed use. In light of the 2003 Durban Accord which signalled a shift towards greater levels of community participation in conservation, this article features the efforts made by the state to explore the potential role of Indigenous and Community-Conserved Areas ( ICCAs) in strengthening biodiversity conservation. Selected case studies are used to showcase some of the ways ICCAs are already making important contributions to safeguarding ecological services and maintaining habitat connectivity in the state. Recognising the role of indigenous and local communities in sustaining Sabah's unique biocultural landscapes is a critical component of a long-term approach to sustaining irreplaceable natural heritage. Sabah's legal framework actually contains sufficient provision for greater synergy between community and state-based governance of biodiversity areas, yet aspects of Sabah's political economy must be addressed before this ideal can be realised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Malaysia's civil society resistance to a bilateral free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, focusing specifically on the role played by domestic mainstream and alternative media in raising awareness of trade negotiations. While challenges to a Malaysia–United States FTA may appear muted – especially if compared with the outpouring of dissent witnessed on the streets of Thailand and South Korea against similar deals with the United States – Malaysia's civil society agents have employed a range of mechanisms to oppose the agreement. Although these activists have focused their efforts on different sections of the proposed FTA – from intellectual property rights to food sovereignty to government procurement procedures – all share a common call for greater transparency in the negotiation process and greater public and parliamentary consultation. This article takes a critical look at who is involved in these resistance efforts, their key issues of concern, limitations to their success, and, most importantly, their relationship with and use of local media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Singapore-Indonesia-Malaysia Growth Triangle has been applauded by the governments of the three nation states, economists and transnational corporations as an economic success. However, other stark realities are evident at the local level as well. The Growth Triangle is supplanting older cultural and economic geographies. This has given rise to struggles over rights to territories and resources. Of the three points in the triangle, it is the landscape of Riau-Indonesia that has been transformed most dramatically. A comparative study of the cadastral maps of the administrators of the Growth Triangle versus the community maps of the indigenous peoples shows the differences in their perceived spatial ideas of Riau. It also highlights the different systems of knowledge as upheld by the administrators in contrast to that of the indigenous inhabitants. This comparative study brings to attention the issues of knowledge construction, mapping knowledge and the politics of mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Landowners and the private investors often have contradictory interests in joint ventures. Although development planners sometimes believe that government can harmonise these contradictions, state interests in development often lead them to support the interests of private capital. While joint ventures may be useful ways of pooling human, material and financial resources, this article draws on a case study of two pilot joint venture oil palm schemes in Sarawak, Malaysia, to show that the legal construction and administration of native customary land rights generate lower results for landowners than they do for the private sector. Information and power asymmetries constrain the ability of affected natives to realise fair benefits under a joint venture arrangement. When institutional constraints that give a measure of protection to native rights and interests are dismantled in the rush to establish commercial plantations for example, an unregulated market can be detrimental to landowners’ rights and long–term interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pressure from the state government to abandon shifting cultivation and of the market to increase the production of cash crops are causing not simply a reduction in the practice of shifting cultivation in Sabah, Malaysia but marked alterations in the way many remote communities grow hill rice. Many traditional practices have been abandoned including the substitution of cash payments for community labour co-operation (gotong-royong), the use of traditional methods to monitor soil fertility such as maintaining fallow periods and the selection of appropriate hill rice varieties. The result has been a reduction in labour input, a shortage of land, continuous production, increased used of weedicides and a general failure to continue sustainable agricultural practices. Despite state incentives to abandon the practice the pressure to maintain real incomes among the rural communities has meant a continuation of the practice of shifting cultivation but under conditions which are now resulting in land degradation, slope instability and soil infertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]