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This paper is a methodological response to the challenge of decolonizing geographical knowledge. It mobilizes post‐ and de‐colonial critiques of geographical knowledge production and conceptual work, suggesting how such work unwittingly disfigures the precise contours of the places and socio‐spatial formations on which geographers work, drawing them into implicit and reductive forms of comparison. Drawing on research and sources from South Asia, the paper moves instead toward more uncertain engagements with, and dispositions to, the production of geographical knowledge; ones attuned to the poetics of planetary difference. The paper speculates on five intellectual and methodological resources, or tactics, aimed toward producing geographical scholarship attuned to the tableaux of heterogeneous and incomparable singularities at large across the world: theory and reading; friction and fragments; translation/untranslatability; abiding by; and poetics.

This paper examines the Malaysian Chinese firms that have expanded into Vietnam. Based on research and qualitative personal interviews with Malaysian Chinese firms that have invested in Vietnam, the paper unpacks the entry modes that these firms have undertaken. It argues that the Malaysian Chinese firms prefer joint ventures in their Vietnamese businesses to wholly-owned subsidiaries and personal direct investments. This paper also argues that such investments are often embedded in social and intraethnic ties, which connect Malaysian Chinese firms with Vietnam's ethnic Chinese businessmen. To this end, these firms tend to rely on informal ties and nonmarket institutions in the form of the ethnic Chinese business networks. Nevertheless, the Malaysian Chinese firms are not averse to collaborating with nonethnic Chinese firms that enjoy a good relationship with the Vietnamese state. This observation is especially marked in the property and construction, and finance sectors.

This paper seeks to bridge postcolonialism's turn to the environment with postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. Recent critiques by Chakrabarty, Spivak, and associated postcolonial theorists seek to expand the remit of postcolonialism and progressive politics to planetary imperatives, nonhumans, and anthropogenic environmental change. While the more-than-human and collective human environmental impacts are problematic for postcolonialism, they suggest ways to reorient postcolonial epistemology, critique, and progressive politics for the Anthropocene. In so doing, however, they unwittingly assume and reproduce Eurocentric and colonialist ontologies of nature and culture. This paper explains how. By revealing the inner tensions and contradictions within such accounts, I argue for the need to overcome the conceptual reticence within postcolonial studies to making ontological claims. Instead, I advocate a turn to postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. My argument extends tentative turns to materiality in recent postcolonial theory to suggest that postcolonial epistemologies need, increasingly, to attend much more radically to collective ontologies of immanence and ontogenesis. Postconstructivist currents in wider cultural and political geographies may be especially suited to composing and advancing these new postcolonial ecologies. The paper contextualizes examples of ontological approaches to ecology and politics through recent anthropological theory, critical indigeneity scholarship and Amazonian ethnography.

In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with Subaltern Studies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the Euro-American power that haunts disciplinary geography. The paper argues that using subalternity like this holds the potential to pluralize geographical interventions, particularly in the light of the discipline's materialist turns since the late 1990s. To make this argument, the paper engages Gayatri Spivak's seminal critique of the Subaltern Studies collective, suggesting how this might speak productively to a postcolonial geographical methodology. It demonstrates the potential of this methodology by weaving it through a broader attempt to critically engage the politics of nature and environment in Sri Lanka.

The impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on coastal tourism communities highlights the vulnerability of tourism destinations to external shocks. Based on fieldwork conducted in Thailand in the wake of this disaster, this paper addresses one fundamental question: what sociopolitical and environmental conditions contributed to the vulnerability of the affected tourism community of Khao Lak in the southern Phang Nga Province. We argue that an understanding of the root causes of destination vulnerability is vital not only for the successful implementation of regional recovery plans, but also for building long-term resilience against future shocks. In the absence of an appropriate tourism vulnerability framework, this paper analyzes Khao Lak's vulnerability through an innovative theoretical framework comprised of the sustainability vulnerability framework, relational scale and place. The findings reveal that Khao Lak's vulnerability is shaped by 13 interlinked factors. These are the complex outcomes of social norms and developmental and dynamic governance processes driven by the competing agendas and scaled actions of key government and industry stakeholders. The identification and understanding of the drivers of Khao Lak's vulnerability and a strong vulnerability framework have significant implications for the wider tourism community. First, the empirical findings provide tourism communities with a blueprint for understanding the foundations of their vulnerability to external shocks. Second, the tourism vulnerability framework presented here provides destination communities and government stakeholders with an analytical tool through which to analyze their unique sociopolitical conditions. Together, these empirical and theoretical contributions bring us closer to securing sustainable livelihood futures for tourism dependent communities.

Most existing studies use ‘reterritorialization’ to describe the outward expansion of Chinese power in Southeast Asia. This paper, however, flips this familiar narrative. It examines Sino-Southeast Asian diplomacy hidden in the Chinese hinterland and embedded in the everyday. I focus on the landlocked province of Jiangxi, where the Chinese government created two enclaves for communist exiles and displaced diaspora respectively—both hailing from Southeast Asia. I argue that this domestic operation of foreign affairs helped absorb the impact of unfavourable foreign policy outcomes or drastic policy reversals. As post-Mao China re-engaged with the world, the PRC state's management of Cold War migrants enabled its reconstruction of geopolitical relations with Southeast Asia. With China's foreign policy reorientation and the progression of market reform, the state's governing strategy in the two study areas changed from one of privileged segregation to a strong push for economic self-reliance. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial individuals from these two communities represented, repackaged and retooled an inconvenient past the state tried to erase for the elevation of their individual socioeconomic statuses and the development of their respective communities. Through their creative mediation, the history of PRC's Cold War engagement with Southeast Asia is reinscribed in new time-space contexts. Ministry of Education (MOE) This article receives financial support from Tier 1 Grant number RG74/18, Ministry of Education, Singapore.

This paper addresses questions of ethnography in geographic fieldwork through research conducted on globalisation and work in Tiruppur, an industrial boomtown in South India. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Tiruppur town in western Tamilnad State became India’s centrepiece in the export of garments made of knitted cloth. This industrial boom has been organised through networks of small firms integrated through intricate subcontracting arrangements controlled by local capital of Gounders from modest agrarian and working-class origins. In effect, the whole town works like a decentralised factory for the global economy, but with local capital of peasant-worker origins at the helm. My research explores the historical geographic trajectories linking agrarian and industrial work, and the ways in which these histories are used in the present. In these uses of the past in remaking self and place, I interrogate the self-presentations of Tiruppur’s entrepreneurs, as these “self-made men” hinge their retrospective narratives of class mobility and industrial success on their propensity to “toil”. This paper explores questions of ethnographic method emerging from a political-economic context in which globalisation has worked by turning “toil” into capital.

Recent strategies to address rural poverty and food insecurity in Myanmar's Ayeyarwady Delta emphasize the scope for market-based and smallholder-led agricultural development to catalyze broader positive change for rural populations. This paper challenges the appropriateness of this development model for the Ayeyarwady Delta. Assumptions of latent growth potential among an emerging smallholder capitalist agricultural class fundamentally misinterpret how farming is embedded within the Delta's regional economy. Using a long historical perspective informed by the food regimes approach, as well as household-level data from a recently completed livelihoods survey in two townships, we reveal a contemporary situation in which medium-sized and large landholders control most agricultural production. We argue that this is a path-dependent legacy from how the Delta has been successively incorporated into the politics of food production and trade at global and national scales. These arrangements have left the Delta without a broad smallholder base, meaning that policies that prioritize smallholder-led market development will not generate the type of pro-poor outcomes required to address the Delta's pervasive rates of food insecurity and poverty. Instead, a rural development agenda for the Delta should focus on its actually existing social and economic dynamics that are a legacy of its history.

In many developing world economies in recent years, the state has been seen to encourage neoliberal economic expansion policies. This has involved both large‐scale foreign corporations and sometimes large‐scale domestic corporations. Many studies have discussed the new landscapes of economic hardship and the impacts on small businesses. The aim of this paper is to argue that the impacts on small traders are in fact more complex and varied than usually appears in the literature. The research was conducted in the industrial city of Durgapur in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal, India. First it is argued that the impact has been greatest on the ‘kirana’ owners, operating small convenience type stores with legalized trading arrangements and fixed premises. On the other hand, the street vendors (often unlicensed and having no fixed premises) seem not to be affected in terms of customer loss and indeed could be seen to be doing well against the backcloth of neoliberal expansion. In fact we argue that the growth in the number of street vendors provides as much of a threat to future livelihoods for traditional kirana owners as the growth of large corporations itself.

Slum eradication has been a concern in South Asian cities since the colonial times. Legislation and policies are being framed both out of national desires and international strategies. However, very little is being studied on how these legislation and policies come into being, specifically geography’s influence in their formulation. The article analyses parliamentary debates from India (Rajya Sabha, 1953–2014), and outlines the process of historical, political, and institutional dominance of Delhi. It shows that the slum legislation and policies in India are formulated by abstracting cases from the Delhi slums. This knowledge hegemony of Delhi is discussed within the growing consideration towards urban theory’s southern shift, which puts the Southern cities (megacities) as underdogs. The paper argues that at a regional level, these megacities exert the same hegemony that the southern theory wants to avoid. The results argue towards broadening the southern theory and ordinary city discussions.

Globally, capital investments are intensifying extraction and contestation over resources in frontier spaces, yet most discussion has focused on terrestrial frontiers. This paper shifts this focus to bring a scaled political ecology approach to examine the access dynamics of fisheries trade in the maritime frontier of Palawan province, the Philippines. We adapt the linked concepts of access and exclusion to highlight how access dynamics unfold at multiple scales. At the local scale, social relations of class and ethnicity serve as important markers of difference that inform control over access to fisheries resources. At the regional scale, we show how engagement in fisheries trade is also shaped by broader historical and geographical contexts of migration and land use change. Access dynamics unfold at multiple inter-related scales to heavily influence the differentiated social outcomes of expanded fisheries trade.

The population of Fogo Island, in Cape Verde, shows a peculiar relationship with the living territory, given that the eminence of volcanic risk is a reality they face every day. The 1951 and 1995 eruptions were particularly scarring in this insular geography, leaving in several generations of Cape Verdeans, the mark of a creation-destruction-restart cycle, as well as an attitude of symbiosis with nature. This article is intended to present and discuss results from a scientific research paper based on a study conducted on Fogo Island, in Cape Verde, in February 2016, where researchers sought to understand the local population's response to the last volcanic eruption (from November 2014 to February 2015), in a logic of deterritorialization-reterritorialization, namely in terms of community and territorial resilience. The analysis method was based on direct observation, with record of the views in a field journal, as well as the biographic narratives of all those who were affected, through questionnaires and interviews.

Decentralization of governance and natural resource management is an ongoing process in many parts of Africa and Asia. Natural resource management requires spatial land resource data for planning. However, currently the financial and human capacity for natural resource mapping, monitoring and modelling remains low in local governments. In this context, this paper explores how new opportunities provided by the increasing availability of free satellite imagery, digital elevation data and open source spatial analysis software, can be applied by local government and NGOs to conduct sophisticated natural resource mapping and modelling in ways that meet their needs and incorporates local knowledge. Reported are cases of a local government using free geospatial data and GIS software to improve evidence-based natural resource management in the developing world with a focus on raster data applications for satellite image analysis and terrain modelling. It is argued that, through removing barriers to uptake, such applications provide a means of decentralizing landscape analysis skills to improve local natural resource management. This hypothesis is supported through examples of a local government applying these tools in eastern Indonesia, and within this context barriers to wider adoption are explored.

This paper addresses the works of Henri Coudreau, a little-known French explorer of Guiana and Amazonia who was later forgotten by the 'heroic' histories of exploration because of his unruliness and nonconformist attitudes. Drawing on the literature of postcolonialism and tropicality as well as on recent studies of anti-colonialist geographies, I address for the first time Coudreau's geography from the perspective of anarchist and critical thinking. My main argument is that Coudreau's work is a further example of the complexity and heterogeneity of the European intellectual field during the imperial age. Despite having come of age intellectually among all the European racist and ethnocentric prejudices of his day, Coudreau developed a different outlook thanks to two factors, viz., his personal experience in living for years with the indigenous communities of Amazonia, and his exposure to anarchist anti-colonialist ideas through his collaboration with Elisee Reclus. Coudreau's tropical utopia of an independent Amazonia, and his endorsement of the stateless nature of local communities, ran counter to French imperial politics, occasioning Coudreau's dismissal from the French administration and his professional exile in Brazil at the time of the Franco-Brazilian border dispute (1897−1900).

Belo Monte is one of the most divisive dams in Brazilian history, becoming entangled in a thirty-year struggle between pro- and anti-dam interests over the role of the facility within a complex web of Brazilian development and the future of the Brazilian Amazon. This research explores how the proponents of Belo Monte have adopted a number of policy frames as a means of deflection, to divide the opposition and legitimize the project. It investigates this claim by analyzing speeches given within the Brazilian Câmara dos Deputados and the public speeches of high-level politicians. These sources, organized around a framework previously identified by Ahlers et al. (2014), show that the government and individual politicians have used a variety of framing devices to legitimize the hydroelectric facility. Principal methods of framing used also demonstrate how contemporary narratives (e.g. sustainability) have been employed to deflect opposition criticism and widen the scheme's perceived beneficiaries. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how the transformation represented by Belo Monte encompassed not only a process of engineering but also a re-articulation of the complex and its role in modern Brazil.

The small nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, once a poor sugar plantation island, has successfully diversified and expanded its economy since independence, by attracting foreign investment in manufacturing and modern service industries. Tourism is a major part of the ‘Mauritian Miracle’; in recent years residential tourism—attracting wealthy foreigners to take up semi-permanent residence—has become a growth industry transforming coastal areas like Tamarin. Based on in-depth interviews among 17 residents of Tamarin, this paper looks at how local people perceive the changes residential tourism is causing in the local area. It appears that while the majority is positive about economic changes like more jobs and income opportunities, and to some extent about improvements in infrastructure and services, there are growing misgivings about some of the social impacts. Notably, the increasing scarcity of land and rising house prices are making it impossible for growing numbers of local people to afford a place to live, resulting in growing squatter settlements in the area. Such growing social disparities challenge the Mauritian development model and may undermine its stability. These undesirable effects call for careful management of tourism development, incorporation of sustainability standards and attention to the position of major stakeholder groups, such as local residents.

Based on an in-depth case study of a rural community, this paper documents the contemporary state of Chinese smallholder agriculture and the changes that it has been experiencing in the context of dramatic socio-economic transition through the lens of three main economic drivers: livelihood diversification, market conditions and government interventions. Results reveal that the change in Chinese smallholder agriculture has been complex and multidimensional. All three factors exert profound influence and shape the current state of Chinese agriculture. Massive rural-urban migration has resulted in labour shortages, which in turn have led to a reduction in agricultural diversity and land use intensity and a shift from traditional labour-intensive technologies to modern capital-intensive technologies. However, because of well-developed agricultural markets, input use levels are similar across farmer categories (such as income diversification), helping to maintain productivity. Furthermore, reduced profits from farming due to increasing input prices and decreasing output prices have exerted pressure on smallholders to increasingly turn to nonfarm activities and have also triggered a thriving informal land transfer market, which was previously non-existent. Policy implications include the need to strengthen local economies, improve market conditions, invest in rural infrastructures and facilitate smallholders' mobility.

This paper explores the politics of mobility for a group of rural inhabitants attempting to diversify their livelihoods in an especially prescribed environment, namely ethnic minority street vendors living and working in upland socialist Vietnam. These Hmong, Yao and Giay individuals face a political environment where access and trade rights shift on a near-daily basis because of the impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is central to determining who gets to be mobile and how. We analyse three groups of itinerant vendors—those vending on the streets of an upland tourist town, the mobile minority wholesalers who supply them and other traders, and vendors who trek with Western tourists—to reveal the nature of this trade environment, while also highlighting the ways in which ethnic minority vendors negotiate, work around and contest vending restrictions in numerous innovative ways. We find that this focus on the micro-geographies and everyday politics of mobility is essential to understanding how rural Global South livelihoods are fashioned and diversified, in this case revealing specific relationships and negotiations regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority and livelihood strategies.

The paper measures the level of crop diversity and identifies factors influencing diversification using a panel data of 17 regions of Bangladesh covering a 19 year period (1990–2008). Results revealed the trends that agricultural areas allocated to high-yielding variety rice, spices and vegetables has increased, while areas cultivating traditional rice, minor cereals, oilseeds, pulses, jute and sugarcane has declined at variable rates across regions with significant differences. The level of crop diversity is also significantly different across regions and has decreased in 2008 from its 1990 level in most regions except Faridpur, Khulna and Sylhet. Among the determinants, an increase in the relative prices of vegetables and urea fertilizer, extension expenditure, labour stock per farm, average farm size, irrigation and a reduction in livestock per farm significantly increase crop diversity. Price policies to improve vegetable prices and investment in irrigation infrastructure and extension services are suggested to promote crop diversity in Bangladesh.

There has been much discussion recently about the future of postcolonial theory. Some suggest that it is on the wane, while others defend its continued capacity for transformative critique. This paper contributes to these debates by considering postcolonial geography's future through the prism of ‘Rising Asia’. Rising Asia presents challenges to the spatial matrices underpinning current thinking in postcolonial geography, particularly the global South/North distinction and the histories of colonialism. What is the constituency of, and the emerging collectivities around, Rising Asia? What are the tensions between past, present and future in thinking about Rising Asia? We route our response to these questions by conceptualizing postcolonial geography as a disciplinary performance that draws on its subdisciplines. The argument is developed through three conceptual hooks—field, constituency and temporality—drawn from a reading of Edward Said's works Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975) and On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2007). Ultimately we do not seek to set an agenda for postcolonial geography; instead we suggest that greater attentiveness to the indeterminacies of postcolonial theory as it passes into postcolonial geography might allow more generative responses to the questions posed by Rising Asia.

The outsourcing and offshoring of services to developing countries has created new opportunities for economic development for countries in the global South. This paper looks at the scope for agency of local institutional actors in the investment attraction of business process outsourcing companies. Drawing on empirical work from the Philippines, an analysis of the process of integrating lower-tier cities into global service production networks is presented. Specifically, the roles of local institutional actors in facilitating FDI attraction and strategically coupling local assets with the needs of multinational service corporations are discussed. Two contrasting cases, the cities of Baguio and Bacolod, show that considerable scope for intervention rests with local institutional actors. The findings have implications for policymaking and research concerned with the newest phase of outsourcing and offshoring in developing countries.

The Aeta Magbukun of Bataan in Luzon, the Philippines remain one of the least known and documented Indigenous tribes. They retain primarily subsistence hunter-gathering strategies to supply their basic needs. They also strive for recognition of their ancestral connection with, and rights to inhabit their ancestral forest domains, which is threatened by the expansion of agriculture and urban development by non-Aetas, primarily the majority Tagalog population. The Aeta continue to endure dispossession, poverty and political discrimination through decades of protracted land rights processes. This review explores the potential use of recent genetic evidence in anthropology and human geography to legitimize the Aeta's status as Indigenous people and contradict the perspective of some governments in the Asia Pacific region who question the existence of Indigenous peoples generally, often from fear of land tenure and associated political repercussions. The acquisition and use of genetic research on Indigenous populations is both socially and politically contested through fear of the potential to jeopardize sovereignty claims and lead to biologically-based discrimination. However, the full implications of the potential use of genetic research to legitimize Indigenous status, as described within this research, has yet to be thoroughly explored. By exploring both the genetic and anthropological evidence using a case study of the Indigenous Aeta, this paper provides a unique approach to building a case for Indigenous rights, occupation, use of ancestral lands, self-determination, and ultimately, recognition as Indigenous people.

This paper re-examines the effect of green revolution (GR) diffusion on factor/inputs demand in Bangladesh using an empirical model that allows for simultaneous determination of factors influencing adoption of GR technology at the current mature stage, as well as access to irrigation. Results reveal some alignments with conventional wisdom as well as few surprises. For example, while an increased demand for major inputs is expected, an increased demand for organic manure is an unexpected positive outcome. The GR adoption rate is significantly higher in villages with access to irrigation and fertile soils and, surprisingly, in infrastructurally underdeveloped villages. Together with other expected findings of GR technology uptake with higher cereal prices and irrigation use encouraged by access to credit, tenurial status and fertile soils, our findings suggest that investment in irrigation and soil conservation, as well as implementing measures to improve cereal prices and provide agricultural credit, could boost GR technology adoption.

The distinctive black-and-white houses from Singapore's colonial era that survive in enclaves as fine dwellings for the present-day elite have been recognized and documented as a type. In this paper we tell the story of their cultural formation, which is one of remarkable hybridity. Various influences were brought to bear and resolved into the black-and-white house-type, which was not invented ‘all at once’ in Singapore, but developed over the course of more than two centuries. We begin the story in India, when British settlers learnt from local Bengali practices to make serviceable dwellings for a climate that they found difficult. The overhanging roofs that shaded walls and the tall internal volumes were formalized with reference to European expectations of geometry and finish, and the bungalow was born. In British Malaya the bungalow was further hybridized with the house on stilts that was well known to the indigenous tradition. This produced the spatial configuration that is to be found also in the Singapore houses, with their extensive verandas on an upper floor level. Their distinctive colouring comes from a different tradition: the black-and-white Tudoresque style that was very popular in Britain and sometimes called ‘Old English’. This was used by the British colonizers so that they could feel more at home in surroundings that were in a far-off foreign cultural environment.

Coca is a controversial plant, existing on the boundary between legality and illegality. This study aims at providing an analytical technique for discussing the problematic of coca in Colombia. Using new theoretical propositions in human geography, a more‐than‐human approach is adopted to encounter coca holistically. The results are a narrative account of coca's social life as experienced by the researcher following its network of non‐cocaine derivatives. An analytical section invokes the Foucauldian dispositif to the drug trade and utilizes concepts of informed materials and technological zones to describe coca outside a political economy discourse. The research finds that coca's dynamic materiality complicates it as a commodity and that these conventional approaches do not fully encapsulate this complexity. By grappling with the messiness of coca's materiality, this paper reveals the multiplicity and interplay of coca's definitions, which lie at the heart of many conflicts.

This paper provides a detailed analysis of agricultural land use change in Bangladesh over a 59-year period (1948–2006) and examines how these have impacted crop diversity, productivity, food availability and the environment. The key findings of the analysis are: first, land use intensity has increased significantly over this period, mainly from the widespread adoption of a rice-based Green Revolution technology package beginning in the early 1960s; second, contrary to expectation, crop diversity too has increased; third, although land productivity has increased significantly, declines in the productivity of fertilizers and pesticides raise doubts over sustaining agricultural growth; fourth, food availability has improved, with a reversal in the dietary energy imbalance in recent years despite a high population growth rate; and finally, the production environment has suffered with widespread soil nutrient depletion experienced in many agroecological regions. The policy implication points towards crop diversification as a desired strategy for agricultural growth to improve resource economy, productivity and efficiency in farming in Bangladesh.

Formally launched on 30 January 2006, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) is, like many other regional economic initiatives, designed to create an economic space in which the uninhibited flow of goods, capital and skills across the borders of member states is anticipated to generate competitive business opportunities and external investment. Despite the intensification of such regional programmes, promoters and critics alike continue to consider CARICOM to be an intergovernmental organization dependent on the political will of member states as they negotiate the pressures of neoliberal globalization. In this paper, I argue that such a framing of regional integration in the Caribbean misses some of the tangible ways that CARICOM works beyond the sovereign intent of member states to enable the encroachment of neoliberal-style economic orders across the space of the region. I adopt a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to unhinge CARICOM from the governments of its member states. Once freed from a persistent statism it becomes possible to consider the technical competencies through which CARICOM initiatives increasingly connect and cohere with neoliberal rationalities. My goal in developing such an analytics is not to suggest CARICOM operates as a superstate but rather to broaden the sites considered relevant to understanding the encroachment of neoliberalism in the Caribbean.

This paper contributes to recent debates about whether urban policy discourses are transferable and what is at stake in their translation. It draws on discussion of Darwin (Northwest Territory, Australia), a tropical savanna location that the local government wants to promote as a ‘creative city’, without quite knowing what this might require. We discuss relevant debates on research knowledge construction, the creative city and the path-dependent character of neoliberal governmental objectives. We then turn to the geographical, demographic and cultural characteristics that make Darwin a challenging and distinct context for translation of global theories of creative city rejuvenation. As well as arguing a case for more nuanced, locationally specific, analysis of the capacity of places to embrace travelling policy discourses, we suggest ways in which creative city research can be refreshed through engaging with literatures on (post)colonial urban politics and intersections with policy initiatives other than those targeted at ‘creative industries’ per se. We systematically outline the particular challenges that tropical cities in remote locations provide to accepted wisdom about creativity-led urban planning. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Seed management has until recently been neglected in agrobiodiversity research. Gender dimensions in seed selection, processing, storage and exchange embody critical task areas in the human management of diverse crop species and varieties. This paper focuses on women’s roles in seed management in field and homegarden crops in Bangladesh and reports on the findings of a study in two villages in Tangail District. Seventy-five women were surveyed with a questionnaire and subsets interviewed in-depth; focus groups conducted for women and men provided a means of cross-checking responses. Three distinct areas of agrobiodiversity were addressed: the gendered divisions of labour among agricultural tasks; the pervasiveness of seed saving among respondents; and seed management practices and techniques. The results indicate that while men have greater authority over field activities, homegarden production is the exclusive domain of women. Seed management is seen as an extension of women’s domestic duties: women are responsible for all seed processing, storage and exchange for field as well as homegarden crops. The vast majority of seeds sown are saved on-farm by women, revealing important cultural, economic and environmental implications for agrobiodiversity conservation and local differences.

In this paper we explore the contours of a ‘method’ for postcolonial development geography, which makes it possible to imagine another ‘world-picturing’. We suggest three steps towards such a method. First, we propose that a postcolonial method involves thinking about why we are doing research in the south in the first place; how we come to and produce our questions; and how we analyze and represent our findings based on our subject positionings. Second, that we need to recognize theorization as an inherent part of method, rethink how we currently theorize and reconfigure our methods of theorization to address wider political aims. Problematizing theorization helps challenge the universalism of Eurocentric theories, thus enabling development geography to move towards more decolonized versions and visions. Finally, that this must be accompanied by firmer recognition of our multiple investments ‐ personal, institutional and geopolitical ‐ and how they frame the possibilities for change. These are some possible steps that we think can reconfigure the ‘scholarly track’ that postcolonial development geographers traverse.

This paper examines the contribution of Export Processing Zones (EPZ) to employment creation in Kenya. The results suggest that employees in non-EPZ businesses are better paid than those in the EPZ. Firms in the EPZ employ more women than the Kenyan national average, although the proportion is less than the international average amongst EPZs. Against the general fear that EPZ enterprises offer little employment, the number of employees in the EPZ enterprises are comparable to those found outside as are working hours. A weak trade union movement, inefficient and inadequate social security, lack of employment benefits, lack of opportunities for training and promotion and low pay are problems encountered by those working in an EPZ.

In this paper, we investigate the links between place and time, and the intersections between the geographical imagination and the historical mind. These issues are explored in the context of Singapore by looking at the links between place and three concepts usually associated with the temporal sense — history, nostalgia and heritage. We argue that the two imaginations can be simultaneously engaged by means of a focus on the concept of place. The making of a place is closely intertwined with individual biographies and collective histories; at the same time, place does not record history in an unproblematic way. We next argue that a sense of nostalgia is a yearning to return to a lost period and place and why memory is often best served by anchoring it in the materiality of place. This is precisely the case in the inscription of heritage into the concrete elements of specific sites as a state strategy to codify and naturalise its own version of heritage as part of the the everyday, visible world. In concluding, we reflect on the salience of place. While it lends itself to ideological uses by the powerful, a sense of place is also equally significant in the experiences and aspirations of a people.

The fact that the humanities and social sciences in developing societies generally originated in the West has raised the issue of the relevance of these arts and sciences to the needs and problems of Third World societies. This questioning of relevance has led, in turn, to the call for the indigenisation of knowledge in developing societies. While there has been a great deal of discussion on indigenisation, there has been little practice of indigenised humanities and social science. As a result, there are few examples of what indigenous knowledge constitutes from theoretical, methodological and empirical points of view. This paper is directed towards arriving at some conception of what indigenised knowledge is, the various forms that it takes, and its rationale.