Albert Salamanca

This article examines the impact of informal intermediaries on heritage governance within Southeast Asia’s indigenous rice-farming communities. By conducting a comparative study of Bali and Ifugao, we analyze how local heritage leaders navigate the interplay between heritage preservation, economic development, and the challenges of modernization, particularly those arising from agricultural heritage tourism. Our findings reveal the intricate nature of these intermediation processes and highlight the evolving roles of local intermediaries within the Regulation-Intermediaries-Target (RIT) Model. We demonstrate that Bali’s kelian and pekaseh, alongside Ifugao’s tonong and mumbaki, are facilitators of agricultural practices and custodians of cultural heritage, adeptly managing the balance between modernity and tradition. Furthermore, our research demonstrates how Indigenous intermediaries adapt to shifting governance dynamics, which are shaped by both formal and informal structures, influencing resource flows and community engagement. This study contributes to the intermediation literature by revealing the limitations of conventional frameworks in addressing the complexities of informal intermediation. Our results underscore the necessity for a nuanced understanding of intermediaries, acknowledging their dynamic, ambiguous, and contested roles in heritage governance. Ultimately, we advocate for a more integrated approach that recognizes the vital role of Indigenous intermediaries in managing cultural landscapes amid contemporary challenges.

In this paper, we return to a well-worn but still very live debate: the issue of the ‘development’ impacts of migration. Drawing on fieldwork in three villages in Northeast Thailand where domestic and some international migration are commonplace, we focus on two often under-examined aspects of migration: the affects of migration, and in particular the affective labour that makes migration possible; and the effects of migration on farming and agriculture. We argue that migration has manifold, under-appreciated impacts on those who remain in the village, whose futures may be curtailed and aspirations thwarted. Non-migrants are not just ‘left behind’ in the passive sense, they may experience migration as actively constraining and limiting. There are also hidden effects of migration on farming that run counter to agrarian transition pathways promoted by many governments and multilateral agencies. We conclude by identifying three gaps in migration research that sit behind our discussion of the affects and effects of migration: the gap between production/work and reproduction/care; between migrants/the mobile and non-migrants/the immobile; and between migrant and non-migrant spaces.

The relationship between environmental sustainability and development continues to be contested. There are those who think that the primary feature of development – industrial capitalism – ‘can never be sustainable’ (Jensen and McBay 2009 quoted in Foster et al. 2011, 8). But there are also others who believe that economic development can be rendered sustainable, leading to the well-known idea of sustainable development. This idea has been the guiding principle for development and environmental governance since the early 1990s, even though its roots can be traced back to the 1972 Stockholm Declaration.

This chapter provides the introduction to the Handbook. It provides a broad overview of global development. It notes that while progress has been made on some development challenges, this progress has been uneven, and has been accompanied by the emergence of new challenges. Following this, it makes a case for the shift from international to global development, and then outlines the key contributions made by this Handbook. The effort to provide pedagogical insights is stated.

Agricultural and food systems in the Mekong Region are undergoing transformations because of increasing engagement in international trade, alongside economic growth, dietary change and urbanisation. Food systems approaches are often used to understand these kinds of transformation processes, with particular strengths in linking social, economic and environmental dimensions of food at multiple scales. We argue that while the food systems approach strives to provide a comprehensive understanding of food production, consumption and environmental drivers, it is less well equipped to shed light on the role of actors, knowledge and power in transformation processes and on the divergent impacts and outcomes of these processes for different actors. We suggest that an approach that uses food systems as heuristics but complements it with attention to actors, knowledge and power improves our understanding of transformations such as those underway in the Mekong Region. The key transformations in the region include the emergence of regional food markets and vertically integrated supply chains that control increasing share of the market, increase in contract farming particularly in the peripheries of the region, replacement of crops cultivated for human consumption with corn grown for animal feed. These transformations are increasingly marginalising small-scale farmers, while at the same time, many other farmers increasingly pursue non-agricultural livelihoods. Food consumption is also changing, with integrated supply chains controlling substantial part of the mass market. Our analysis highlights that theoretical innovations grounded in political economy, agrarian change, development studies and rural livelihoods can help to increase theoretical depth of inquiries to accommodate the increasingly global dimensions of food. As a result, we map out a future research agenda to unpack the dynamic food system interactions and to unveil the social, economic and environmental impacts of these rapid transformations. We identify policy and managerial implications coupled with sustainable pathways for change.

Farmers are ageing across Asia. This is presented as a ‘problem’ with implications for agricultural productivity, rural poverty and elderly care. Drawing on fieldwork in Thailand we interrogate this assumption. By examining farming as an activity within households that are occupationally diverse and spatially promiscuous, we argue that it is necessary to see farming not as a singular occupation but instead as part of livelihood complexes. We question the raw data used to construct the ageing farming problem and the causalities that flow from it, in rural Thailand and in smallholder farming across Asia.

The objective of this paper is to assess how climate change adaptation funds have been legitimised; that is, how they have been justified and made acceptable to different actors. To this end, it analyses the way various actors have sought to promote and challenge the legitimacy often multi-lateral international and national climate change adaptation funds in the Asia-Pacific region. The study shows that adaptation funds draw on multiple sources of legitimacy, including: ethical or justice arguments; participation and deliberation; transparency; accountability; coherence; and effectiveness. Efforts to strengthen one source of legitimacy can have an impact on other sources, with evidence of both synergies and trade-offs. International and national adaptation funds are primarily legitimised to state actors, even though funds and projects are justified in terms of assisting vulnerable groups and communities. International financing has helped legitimise adaptation as an important development and policy objective. An adaptation financing architecture that is more multi-level, if not yet polycentric, has emerged alongside new legitimacy challenges; but at the same time, providing opportunities for improving outcomes on the ground if greater attention is given to access by vulnerable groups and communities.

Tracking and explaining patterns and trajectories of social and economic change in the global South is a key challenge for geographers. Panel studies, though rare, offer a particularly rich alternative insight to more usual cross‐sectional studies. Drawing on a 25‐year longitudinal panel study of two villages in rural Thailand, this paper reveals the complexities of the processes underway, the shifting terrains of explanation, and the surprises that are easily overlooked in cross‐sectional studies, particularly when it comes to household life chances and courses. The paper makes a case for the value of such approaches and the insights they can provide.