Sango Mahanty

The case of Cambodia in many ways exemplifies the phenomenon of “green grabbing” in the Global South. Green grabbing – which involves acts of territorialisation that alienate land and appropriate resources for environmental ends – is especially evident in 2016 reforms to Cambodia’s Protected Area System. These reforms have consolidated and expanded natural areas slated for protection, so that over 40% of the country’s surface area is now zoned for conservation. This high rate of green territorialisation demands investigation, given Cambodia’s significant experiences with land grabbing and deforestation. To investigate this, we draw from empirical material on conservation projects in Cambodia, observing: the often fanciful deployment of mechanisms like REDD+, to secure carbon finance; and routine protected area management by government officials, often with the backing of international donors and non-government organisations. Finally, we reflect upon the Cambodian government’s motives for green territorialisation, arguing that it creates new frontiers for resource control and extraction, which ultimately serve the agendas of state control and elite accumulation. Abundant evidence of illegal logging and extractive practices in Cambodia’s protected areas corroborates this. Cambodia’s green grabbing phenomenon therefore entails a state-orchestrated nexus between protection and extraction, presided over by international environmental actors.

In our article, ‘Rupture: Towards a Critical, Emplaced, and Experiential View of Nature-Society Crisis’, we advocated for contextually rich and critical understandings of environmental crises and their catalytic effects. This authors’ reply responds to four commentaries whose authors raise helpful questions and insights. We first review the spatial and temporal connections between specific rupture episodes and ongoing processes of extraction and exploitation. We then discuss how the impacts of rupture disproportionately fall to those with the smallest contribution to the crisis. Third, we clarify how our contextually rich view of rupture differs from planetary analytics such as the Anthropocene. In terms of rupture's effects, we agree with comments that rupture does not simply represent a politics of hope but can strengthen authoritarian interests. Finally, we clarify what it means to ‘put rupture to work’.

This article aims to extend and deepen our understanding of how emotions figure in experiences of major nature-society disruptions or “rupture.” Cambodia's Lower Sesan 2 hydropower dam is an example of rupture, which refers to dramatic, adverse, and disruptive episodes that ripple across scale. Against a historical backdrop of land enclosures and dispossession, the dam sparked significant community and civil society resistance. This emotionally charged campaign emphasized that the dam and associated resettlement would erase the impacted communities’ deep customary relationships to the area. Although some community members ultimately refused the resettlement package and moved to customary lands near their flooded village, the majority accepted resettlement. We explore the emotional dimensions of these communities’ experiences, finding that rupture is an inherently emotional process, within layered historical processes of change and violence. The intense emotions that such processes evoke can spark action within the “open moment” (Lund, 2016) that episodes of rupture create; yet the outcomes are highly unpredictable within the asymmetrical political and economic settings that underpin nature-society rupture.

We are currently seeing a global escalation in social and environmental disruption, yet concepts like the Anthropocene do not fully capture the intensity and generative scope of this crisis. ‘Rupture’ is being used as a term for specific and intense episodes of change, such as wildfires or toxic pollution releases. This is a useful addition to our lexicon for nature-society change but needs to be more robustly theorized. Defining rupture as an intense and adverse episode of nature-society disruption that ripples across scales, we elaborate four dimensions that account for rupture's sources and uncertain effects. The first two dimensions consider how rupture emerges in space and time from: (i) synergistic spatial, material, and socio-natural changes across scales; and (ii) the accumulation of slow violence that builds towards and is exposed by punctuated shifts and crisis moments. The second two dimensions consider the outcomes of rupture, namely: (iii) heightened uncertainty, insecurity, and socio-material deprivation, which are experienced in unequal and deeply affective ways; and (iv) the scope to catalyze diverse forms of agency that play out in uncertain ways. To illustrate our discussion, we draw from our long history of research on hydropower landscapes in the Mekong region.

SOJOURN is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of social and cultural issues in Southeast Asia. It publishes empirical and theoretical research articles with a view to promoting and disseminating scholarship in and on the region. Areas of special concern include ethnicity, religion, tourism, urbanization, migration, popular culture, social and cultural change, and development. Fields most often represented in the journal are anthropology, sociology, and history.

Meat consumption and production in Asia have boomed over the last decade to meet growing regional and global demand. Asia now supplies around 40% of the global broiler or meat chicken industry. Dominant policy frameworks such as ‘One Health’ aim to manage the health risks associated with factory livestock farming, which has rightly become a major concern because of regular disease outbreaks. Yet this approach provides a limited basis for addressing broader risks and challenges associated with what we term the Asian ‘broiler complex’. This includes the intertwined networks of feed production, factory farming and meat distribution nodes through which health and environmental risks can accumulate and be amplified. By applying this broader lens, we highlight the need to better understand the industry's pressing environmental, animal welfare, social and health challenges to inform more integrated policy approaches.

Social and environmental safeguards are now commonplace in policies and procedures that apply to certain kinds of foreign investment in developing countries. Prominent amongst these is the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), which is commonly tied to policies and procedures relating to investments that have an impact on ‘indigenous peoples’. This paper treats international safeguards as a possible manifestation of what Karl Polanyi called the ‘double movement’ in the operation of a capitalist market economy. Our concern here is with the way that the FPIC principle has been applied in struggles over the alienation of land and associated natural resources claimed by indigenous peoples or customary landowners in three developing countries—Cambodia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Case studies of recent land struggles in these countries are used to illustrate the existence of a spectrum in which the application of the FPIC principle may contribute more or less to the defence of customary rights. On one hand, it may be little more than a kind of ‘performance’ that simply adds some extra value to a newly created commodity. On the other hand, it may sometimes enable local or indigenous communities and their allies in ‘civil society’ to mount an effective defence of their rights in opposition to the processes of alienation or commodification. The paper finds that all three countries have political regimes and national policy frameworks that are themselves resistant to the imposition of social and environmental safeguards by foreign investors or international financial institutions. However, they differ widely in the extent to which they make institutional space for the FPIC principle to become the site of a genuine double movement of the kind that Polanyi envisaged.

Despite recent attention to “frontier” green economies and the governance of emerging ecosystem services, the specific division of labour in these economies has been little studied. As many such initiatives are in the global South, labour’s marginality potentially contributes to the existing precariousness of those who are more often identified as “participants”. This article examines the roles and vulnerabilities of these actors: the carbon counters, species identifiers, GIS mappers, tree planters and others operating in the shadows. We draw on current understandings of labour and precarity to examine the geographical contours of an apparent and emerging “eco‐precariat”: a socio‐economically diverse group of labourers that address the volatile demands of an ever‐expanding environmental service‐based economy. We illustrate our analysis drawing on examples from a Blue Carbon project in Kenya, ecosystem services project in the Philippines, and REDD+ scheme in Cambodia. We use these examples to theorise the nature of labour in these frontier economies and put forward a framework for analysing the eco‐precariat. We highlight the need to understand the precarity and marginalisation potentially created by this green division of labour in the provision of new ecosystem products and services. This framework contributes to ongoing analyses of labour as a central part of the green economy discourse and to larger discussions in the geographies of labour literature around the future of work in the global South and beyond.