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Agrotourism in Vietnam has been identified as one of the strategies used to achieve green growth and countryside modernisation, and it is often included as part of the national and local agenda. In this paper, we examine agrotourism in a village in the periphery of Hội An city (an international tourism hub in central Vietnam) to question tourism's interaction with ongoing development processes. More specifically, we aim to understand the impact of fast peri‐urbanisation on agrotourism and the impacts of agrotourism on people's daily lives, specifically when it comes to physical changes in their living environment, tensions in their social life and their concerns about the future. Our analysis is supported with data generated from interviews with farmers, local officials, tourism workers and tourists. We find that agrotourism products lacked authenticity and farming was not of great interest for tourists, yet the state's investment in the village tended to favour spaces and infrastructure that could attract more tourists and generate profit, to the detriment of cultural infrastructure. Land speculation and an unequal distribution of income were the main tensions in the village along with farmers' concerns about their rural heritage, income diversification and environmental quality. As such, agrotourism in the village has been driven by rapid urbanisation and mass tourism, creating a competition between a consumption activity and a productive activity. Those are important parameters that future policymakers need to take into consideration in order to sustain the city's food production and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the pressing challenges of poverty, climate change and disasters, identifying opportunities for interventions that offer positive outcomes across the trifecta of development, adaptation and disaster risk reduction is critically needed. While the overlaps between these streams can be straightforward in theory, practical opportunities for convergence are often lacking. Drawing on 10 focus groups with women market vendors who are part of the UN Women's Markets for Change programme in Vanuatu, this paper explores how markets as places can be useful entry points for this trifecta. Marketplaces can be important sites for developing capabilities and empowering women. As transient and interactive spaces, marketplaces also have inherent strengths that can be built upon and utilised to heighten intervention reach and foster positive outcomes across the development‐adaptation‐disaster trifecta. This paper encourages further exploration into the capacity of marketplaces to achieve this trifecta of outcomes across various scales and locations, and to find solutions to existing challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the Western paradigm of foreign aid promoted by the Development Assistance Committee is rapidly losing relevance in development studies and its related academic teaching programmes. The longstanding Southern‐led approaches to aid and development are now coming to the fore. China's Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (finalised at Bandung in 1955) and the Eight Principles for Economic Aid and Technical Assistance to Other Countries (1964) are increasingly emphasised as points of difference to Western aid. It is the rise of the South that has challenged the dominant development paradigm(s) over the past 50 years. The discipline of development studies has been slow to address these challenges in how it trains future development practitioners. I will argue that development studies programmes in Australian universities have a focus on Western foreign aid: either questioning its hegemonic nature as a tool for neo‐liberal or neo‐colonial development on the one hand; or questioning aid effectiveness and how well it addresses contemporary challenges. This paper explores the challenges in examining South–South cooperation and a different development paradigm in producing relevant development studies curricula and pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of the international migration of health workers in recent decades has taken place in the context of the transnationalisation of healthcare provision as well as of governance and policy responses. This paper examines international policy responses to cross‐border health worker migration in the Asia Pacific region. These include multilateral (global and regional) and bilateral policy agreements, policy dialogue and programmes of action in relation to key issues of ethical recruitment, ‘circular’ migration and labour rights and key themes of health workforce planning and management. The paper brings original new analysis of international datasets and secondary data to bear on the pressing and important questions of what international policy initiatives and responses are at work in the Asia Pacific region, and what these mean for the nature of migration governance in the region. The paper's focus routes the evidence and argument towards current research and policy debates about the relationship between health worker migration, health worker shortages and poor health outcomes. In this, the paper brings new insights into the analysis of the international policy ‘universe’ through its emphasis on multiple and intersecting cross‐border institutions, initiatives and actors operating across different scales. Coherent national and international strategies for integrated health worker migration governance and policy need to incorporate these insights, and the paper considers their implications for current strategies to attain universal health care and improved health outcomes in Asia Pacific and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways in which the religious subject can be a contingent position that is responsive to the broader socio‐religious context within which it is expressed. These contingencies are acutely observed among short‐term missionaries (STM), who seek out encounters with difference in pursuit of a more cosmopolitan subjectivity. Yet, while spaces of missionary encounter are inherently relational, the missions literature has tended to downplay the effects of relationality on the realisation of these subject positions. By focusing on the experiences of Singaporean missionaries working among Christian communities in Southeast Asia, I contribute a more nuanced and less pre‐determined understanding of the dynamics that underpin intra‐Asian missionary encounters. Drawing on interviews conducted with Singapore's STM community, I explore how materiality and new media can structure encounters and subject positions within relational missionary space. I also emphasise the limits of relational space by highlighting its untranslatability beyond the missionary terrain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing the multiple dimensions of gender inequality requires commitments by policy-makers, practitioners and scholars to transformative practices. One challenge is to assemble a coherent conceptual framework from diverse knowledges and experiences. In this paper, we present a framework that emerged from our involvement in changing market culture in the Pacific, which we name a radical empowerment of women approach. We draw on detailed narratives from women market vendors and women-led new initiatives in marketplaces to explain this approach. We argue that the primary focus of recently developed projects for marketplaces in the Pacific is technical and infrastructural, which is insufficient for addressing gendered political and economic causes of poor market management and oppressive conditions for women vendors. By exploring the complex array of motives and effects of the desire to transform or improve marketplaces in the Pacific, we caution against simplistic technical or infrastructural solutions. This paper also introduces the practice of working as a cooperative, hybrid research collaboration. The knowledges and analyses that we bring to this issue demonstrate that substantive analysis generated from diverse and shifting 'locations' and roles, but underpinned by a shared vision of, and commitment to, gender justice, can provide distinctive policy and research insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewing the Salween River as a transboundary commons, this paper illustrates how diverse state and non‐state actors and institutions in hybrid and multi‐scaled networks have influenced water governance in general, and large dam decision‐making processes in particular. Putting power relations at the centre of this analysis and drawing on the conceptual lenses of hybrid governance and critical institutionalism, we show the complexity of the fragmented processes through which decisions have been arrived at, and their implications. In the context of highly asymmetrical power relations throughout the basin, and the absence of an intergovernmental agreement to date, we argue that hybrid networks of state and non‐state actors could be strategically engaged to connect parallel and fragmented decision‐making landscapes with a goal of inclusively institutionalising the transboundary commons and maintaining connected local commons throughout the basin, foregrounding a concern for ecological and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peatland fires and the impact of transboundary haze are often intertwined with socio‐environmental externalities of neoliberal forest governance and overlapping systems of resource property rights in Indonesia. New peatland governance strategies are emerging to address fires and haze by reorganising peatland management using a more ecologically relevant scale that territorialises peatland according to its hydrological characteristics. Employing the concept of the eco‐scalar fix, this paper interrogates rescaling peatland governance as a strategy to address the socio‐ecological crisis associated with the conversion of peatland into mono‐agricultural land. However, rescaling peatland governance entails the risk of merely displacing socio‐environmental crises to areas considered less ecologically important rather than addressing them. Drawing on a case study of a peatland restoration in Riau, Indonesia, this paper shows how emerging hybrid forms of peatland governance can address the environmental externalities that have unintentionally been created. This hybrid form of peatland governance has pressured actors across multiple types of property to rework the ways that environmental commons are controlled and accessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, with a focus on Japan and Thailand, we outline a relational environmental and economic history of East Asian economic integration (EAEI) and its implication for the commons in both places. We draw attention in particular to global commodity chains as relational processes not only of trade and investment, but also geopolitics and aid, to argue that these transborder processes have connected together commons in distant localities resulting in their simultaneous enclosure, dispossession and (re‐)commoning with implications for community vulnerabilities in positive and negative ways. To demonstrate this argument we analyse three periods of EAEI: the late nineteenth century until World War II, when Japan and Thailand both began to modernise and new trade and geopolitical relations emerged in the context of colonialism; the post‐World War II recovery until the Plaza Accord in 1986, during which time Japan rapidly industrialised, as did Thailand to a lesser extent and regionalism was largely defined by US hegemony; and the post‐Plaza Accord period, when Japan deindustrialised its labour intensive manufacture and heavy industry and Thailand rapidly industrialised and EAEI became defined by new and intensified global commodity chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the 'the unseen transboundary commons' of residues, nutrients and mobile matter associated with the annual flood pulse that support Cambodia's inland fisheries. We develop the idea of biophysical geopolitics concentrating on political‐socio‐natures rather than the purely biophysical. In the context of multiple mega‐projects in the Basin, we argue the flood pulse has become increasingly compromised, which is an urgent socio‐ecological security issue facing the Mekong region. Scores of livelihoods are dependent on the hydrological flood pulse via the reproduction of the inland fisheries, and a diversity of wetlands resources. Our paper builds on cross‐comparative research focusing on a geo‐strategic mouth of the Tonle Sap (Chhnok Tru) and a transborder area along the Mekong main‐stream (Stung Treng, Cambodia – Champasak, Laos area). By viewing biophysical matter as becoming trans‐border geopolitical matter, we wish to emphasise the critical socio‐ecological character of the hydrological flood pulse, and the urgency of cumulative spatial and temporal changes affecting diverse wetlands communities. Loss of wild capture fisheries and the more unpredictable flows of the Mekong are signs of an emergent and dangerous era of increasing environmental insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While internal migration in contemporary China ascribes a great change to urban China's demographic composition, social structures and economic development trajectories, it is yet to restructure the formal definitions of urban identity and belonging, which are still dominated by the household registration system (hukou). The paper suggests that as a result of changes in the political, economic, demographic and social contexts within which China's internal migration develops, there emerge a crucial need to re‐examine the crude forms of determining identity and belonging, questioning the addressing of spatiality within the existing mechanisms (such as hukou system or the shiminhua discourse). To do so, the paper argues that the existing de‐territorialisation of the migration experience has to be replaced with a more nuanced understanding of how spatial practices and conceptualisations shape migrants' experiences, as it is becoming imperative to develop a new framework that is more sensitive to migrants' lived process of identification and belonging, especially as these traverse multiple geographies and spatial scales. This close engagement with migrants' spatiality can then be used as a base from which to engage with a more complex view of migrants' spatial and social relatedness, as well as the development of their urban belonging and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has promoted the idea that political struggles over food systems can be understood through the concepts of food security (the right to access food) and food sovereignty (the right to exercise control over food systems). These concepts emphasise different political priorities in the social relations of food: for the former, the promotion of decent work and the strengthening of the social safety net to enhance people's abilities to put food on their plates; for the latter, the defence of land, water and resource rights, to underpin capabilities for food own‐provisioning. The question we pose in this paper is how these priorities are articulated by grassroots non‐government organisations working at the frontline of global food poverty? Interviews with 22 representatives of food‐related non‐government organisations in Myanmar were used to elicit narratives about how they understood their challenges. The paper finds that narratives did not cohere exclusively to either the food security or food sovereignty concept, but blended ideas associated with the political priorities of both in complex and contradictory ways. These insights lend important firsthand evidence to the argument that supports a multi‐dimensional framing of the politics of food that is inclusive of the diverse struggles highlighted by food security and food sovereignty concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conceptualises the process of voluntary relocation undertaken by rural farmers to informal settlements in coastal cities. These are journeys that occur without formal institutional support, utilising migrants' own agency. Learning from these community‐driven relocations has merit in rethinking climate change adaptation at the regional level. In this paper we present stories of 17 families who have progressively relocated to the fringes of Khulna city in southwestern Bangladesh. We observe three key attributes: first, relocations are slow, neither singular nor immediately completed, but rather take months of careful back and forth journeys of family members between their places of origin and destination. Second, relocations rely on small networks of relatives and acquaintances at the destination. Third, relocations are built on shared responsibilities distributed among a range of actors in places of origin and destination. We conclude that these slow, small and shared relocations are likely to be realised as forms of ongoing adaptation by rural farmers if their aspirational mobilities, social relations and supports are maintained at a regional scale. This kind of migration as adaptation may bring about just outcomes for those displaced without necessarily promoting rigid planning interventions that tend to fix resettlement solutions in place and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between commuting distances and where people work has been studied for urban contexts in both developed countries and developing countries. However, few studies have examined the situation in rural areas, and none look at commuting distances to non‐farm workplaces in rural areas of developing countries. This paper investigates how commuting distance, and thus accessibility, to local non‐farm work influences non‐farm employment and out‐migration from rural villages in Northeast Thailand. The main issues examined are: (i) the distance that rural residents travel to work in local non‐farm jobs; and (ii) the influence that local non‐farm employment has on the number of outmigrants from rural villages. The study finds: (i) distance between villages and non‐farm work sites impact the number of villagers who are employed in regular wage work; (ii) beyond 20 km villagers are less likely to travel to non‐farm employment using their own means of transportation; and (iii) employment in regular wage work decreases outmigration. The findings from this study contribute to the debates over the drivers of rural out‐migration, rural livelihood changes, and agrarian changes that are taking place in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS), an Indigenous single women farmer's collective in Odisha, India and Norco Dairy in regional NSW, Australia are cooperatives undertaking collective action to 'survive well', securing agrarian livelihoods in the face of climate change. Striking differences in affluence and poverty separate these place‐based cooperatives while other things connect them: an Earth unsettled by climate change and extractivist/capitalist interventions. Both cooperatives transform place in practice by engaging similar survival strategies and non‐exploitative forms of cooperation. In this paper we seek to articulate the transformative nature of these places and practices in a way that goes beyond easy binaries of local/global, while enabling recognition of different affiliations between lands, related climate crisis and sustainable and shared surviving mechanisms. We develop a 'two‐thirds' perspective building upon Bruno Latour's third attractor, the Terrestrial, together with another third, Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg's idea of the World of the Third (WOT). Their interventions open our thinking to the ecological particularities, uncertainties, and postcapitalist possibilities of surviving well in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic climate change poses huge challenges to humanity. The frequency and magnitude of extreme weather is increasing. As more attention turns to disaster preparedness and recovery, it is worth recognising that many communities have a long history of living with the flux of planetary dynamism. They are experienced in negotiating collective well‐being with one another and with the earth. Other communities have less experience and know‐how and have had to adopt more experimental approaches. In this paper we draw on planetary social thought and critical disaster studies to re‐think disaster recovery. We present stories of communities in the Philippines differently negotiating collective well‐being in the face of climate uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a resurgent interest in the study of 'urban commons' in critical geography scholarship as a way to reimagine cities beyond the pervasive neoliberal framing. Inspired by this body of work, this paper explores the processes through which marginalised groups, despite their many socio‐economic limitations, negotiate and transform their sparse urban resources into 'commons' to survive in cities. We use qualitative interviews and participant observations to examine two case studies of informal settlements in Dhaka and Khulna city in Bangladesh. The 'commons identikit' is used to analyse how informal settlers negotiate survival by enacting particular social relationships among themselves and beyond, ensuring access, use, and exchange of materials and ideas, as well as distributing care, benefits, and responsibility of their commons. By bringing a commons perspective to the pre‐existing and emerging local tactics, we highlight the logics and relationality that help these communities make efforts of collective survival and aspire to a better future. We argue that there are significant practical benefits to recognising the self‐organising logics of the precariously positioned communities in the city. Furthermore, commoning the city constitutes a major extension of the theorisation of urban informal settlements and the city as urban commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid expansion of urban development in Asia over the last 50 years has seen a rise in demand for building materials. From large construction companies to squatter settlers seeking to improve their housing, concrete is the building material of choice. In the Philippines there is plentiful supply of the limestone and aggregate (sand and gravel) required for concrete production. Alongside the large quarries owned by major corporations are small, often illegal quarries, supplying aggregate to the construction industry. In these shadow places informal miners scratch out a precarious livelihood. They are members of a vast artisanal and small‐scale mining (ASM) workforce that is global in extent. This paper situates informal aggregate mining in the diverse economy of concrete in the Philippines and within the context of global ASM studies. With a detailed study of one quarry on the edges of Metro Manila, it reveals how mining contributes to the survival portfolio of poor households. Without romanticising the lives of quarry labourers, we identify a range of negotiations by which informal miners create a community of commoners in a contested quarry site. This research provides insight into the capacities that informal miners could bring to designing more sustainable development pathways within and beyond the extractive industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a diverse economies account of fish 'waste' that revalues it as 'surplus'. We examine 'Kai Ika', a community marine conservation experiment in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa New Zealand. Kai Ika rescues fish heads, frames and offal that were previously 'going to waste' and redistributes them to fish eaters who would otherwise struggle to access these foods. It involves fishers and community sector and Indigenous actors in an initiative that converts would‐be waste into surplus. We examine the case as a diverse economic project that nourishes humans, enhances respect for fish as living beings, and potentially conserves marine resources in the face of global‐to‐local fisheries depletion. The research is based on community‐gathered fish parts collection data, and virtual and email interview data. We analyse this data to produce an account of diverse 'object values' and fish‐related surpluses that derive from surplus labour and other socio‐cultural and environmental surplus. We argue that reframing fish economies in this way encourages new and diverse economic subjectivities and a more connected, relational and cooperative community economy of fish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hong Kong, a part of China, yet separated from it by a borderline and a different social system, relies mostly on China for its fresh food. With a high incidence of food contamination, many Hong Kong people have turned to a new food alternative - locally grown organic vegetables. The number of organic growers has risen significantly over the past decade. This paper examines the emergence of local organic food production in Hong Kong since the turn of the century. Not only is this revival of an interest in agricultural production (manifested in the increase in organic farms and organic food consumers that is related to the global movement of eco-agriculture), it is also intertwined with a public discourse relating to land preservation, the balance between an agricultural economy and urban development and food localism. Continuous food news revealing the scale of substandard and poisonous food produced in China have escalated the scare surrounding unsafe food and has helped turn consumers to local produce and to build the discourses on food localism. The paper argues that such a local food consciousness has been fed by the local politics of resistance against negative influences from China in the evolving cross-border relations between China and Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of spatial imaginaries and as physical infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) spurs new geographies of comparative urban study. Irrespective of whether it is the primary driver for developments carried out in its name, 'the BRI' is a label that serves to bring previously unassociated project sites and non‐place‐based infrastructural developments into comparative relation. This paper considers some of the possibilities presented by the BRI for comparative urban studies in – and from – Asia. Building upon insights from postcolonial urban studies, planetary urbanisation and inter‐Asia cultural studies, I sketch two key possibilities of the BRI as (comparative urban) method. The first concerns the BRI as a series of openings to much (spatially) wider and historically deeper forms of comparison. Second, I argue that BRI as method impels forms of urban comparison beyond conventionally territorialised units of analysis at a variety of scales, including both the city and the (area studies) region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can contribute to more cosmopolitan forms of theory‐making and the diversification of knowledges. It focuses on emerging Chinese narratives of the Digital Silk Road (DSR) that cast the initiative as emblematic of an improved BRI 2.0 in the (post‐)pandemic era. With subterranean fibre‐optic cables and satellite systems constituting important components of the DSR, I argue that these Chinese discourses fundamentally expose the 'horizontal' bias in infrastructure debates, thereby forcing an analytical re‐orientation towards the notion's volumetric possibilities. Reconceptualising infrastructures in volumetric terms opens up opportunities for interrogating issues of representational politics, power and sovereignty that matter for the DSR and beyond. Using Chinese perspectives of the DSR for the purpose of theory‐building, however, does not equate to endorsing Sinocentrism or privileging the BRI as a totalising framework for interpreting the world. Rather, it signifies an effort to 'provincialise' the BRI – ensuring that different voices and subjectivities can co‐exist in the ongoing and unfinished project of rethinking/reconstructing the BRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impacts of the 2015 New Zealand (NZ) All Black rugby test match with Manu Samoa in Samoa: the 'Game that stopped two nations' (henceforth referred to as 'the Game'). Outlining key concepts as well as events and experiences surrounding the Game, this paper reflects on how the Game aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals as well as NZ's current Pacific Reset Agenda, an agenda which aims to increase understanding, friendship, mutual benefit, collective ambition and sustainability (Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2017). A Likert‐styled questionnaire, a 15‐category ranking exercise, semi‐structured interviews, analysis of relevant media and other sources, informal discussions and participant observation help to provide insights into how sport for diplomacy and development functions. The Game was viewed as providing an opportunity for income generation, most participants felt excited to have shared in the experience, and many were hopeful as to what this might mean for future NZ/Samoan relations. However, we argue that, overall, this event represented a missed opportunity. If sport diplomacy events are to authentically contribute to diplomatic and development goals, more needs to be done to create meaningful and enduring engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many disaster settings, top‐down responses emphasise 'expert‐led' solutions that often involve relocating disaster‐affected communities. While the intention might be to move people from harm's way and facilitate recovery, failure to attend to local pre‐disaster circumstances as well as the interplay between power, resilience and vulnerability within and around affected communities often sees resettlement reconfigure as displacement or disconnection. This oversight may even usher in a new phase of dispossession and disadvantage for marginalised groups (particularly in colonial settings). This paper explores experiences in Australia, Japan and Taiwan to reflect on what issues of local sociality, local culture and local resilience need to be attended to in framing 'better' disaster responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bangladesh experiences some of the most severe impacts of climate change, with impacts already evident in the coastal regions. Recent data shows that around 32% of the coastal communities in Bangladesh are affected by climate‐induced hazards each year. In 2011, 64% among them were displaced locally and 27% were displaced to other locations in Bangladesh. It requires comprehensive and viable polices and planning to meet the challenges of managing a large number of displaced people. In this context, this paper reviews and investigates the effectiveness of current governance frameworks to address migration of affected communities. It argues that migration can be an effective way to cope with environmental shocks. Finally, it discusses policy imperatives for effective protection of people displaced by climate risks with a special reference to adopting a human rights‐based approach in law and policy making for climate‐induced migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the emerging effects of the 2012 decision of the Constitutional Court of Indonesia relating to the customary management of Indonesia's traditional forests. It focuses on the challenge of moving from legal to political and societal recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights. In its advocacy of customary land rights, Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN) successfully applied to the Constitutional Court for judicial review of the Forest Law 41 1999. It argued the law breached the constitutional rights of its members in permitting the state to permit exploitation and development rights over traditional forest without their consent. The flow‐on effect of allocating such rights included widespread deforestation and land use change without agreement from customary communities that have used and occupied these forests for centuries, thus ignoring traditional customary law that regards these forests as the property of such communities. The paper reflects critically on international experience in the interface between legal recognition of Indigenous peoples' rights, and their translation into sustainable and meaningful societal transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the sweeping changes in industrial relations in South Korea that have taken place since democratisation in 1987, which gave workers the right to organise themselves, and critically reviews the development of social dialogue since the financial crisis of 1997. A number of international labour specialists have maintained that social dialogue plays an important role in enhancing economic restructuring and the stability of industrial relations in order to compete in a global economy. Contrary to the positive assessment of social dialogue, the paper argues that the Korean Tripartite Commission has not reduced the antagonism between unions and employer organisations due to the influence of embedded, state-led economic development. The financial crisis of 1997 merely provided a catalyst to propel the 'historic compromise' of February 1998, without creating effective institutional arrangements to maintain social dialogue. It is worth noting that the uncertainty of social dialogue results from the inability of the Korean Tripartite Commission to encourage employers and workers to trade off wage restraint for job security in the context of a lack of social welfare protections. The paralysed Korean Tripartite Commission provides fertile ground for reflecting on the complex relationship between social dialogue and institutional arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper captures some of the structural deficiencies within the United Nations' decision-making processes at its headquarters in New York. Ideas and methodological approaches from critical geopolitics are adopted here to examine semi-structured interviews held with Pacific ambassadors ( n = 7) at the United Nations and bring new knowledge to an underexplored area. Results demonstrate that the institutional capacities of Pacific small island states hinder their ability to voice their concerns adequately at every United Nations' forum, while shifting imaginaries and a decline in popularity of issues has seen a drop in on-the-ground financial assistance for these states. In this way, this paper attempts to contribute to our understanding of the practice of international diplomacy within the United Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a set of international development targets agreed to by members of the United Nations in 2000. The goals aim to improve many of the dimensions of extreme poverty and are to be achieved by 2015. This paper provides an overview of the issues relevant to the achievement of the MDGs in the Asia-Pacific region. The paper begins by discussing the critiques of the MDGs before assessing whether countries in the region are on track to achieve them. Issues relating to data availability and accuracy are discussed and the need to tailor the MDG targets to the special circumstances of some Asia-Pacific countries is examined. The paper proceeds by discussing the role of international assistance via international foreign development aid and non-governmental organisations in the achievement of the MDGs. The paper concludes with some policy implications for the international donor community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the papers about Indonesia that have been discussed at the University of British Columbia's Centre for Southeast Asian Research. These articles are about Indonesia's history and current developments with special emphasis on institutional reforms, democratization, regional autonomy and empowerment. These papers include "Unity in diversity: A brief historical perspective," "Post-Suharto: New hopes for reformasi, otonomi, demokrasi, partisipasi."

The article discusses various papers published within the issue, including one by Cynthia Chou on the ways in which planners, policy-makers and investors ignore specific indigenous histories and another by Michele Ford and Lenore Lyons on means in which Tanjung Pinang has connected with Singapore.

Drawing on Harold Brookfield's seminal interventions on intensification and disintensification in tropical agriculture, the paper argues that a de-linking of poverty and livelihoods in rural areas from farming and agricultural resources is occurring in rural South-East Asia. This is often driven as much by changes in lifestyles and life views than by economic and environmental imperatives. The paper proposes that farming is in the process of losing its resonance and significance for the rural poor. Emerging patterns of change in the South-East Asian countryside are used to construct a generalised framework of agrarian transition where the current trend towards pluriactivity is likely to be replaced by a mixed landscape of agrarian entrepreneurs, neopeasants and remnant smallholders. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this trajectory for understanding poverty and pro-poor interventions in the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates conflicting priorities in Japan's aid policy to Cambodia and how those policies appear in the implementation of the aid. Japan's aid is driven by a strategic policy to integrate Cambodia into the regional economy while the same aid focuses on assisting small-scale farmers in that country. On the Cambodian side, the government has employed a market-oriented approach of development in the context of local patron/client mode of governance, in which, the agricultural policy has also become oriented towards large-scale investment and export. By looking at the case of Japan's technical cooperation in Cambodia's rice sector, this paper examines how the conflicts within Japan's aid policy are internalised in the Cambodian context and appear as conflicts between Japanese and Cambodian approaches to agricultural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timor-Leste's nation-building process faces significant demographic challenges because of its current and prospective population dynamics. Based on the 2010 census data this paper projects the demographic structure of Timor-Leste by 2030 and discusses the impact of the same on peace, development and environmental sustainability. This paper projects that Timor-Leste's population will increase from 1.06 million in 2010 to 1.82 million in 2030, and because of a slow decline in total fertility rates, its population characteristics will remain that of a very youthful country with an extraordinarily high dependency ratio. Timor-Leste will have extremely high proportion of excess labour, high concentration of uneducated and jobless youth in small urban areas and an ever-increasing demand on natural resources in the next two decades. In the context of poor performing domestic economy, very low formal sector employment and weak environmental governance, these challenges may well contribute to social conflict which is evident in the nation's recent past. This paper is an attempt to reflect upon the implications of Timor-Leste's population dynamics by 2030 on urbanisation, economy (labour market) and the environment which tend to have a strong relationship with social stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how the economic actions of water distribution and exchange are embedded in the culture of indigenous communities in the Cordillera highlands of Northern Luzon, Philippines. Such actions are fundamental to water access and provisioning. Data was derived from a series of focus group discussions conducted with various water users, including households, farmers, enterprises and local government officials, and from upstream, midstream and downstream communities along the Balili River, a critical watershed in the Cordillera highlands. The study area exhibits a mix of livelihood systems and both formal and traditional institutions of decision-making. Recognising that water is both an economic and social good, this paper draws inspiration from Polanyi's concept of embeddedness. Cases of three communities suggest that water distribution and exchange are embedded in the community's socio-cultural spaces, but the extent of embeddedness declines as communities transform from subsistence to market-based economies. Embeddedness also determines value and availability of water. The paper contributes to the discourse on the cultural economy of water and provides direction on new modes of decision-making on river management that promise more inclusive, equitable and ecologically sustainable outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Processes of globalisation in the conventional food provision system have had widespread negative impacts on small-scale farmers. Yet, alternative food networks, which are characterised by more sustainable production/consumption practices and fairer trade relations, have increasingly been 'going global' and, in the process, have been integrating small-scale farms in the South. One such high-value export-led commodity is certified organic shrimp. International third-party certification schemes are becoming popular as a tool to verify the intangible attributes of such commodities. Using concepts of multifunctionality and agrarian change, this paper examines the implications of introducing an international environmental certification programme to a site where the 'peasantry' has been preserved and has limited integration in the global agro-food system. Drawing on a case study that examines the first certified organic shrimp production project in Vietnam, this paper concludes that the current movement towards post-productivism in the global North has potential to keep local farming practices in the global South by justifying the value of peasant-like production methods through international certification. As a result, the development path of agrarian transition might be reshaped into a form not necessarily pursuing industrialisation. This leads to the new interpretation of pre- and post-productivism beyond the North and South divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past several years, the creative reuse of brownfields has played a major role in Chinese cities to give their urban landscape a so-called second development. This paper analyses the governance of the brownfield restructuring in Guangzhou (Canton). The research is based on a study of the T.I.T Creative Industry Zone, a highly successful creative space currently in danger of demolition. This paper follows DiGaetano and Strom's () analytical governance framework. This approach allows for deciphering the complexities of decision-making through a well-structured set of interdependent categories. In Guangzhou, new policies and institutions have been promoting the restructuring and have contributed to the formalisation of public-private interactions. In general, this indicates a shift towards a more corporatist governance. However, the study of T.I.T reveals a rather intricate picture: the policymaking remains influenced by a top-down authoritative style - sometimes in an arbitrary manner - and to some extent also by particularistic exchanges. This indicates a complex mode of urban governance consisting of increasingly corporatist elements but still with managerial, and to a lesser extent, clientelistic elements. Finally, the coexistence of different governance modes seems to be a typical outcome of China's transition while still remaining more adaptive, experimental and flexible in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yolŋu people living in northeast Arnhem Land regularly celebrate their connections with the Macassan trepangers from Indonesian Sulawesi in storytelling, art and music. The history of this contact is well known in academic literature, and these stories of Macassan contact are told regularly by Yolŋu people to tourists visiting northeast Arnhem Land. This paper explores the impact that hearing stories about the Macassans from one Yolŋu family's tourism business had on a group of Australian Indonesian language teachers, visiting as part of an Endeavour Language Teaching Fellowship. It draws on ideas related to telling and hearing stories and argues that these particular stories enabled the teachers to make powerful connections: with each other and with Australia's histories and geographies. The paper also explores the ways in which the teachers went on to become storytellers themselves, using stories to make connections in their students' learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oceania includes sovereign states as well as overseas territories of metropolitan powers. In both cases, contemporary geopolitical borders are legacies of colonialism. As in many (de)colonised places, materialisations of spatially anchored social imaginaries and practices of self and otherness, play a role in the everyday politics of Oceania's communities and states. Notably, cultural intimacies (Herzfeld, 2016) in this region are also shaped by tensions between islands in an archipelagic unit. Characterised by plural identities, Oceania's communities must navigate solidarities within the colonial borders of unitary sovereign states or non‐sovereign island territories. Given this context, we ask whether spatially anchored identities within archipelagic contexts are politically engaged, playing a role in the politics of state (dis)cohesion across the region. This paper presents findings from 73 interviews across four pairs of Pacific islands – Wallis‐Futuna, Tahiti‐Mangareva, Rarotonga‐Manihiki, Pohnpei‐Chuuk – exploring how communities define their own identities and the identity of those on 'the other island'. We find both sides in agreement on six complementary and rather respectful identities. We therefore suggest that while political tensions and calls for secession in archipelagos are real, it is unlikely that identity politics at this point in time inflames political break ups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is a leading threat to sustainable socio‐economic development in Bangladesh. Adverse impacts of climatic disasters including flash floods, recurrent cyclones and erratic rainfall patterns are already causing hardship for both rural and urban people and are expected to accelerate into the future. The aim of this research note is to identify the core contributing economic sectors to climate change in Bangladesh, and to consider effective mitigation strategies. Following the 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (2014), in this paper, we argue that comprehensive mitigation measures are required in the energy, transport, buildings, industry and land‐use sectors to reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Our findings indicate that it is crucial that government and non‐government mitigation efforts engage with community knowledge practices in order to most effectively reduce GHG emissions and combat the adverse impacts of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We suggest the value of considering Pacific Latin America and the South Pacific in relationship to each other in contexts of climate change and investment in extractive industry. The paper explores the interactions between extractive industry, climate change and environmental governance through the lenses of double exposure, double movements, resilience and risk. The first part of the paper addresses the nature and scope of investments in extractive industries in this 'other Pacific'. The geography of these investments is changing the actual and perceived distribution of exposure and risk in the region. The nature of this risk is also being affected by climate change and its implications for the geographies of water and land-use. Much of the contention surrounding extractive industries can be understood as conflicts over the unequal distribution of this risk, how to interpret its significance and the ways in which resilience might be enhanced to respond to it. The final section of the paper discusses the ways in which mining governance and governance for resilience converge and, on the basis of recent experiences in El Salvador, analyses the difficulties in governing extractive industry in a way that manages risk and builds resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a practitioner perspective on community-based REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) projects in the Pacific Islands. It draws upon the author's experience in forest conservation financing since 1987, and REDD project and programme design, development and implementation since 2006. The aim is to highlight the commercial challenges faced by REDD practitioners, and explore strategic (including policy) solutions to meet these challenges. The paper begins by situating REDD as a tool for forest conservation and community development. Following a brief overview of the key elements of REDD project development procedures, the paper examines commercial (particularly market access) challenges faced by project proponents, together with challenges associated with the supply and demand dynamic for REDD credits in the global carbon market. This is situated against a backdrop of global policy stagnation in the REDD sector and the implications of this for those at the frontier of community-based forest protection efforts on the ground. The paper culminates by showing the importance of an effective partnership between governments, rainforest communities and the private sector in regional and global rainforest conservation financing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The praxis of an Indigenous Fijian researcher who is both an insider/outsider offers some valuable lessons for ethnographic work. This paper introduces ' cultural discernment' as a concept used to ensure that the research process is culturally ethical within the research setting. An insider will always require a sense of cultural discernment, recognising that actions taken have implications that are critical and remain with the researcher for life. The paper contextualises the concept of cultural discernment in relation to Fijian epistemology. Although there are risks within any research project with regard to ethics processes and the conduct of research, this paper will illustrate how Western paradigms associated with 'expert knowledge' and the 'lay knowledges' of an Indigenous population group produce competing understandings about ethical practice. The paper draws on a doctoral research project exploring the cultural conceptualisation of health and well-being, conducted in Fiji and New Zealand. The research process and steps carried out in this study ensured those actions were culturally appropriate and ethically sound from an Indigenous Fijian perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing predominantly on the work of Butler, Rose and Walters, this paper examines the governing rationalities and technologies that characterise one particular site of aid relations. Focusing on key policy documents, economic surveys and performance reports, the paper traces the fashioning of particular subjectivities as constitutive of AusAID's development objectives and the function of problematisation and responsibilisation as central to these practices of subjectivation. While I argue the freedom on offer as part of AusAID's development objectives is a highly governed one - where the 'free' economic-rational subject adopts certain 'civilised sensibilities' (Rose, 1999: 78), I show how this process of subjectivation encompasses both 'a power exerted on a subject' and 'a power assumed by the subject' (Butler, 1997: 11). What becomes apparent through this analysis is the productive and tenuous characteristics of these practices of subject formation. This paper also foregrounds the practice of critique itself, and the very act of research; concepts adopted and explanations made, as far from innocent in their performativity in enacting some worlds and not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1998 Professor R. Gerard Ward retired after 27 years as Professor of Geography in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. Ward’s contributions to his discipline, the social sciences, and the discourses about development in the Pacific region have been very considerable. This paper reviews some of the achievements of one of the twentieth century’s eminent Pacific geographers. After establishing his academic roots in the Department of Geography at the University of Auckland in the 1950s, we outline the major clusters of his writing on land use and land tenure, population dynamics and urbanisation, Pacific history and prehistory, Pacific development issues, informal markets, transport systems and tele-cost worlds. The paper concludes with an assessment of three unusual features of Ward’s writing: the breadth of his interests, the range of scales he felt comfortable working at, and the innovative nature of ideas introduced into debates about Pacific development. A comprehensive list of Ward’s publications is attached to this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing numbers of Australian students are travelling overseas to undertake short‐term work‐integrated learning placements with community development organisations. In light of recent criticisms emerging in academic and public commentary on short‐term international volunteering, this paper highlights the need for a support curriculum that caters for students from diverse discipline backgrounds, often with little or no previous understanding of community development principles or intercultural engagement. In doing so, we question who is best placed to develop an appropriate curriculum and what might it look like. We draw on Macquarie University's Professional and Community Engagement community development programme to critically reflect on the importance of engaging with diverse knowledge frameworks, approaches to learning and subject expertise of our international community partners. In particular, this paper showcases a community‐based development module co‐created with community partners that aims to encourage students to rethink western‐dominated understandings of development, poverty and inequality. To conclude, we explore how co‐creating curriculum with community partners unsettles assumptions of the university as the only site of expert knowledge and knowledge‐making practices, and reflect on the challenges encountered as we try to contribute to the development of socially and environmentally conscious students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]