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

Environmental change and governance operate across multiple, interconnected scales. In Southeast Asia, there are calls to broaden the study of transboundary environmental governance to address the range of scales, actors, and flows in analysis. In response, we propose a framework to move beyond statist framings of 'transboundary' in the region by drawing on van Schendel's proposal for flow studies on the one hand, to overcome the 'geographies of ignorance' that stem from fixed studies of nation‐states, and mobile political ecology on the other, to emphasise the role of resource users and their mobilities in environmental governance. We focus on transboundary sand and sediments in rivers, the rise in sand mining in the region, and its impacts on livelihoods and cross‐border flows. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2019 along the transboundary Salween River in the Myanmar‐Thai borderlands. This research shows that sand extraction not only impacts existing sand‐based livelihoods, like riverbank gardening, but also intersects with migration patterns. Migration here is being exacerbated by sand mining alongside processes of environmental and political‐economic change, but these intersections would be overlooked in a fixed or statist approach. We illustrate these complex changes by presenting two 'sand stories' that emerge from our research. This primary research combined with a novel conceptual framing expands our analysis of transboundary by revealing and highlighting the linkages between mobilities and transboundary resource flows. In doing so, our analysis brings people, livelihoods and mobilities to the centre of transboundary environment governance and opens scholarly and practice‐based discussions to the range of actors, scales and resource regimes involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

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

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