Most recent papers:

• Indigenous‐Led Adaptation to Complex Climate Risks in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.
  Eric Lede, Guy Jackson, Kamilo Bogen, Tristan Pearce.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. 4 days ago
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nPacific Island peoples have long histories of adapting to environmental changes, but recent climate change is now driving complex risks that unfold within rapidly shifting societal and environmental contexts. This study investigates how remote Indigenous communities in New Ireland, Papua New Guinea, experience and want to respond to complex climate risks. Through participatory workshops and observations with 318 participants across eight communities, a web of interacting social and environmental stressors was identified to shape risks to food security, health and well‐being and water, sanitation and hygiene. Participants drew on scientific, traditional and religious knowledge systems to interpret and manage these risks. Locally controllable, low‐cost strategies were prioritised, targeting root causes of vulnerability such as inadequate sanitation, limited access to education and social issues. The findings suggest that community‐based risk and adaptation assessments are strengthened by approaches that integrate diverse knowledge systems and address both climatic and non‐climatic drivers of risk.\n"]

  May 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70048   open full text
• ‘We need solidarity’: Reflections on Building and Troubling Solidarity in Research Ethics in Myanmar.
  Vanessa Lamb, Anne Décobert, Phyo Pyae Thida Htwe, Saw John Bright.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 21, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nCalls for solidarity by civil society are taking place alongside changes in how researchers navigate shifting research landscapes. Yet what solidarity‐based research entails in practice and how this might guide, critique, or challenge institutionalised ethics can be elusive. This is particularly the case in complex conflict and authoritarian research environments like Myanmar, which require us to question how solidarity can be practiced with civil society movements. In this paper, we draw on our experiences in research and reflect on our positions ‘in‐between’ universities and civil society movements to illustrate how solidarity can be practised and how we can navigate tensions with institutional ethics processes. Through our own reflections of building solidarity in our research in Myanmar and its borderlands, we identified the key foundations of positionality, building trust and relationships, approaching time critically, and moving beyond ‘do no harm’ in research. We argue that placing relationships at the forefront of the research process also requires moving beyond claiming solidarity by engaging in critical reflexivity and ‘troubling’ our own research practices and positionalities.\n"]

  April 21, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70045   open full text
• Adaptive Spaces and Rural Futures: Climate Change, Agrarian Dynamics, and Knowledge Politics in Southeast Asian Socioecological Transformations.
  John F. McCarthy, Jean‐Christophe Castella, Kelly Dorkenoo.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 12, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nContemporary rural change in Southeast Asia is shaped by complex, intersecting forces that defy simplistic narratives. Researchers must therefore develop new ways to grasp nuanced, non‐linear, and locally specific processes to understand how transformational shifts may occur (or not) in the region. This collection of articles explores how climate change, agrarian dynamics, and knowledge politics intersect to produce ‘adaptive spaces’, where potential transformative responses can emerge. This special issue develops a heuristic for understanding the spaces where diverse knowledges intersect, challenging traditional power dynamics in knowledge production and policymaking, and building grounded responses to climate change while nurturing climate justice in ways that shape future policy and practice.\n"]

  April 12, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70046   open full text
• Local Social Capital and Low Fertility in Seoul: A Fuzzy‐Set Analysis of Social Enterprises and ESG.
  Inseok Seo, Wonhee Chung, Youho Shin.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 09, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study examines the community‐level determinants of persistently low fertility across Seoul's districts, a pivotal case in the Asia‐Pacific demographic landscape. We advance a place‐based, community‐oriented framework by conceptualising fertility as a contextual outcome shaped by local institutional environments and collective social capital. Using Seoul's 25 districts as a bounded comparison, we analyse how social‐enterprise capacity and municipal ESG performance (Environmental–Social–Governance) intersect with socioeconomic conditions to foster higher fertility. Utilising a unique integrated dataset of national vital statistics, ESG evaluations and administrative records, we apply fuzzy‐set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The analysis reveals no single necessary condition but identifies two sufficient pathways: (1) a synergy of robust environmental/governance performance and civic volunteering, which sustains fertility despite weaker marital and employment profiles; and (2) dense social‐enterprise ecosystems coupled with strong environmental/social performance that offset governance deficits in diversity‐intensive districts. These findings demonstrate equifinality, suggesting that effective demographic interventions require differentiated, place‐based policy mixes rather than monolithic, uniform strategies.\n"]

  April 09, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70047   open full text
• Reimagining Rural Spaces: Cultural Practices and Aesthetic Design for Active Ageing in Northern Thai Community.
  Alisa Nutley.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 08, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study investigates the role of rural aesthetics and cultural practises in promoting active ageing amongst older adults in Baan Pong Nuea Village, Northern Thailand. Addressing a critical gap in the literature, it examines how the residential environment influences elderly well‐being in a rural context. A mixed‐methods approach was employed, combining quantitative data from 144 elderly residents with qualitative insights from in‐depth interviews and site surveys. Regression analyses revealed significant associations between environmental factors, such as the quality of communal spaces and natural landscapes, and both physical and mental health outcomes. Additionally, participation in cultural activities, including festivals and religious ceremonies, was found to enhance social cohesion and physical activity, both essential components of active ageing. The study further highlights the importance of elderly residents feeling valued and included within their community, facilitated by thoughtful community‐driven design. The findings underscore the need to integrate cultural and aesthetic considerations into community development strategies to improve elderly well‐being. This study offers valuable insights for policymakers and urban planners, providing evidence to promote cultural practises and enhance rural environments, ensuring elderly populations remain active, engaged, and socially connected through the design of rural spaces.\n"]

  April 08, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70042   open full text
• Governing Complex Disasters in Siquijor Island, Philippines: Super Typhoon Rai and the COVID‐19 Pandemic in the Context of Climate Change.
  Moises Norman Z. Garcia, Maria Rosario Virginia Cobar‐Garcia, Arlen A. Ancheta, Raquel C. Layco.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 04, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nComplex disasters are becoming common due to the uncertain and compounded effects of climate change. The study aimed at depicting the governance of a complex disaster caused by the combined effects of COVID‐19 pandemic and Super Typhoon Rai on Siquijor island, Philippines. The combination of these two hazards needs an exceptional kind of governance to manage risks and strengthen resilience. The Sendai Framework Priority 2 served as the theoretical basis of the study. Using a mixed‐methods convergent design, the study investigated quantitatively the six factors: perception, awareness, assistance, collectivism, political pressure, and resilience. The results revealed significant differences across the two hazards in terms of said factors. Regression analysis showed that awareness, collectivism, and political pressure are significant predictors of resilience being the dependent factor for the super typhoon. In contrast, none of the factors influenced resilience for the pandemic, suggesting the uncertain nature of the hazard. Qualitatively, using thematic analysis, the following themes emerged: Planning and preparation, Protocol and procedure, Prediction and projection, and Participation and provision, proposed as the 4 × 2Ps model for complex disaster governance. The study provided substantial insights on how complex disasters affecting similar small islands could be managed and governed in the future.\n"]

  April 04, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70043   open full text
• Critical ‘Outsider’ Reflections on Research‐Initiated Pacific Partner Engagement.
  Ross Westoby, Susanne Becken, Christopher Fleming.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 104-108, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nLearning with Pacific stakeholders requires genuine people‐to‐people engagement and understanding of differing literacies and ways of being. Co‐learning is possible when people authentically meet in spaces of mutuality, such as those characterised by shared hospitality. This perspective examines practical approaches to engaging Pacific stakeholders in a co‐developed research process reflected from an ‘outsiders’ perspective. Drawing on evidence from cross‐cultural studies, Pacific literature and peace studies, we reflect on ‘authentic’ co‐learning via a five‐day in‐person immersion. Reflexive and reflective insights elicited by the facilitators identified seven key ‘ingredients’ for developing deep cross‐cultural learning. These ‘ingredients’ are grounded in mutuality and shared learning, attempting to decolonise and dissolve power imbalances.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70011   open full text
• Toward a Talanoa Way of Knowing: Relational Transformation for Environmental Sustainability and Climate Action.
  Simon Hollis.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 109-115, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis research note advances the idea of a talanoa epistemology. Many readers will be familiar with talanoa as an Indigenous mode of communication practiced in the Pacific. Variations of talanoa have been applied in COP constellations, inter‐faith meetings, Pacific diplomacy, conflict resolution, and as a research method. However, the value of its epistemological foundations is rarely acknowledged; talanoa can also be understood as a way of knowing that holds the potential to generate transformative capacities to meet today's complex socio‐ecological challenges. Based on an ongoing climate change series of talanoa with Rt Rev. Dr. Winston Halapua, five reasons are outlined for engaging with talanoa: trans‐formation, creativity, solidarity, flourishing, and trans‐communication.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70020   open full text
• The Mobility Politics of Hong Kong's High‐Speed Rail.
  Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 136-146, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nHuman geography scholarship has revealed how powerful and marginalised actors alike may use (im)mobility to exert authority, and it has recognised the ability of infrastructure to either consolidate or undermine state power. This paper uses new evidence to demonstrate how Hong Kong's express rail link (XRL) to Mainland China was implicated in attempts by both the Chinese state and various social movements to exert control over Hong Kong's territory. Informed by a qualitative content analysis of media reportage, findings revealed themes of ‘rejuvenation’ and ‘integration’ circulated in Chinese state media in support of high‐speed rail, while themes of ‘autonomy’ and ‘protest’ circulated in international media to oppose it. Such conspicuous flagship infrastructures like Hong Kong's XRL and the West Kowloon station integrate Hong Kong more closely with Mainland China, while also providing various social movements a large target with practical and symbolic power. The XRL was simultaneously a mode of dominance and resistance for the ways it enabled competing mobilities to assemble to support or resist state objectives. As dominance, the XRL facilitated rejuvenation and integration to entrench the Chinese state's authority over Hong Kong. As resistance, it inadvertently galvanised social movements in Hong Kong who opposed closer ties to Mainland China.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70014   open full text
• Socioeconomic Adaptation Through Ethnic Business: Chinese Migrant Ethnoburb Formation in Nishi‐Kawaguchi, Japan.
  Hiroya Takamatsu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 13-25, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study investigates how Nishi‐Kawaguchi Chinatown, a Chinese ethnic enclave in suburban Tokyo, functions as a ‘socioeconomic emergency elevator’ for Chinese migrants. The enclave serves a dual purpose: offering refuge from social exclusion and facilitating upward socioeconomic mobility. This study extends the understanding of ethnoburbs beyond Western contexts by analysing this suburban ethnic formation. Based on six in‐depth interviews with Chinese residents and business owners and analysis of secondary sources such as census data and municipal reports, this study explores the formation of Nishi‐Kawaguchi Chinatown and its embedded ethnic business networks. The research revealed how Chinese migrants create economic niches and community spaces while facing institutional barriers in Japanese society. These patterns challenge classical and spatial assimilation theories and support a more nuanced understanding of immigrant adaptation in East Asian urban peripheries. By conceptualising the enclave as a ‘socioeconomic emergency elevator’, this study bridges two seemingly opposing perspectives on ethnic enclaves—as places of exclusion and as springboards for opportunity—and proposes a flexible, dynamic model of immigrant adaptation. The results offer theoretical and practical insights into urban studies, migration research and multicultural policies in diverse societies.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70016   open full text
• Circular Carescapes in South Korea: The Migration–Care–Policy Circuit Developed During Urbanisation and Globalisation.
  Junyoung Park, HaeRan Shin.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 26-37, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study examines how outsourcing household care in modern South Korea has shaped gendered migration from both rural areas and abroad. To clarify the interplay between macro‐level power and individual lives—an aspect often treated piecemeal in earlier research—it introduces the concept of circular carescapes. This notion captures the looping assemblages in which care needs, labour mobility, and governance continually re‐create one another, shaping everyday life and policy across borders. The analysis follows gendered migration for care work through two phases of Korea's recent history. During the first phase of industrialisation and urbanisation, female rural‐to‐urban migrant care workers, known as sikmo (kitchen maids), emerged, and conflicts between employers and sikmo spurred national and local governments to professionalise the job market. The second phase, beginning in the 1990s, saw the arrival of care workers from abroad—particularly of Korean Chinese (Joseonjok), whose ancestors migrated from the Korean Peninsula to China in the premodern era—enabled by visa revisions that relaxed restrictions on other foreign workers. By analysing digitised newspapers and online postings, the study reconstructs the public sentiments, policies, and migration dynamics that formed the carescapes of each period.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70017   open full text
• Public Service Inclusivity and Economic Empowerment of Migrants: Evidence From Chinese Cities.
  Lanxin Zhang, Yanping Pu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 116-135, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nUrbanisation has concentrated over half of the global population in cities. However, rural–urban migrants in developing countries often face less inclusive urban institutions, limiting their access to essential public services. This study focuses on China's recent reforms aimed at achieving equal access for migrants to childcare, education, employment, healthcare, elderly care and housing—an institutional strategy designed to enhance urban inclusivity. We develop a multidimensional composite index, employing ratio and entropy‐weight methods, to measure the degree of public service equalisation between migrants and local residents at the urban district level. Our findings indicate that greater service equalisation significantly improves migrants' economic outcomes. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect arises through the promotion of human capital development, facilitation of integration into local social networks and provision of psychological incentives for urban assimilation. These results highlight the pivotal role of reducing disparities in urban public services in unlocking migrants' economic potential and promoting inclusive, sustainable urban growth in developing countries.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70018   open full text
• Towards a Just Coastal Transition: The Mixed Success of Livelihood Diversification and ‘Bouncing Back’ Among Seaweed Farmers in Sorsogon Province, the Philippines.
  Richard V. Dumilag, Edo Andriesse.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 38-53, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe need to integrate localised settings of coastal communities within its wider marine and landscapes calls to provide contextualised assessments. Drawing upon the ambition of the Philippines to identify opportunities for enhancing coastal livelihoods, the potential of seaweed farming accruing to high productivity in many of its regions is worthy of examination. Here, we advance our knowledge on the mixed success of diversifying livelihoods based on data collected through a survey and interviews in the province of Sorsogon, the Philippines. Livelihood trajectories bounce up and down. Around 50% of the respondents indicated a decline in their farming operations and an increase in difficulty since before the Covid‐19 pandemic, with many indicating that seaweed farming presently contributes less to their household income. These trends are explained by investigating the asymmetry of environmental pressures, economic opportunities and organisational capacities. We argue that just coastal transition requires a stronger conceptual and analytical underpinning with respect to the nexus of economic and organisational capacity building, as well as local social geographies. We present policy implications related to place‐based challenges, the opportunities for sectoral policies and bouncing forward to more inclusive and sustainable livelihood trajectories.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70021   open full text
• ‘I Have Always Seen People Who're out of My League!’: Algorithmic Visibility of the Pretty, Productive and Professional Femininities on Rednote.
  Ran Xi.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 54-63, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article examines Rednote, a lifestyle and e‐commerce platform in China predominantly used by women to share personal stories, tutorials, and advice. With over 300 million monthly active users, more than 70% of whom are female, Rednote has become a vibrant space where Chinese women perform and negotiate femininities. This study focuses on a cohort of well‐educated, middle‐class women, who comprise the first generation raised under China's one‐child policy. Benefiting from concentrated educational investment, this demographic is projected to form a significant segment of the national workforce. Despite their prominence on Rednote, they have received little scholarly attention regarding how algorithms mediate gendered subjectivities. This research investigates emerging femininities represented by a selection of these micro‐bloggers and explores their encounters with Rednote's algorithms. The findings reveal how algorithms mobilise women to become prettier, more productive, consumption‐driven, and self‐disciplined professionals. The article concludes by conceptualising ‘algorithmic visibility as governmentality’ to explain how visibility, meritocracy, and community interrelate to reinforce postfeminist femininities and consumerism on Rednote.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70023   open full text
• The Impact of Customary Land Rights Conversion on Local Communities and Economic Development in Bali.
  Abdul Rahman Hamid, Siti Hafsah Zulkarnain, Martini Anwar, Suyuti Suyuti, Cheah Chan Fatt.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 64-73, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis study examines the transformation of customary land rights in Bali, Indonesia and its implications for local communities and regional economic development. As tourism and urbanisation accelerate, the conversion of customary (adat) land into formal legal titles has become a contested yet increasingly common process. While often criticised for disrupting traditional governance, land conversion is also driven by local aspirations for improved livelihoods, investment opportunities and participation in a modern economy. Using a qualitative approach based on case studies, interviews and field observations, this research analyses how Balinese customary communities engage with and are affected by land rights conversion. Findings indicate that conversion can stimulate economic growth, employment and infrastructure development, but it also weakens traditional land stewardship, causes social dislocation and exposes legal ambiguities. The study identifies persistent issues of limited community consultation, marginalisation of customary authorities and tension between adat and state legal systems. Nevertheless, opportunities exist to integrate customary land governance into Indonesia's legal framework through inclusive, culturally sensitive policies. The research contributes to debates on land tenure reform in Southeast Asia, emphasising the need to balance economic modernisation with the protection of Indigenous rights and social cohesion.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70024   open full text
• Vietnam's Resilient Diplomacy: Navigating Global Shifts in the Post‐COVID Era.
  Nguyễn Anh Cường.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 74-91, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe COVID‐19 pandemic reconfigured the global political–economic landscape and compelled states to recalibrate foreign policy. This article shows how Vietnam has repositioned itself through a calibrated hedging strategy that bridges Realism (security–power) and Liberalism (cooperation–institutions). Using the United States, China, Russia and the Republic of Korea as core dyads, we argue that post‐pandemic Vietnam simultaneously diversified growth partnerships (technology, advanced manufacturing, and health with the U.S. and ROK), preserved critical trade and supply‐chain channels with China, and sustained a bounded security–energy portfolio with Russia—while elevating its role in ASEAN‐centric and mega‐regional frameworks (ASEAN, RCEP, CPTPP). The analysis highlights emergent pillars in health diplomacy (notably vaccines) and green transition as reinforcing mechanisms. Taken together, ‘Bamboo Diplomacy’—deep roots, sturdy trunk, flexible branches—has allowed Vietnam to avoid hard alignment and single‐partner dependence, consolidate strategic autonomy, and strengthen its profile as an influential middle power in the Indo‐Pacific.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70031   open full text
• The Covid‐19 Pandemic and Pre‐Existing Migration Infrastructures: Differentiated Impacts on Nepali Migrants in Japan.
  Ramesh Sunam, Dinesh Prasad Ratala Joshi, Indu Dhungana, Tula Raj Sunuwar.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 92-103, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe COVID‐19 pandemic disproportionately affected international migrants worldwide. However, not all international migrants were uniformly impacted. While much of the literature has focused on the pandemic's effects on migrants relative to citizens, the impacts faced by different groups of migrants remain less understood. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with various groups of Nepali migrants in Japan—including students, cooks and migrentrepreneurs—we examine how these different groups of migrants were affected during the pandemic and how these effects intersected with pre‐existing migration infrastructures. We found that students and cooks faced more severe socio‐economic challenges during the pandemic compared to migrant entrepreneurs given their varied social networks, pre‐pandemic economic status and linguistic abilities. Students and cooks' economic and social vulnerabilities were further exacerbated by an unfavourable visa regime and exploitative migration infrastructure that governs transnational student and labour mobility. We also reveal instances where some migrant entrepreneurs engaged in pandemic profiteering by taking advantage of government support, pre‐existing vulnerability and exploiting their own employees.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70032   open full text
• Aspirations‐Capabilities of School‐to‐Work Transition in a Migratory Context: A Case of Thai Tertiary‐Level Migrants in Taiwan.
  Pakorn Phalapong.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, Volume 67, Issue 1, Page 2-12, April 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article explores aspirations‐capabilities of Thai migrants who transitioned from tertiary education to employment in Taiwan. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 23 Thai migrants, this study unpacks three distinct mobility trajectories under a processual perspective. First, an intentional transition reflects an aspiration rooted in accumulating economic capital for future mobility. Second, an incidental transition manifests the aspirational shift from study to romantic and affective aspirations with the hope of permanent residency. Third, a sexualized transition unveils the desires of homosexual migrants to permanently reside in Taiwan due to the pursuit of romantic relationships and belonging. This typology challenges conventional theories by conceptualising a school‐to‐work transition as multifaceted aspirations, not a mere economic pursuit.\n"]

  April 01, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70012   open full text
• Branding the Night: Entrepreneurial City Logics and the Governance of Pedestrian Streets in Hanoi, Vietnam.
  Huu Lieu Dang, Thi‐Thanh‐Hiên Pham, Julie‐Anne Boudreau.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 27, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nCities have increasingly embraced pedestrian streets and the night‐time economy in revitalising their downtown, justified by promises of livability and city branding. However, there remains a notable gap in scholarly work regarding the impacts of these programs on local life. Prior research on Vietnamese streets has concentrated on examining the production and usage of these spaces, often ignoring broader policies and their impacts on the streets. This study analyses policies, discourses and governance diapositives around pedestrianisation and the night‐time economy in Hanoi (Vietnam), with a particular emphasis on the social dimensions, drawing on the concepts of entrepreneurial city and governmentality. Our research reveals that Vietnamese authorities have employed aesthetic and spatial governmentality to reshape and to some extent distort the model of the entrepreneurial city. We term this model as a pseudo entrepreneurial city, manifesting in forced policies of exclusion, as opposed to the ‘soft policies of exclusion’ commonly observed in Global North cities. This study contributes to debates on the entrepreneurial city and governmentality by analysing how state‐led urban revitalisation initiatives are implemented not only as strategies for economic growth and city branding, but also as instruments of spatial regulation that reconfigure public space and unevenly affect urban actors, notably street vendors and other informal workers, and local residents.\n"]

  March 27, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70039   open full text
• Brokers, Collaborators and Knowledge Translators: Expanding the Role of Research Assistants in Geographic Research.
  Zali Fung.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 26, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nWhile ‘local’ research assistants (RA) often play a key role in knowledge production in fieldwork‐based disciplines like geography, their role and agency often remain silenced. This paper brings together scholarship in feminist geography and critical development studies to reposition RAs as brokers, collaborators, and knowledge translators. I mobilise Nagar's concept of hungry translations, which reimagines translation as a dynamic and negotiated political practice that underpins collaborative research. I reflect on collaborating with Mueda, a Karen environmental activist from near the fieldsites in the Salween River Basin. We conducted fieldwork with Karen communities contesting a proposed water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. Mueda forged networks and translated diverse knowledges for academic, civil society and community audiences, including during the project's contested Environmental Impact Assessment. This was undertaken as part of ‘my’ PhD research and a long‐standing civil society movement challenging unjust development in the Basin. Collaboration with Mueda enabled Salween residents and civil society actors to shape the research design, questions, outcomes and outputs. This paper illustrates how collaboration between foreign researchers and local RAs can enable research to align with and advance local goals and objectives. This is important amidst growing calls to decolonise research methodologies and enhance researcher accountability to communities and collaborators.\n"]

  March 26, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70037   open full text
• Adapting to Change: The Dynamic Crop Production Systems of Smallholder Farmers in the PNG Highlands.
  Geoff Kuehne, Joe Koima, Lonica Aris, Ismael Nae, Akia Aira, Bennie Afigini, James Aniau, John Gahekave, Naomi Paul, Steven Crimp.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 26, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nSmallholder sweet potato farmers in Papua New Guinea's Eastern Highlands Province (EHP) face challenges as they navigate social, economic, demographic, and environmental change. While they routinely adapt to weather variability and shifting markets, population growth is placing additional strain on an already finely balanced farming system. This study shows that farmers' decisions are shaped not only by agricultural considerations but also by the interconnectedness of social, economic, and biophysical factors, highlighting the risks of addressing single issues in isolation. Although agricultural intensification may be a necessary response to population pressures, it can come at a cost. Moving to a higher‐input approach can unsettle the smallholder farmer's system and risk undermining their resilience.\n"]

  March 26, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70044   open full text
• Navigating Ethical Review Processes in Conflict‐Affected, Authoritarian Contexts: A Case Study of Myanmar's Interim Ethics Review Board (IERB).
  Phyu Phyu Thin Zaw, Su Su Maw, Nyein Chan, The Spring IERB Team.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 26, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article examines the formation and operation of Myanmar's Interim Ethics Review Board (IERB), which was established in November 2023 by displaced academics involved in the Civil Disobedience Movement against the 2021 military coup. Operating within a highly repressive, conflict‐ridden environment, the IERB exemplifies a locally‐led and context‐specific model for ethical oversight, which was designed to address challenges created by a context of extreme authoritarianism and political instability. Using qualitative case study methods and autoethnography, the article analyses how IERB members navigate security threats, political persecution and ethical dilemmas. In so doing, the analysis identifies four key trade‐offs—anonymity versus transparency, legitimacy versus independence, efficiency versus volunteerism and scientific rigour versus flexible and humanised approaches—that shape ethical decision‐making in this context of authoritarianism and conflict, and that are not typically acknowledged in literature on institutionalised ethics mechanisms. The article then describes how, to navigate these trade‐offs, the IERB has developed an innovative approach grounded in ‘scientific resistance’ and based on key foundations of trust‐based, localised and humanised research ethics. This model emphasises principles of anonymity, independence, volunteerism and flexible and human‐centred practises; and it acknowledges that trade‐offs can be necessary to uphold ethical integrity amidst repression and conflict.\n"]

  March 26, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70033   open full text
• The Mobile Core: Perpetuating Tourism Leakage Through the Socioecological Fix in South Korea.
  Souyeon Nam.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 26, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nBy adopting the socioecological fix concept, this study aims to examine the spatial dynamics of tourism leakage. An ethnographic examination of an ecotourism project on Jeju Island, South Korea was conducted for 18 months from 2011 to 2013. Findings indicate that the simultaneous spatial reconfiguration of tourist capital and discursive production of nature resulted in perpetuating class inequalities. Particularly, this study identified a peculiar mode of capitalist production: the ‘moving core’ in tourism leakage. Overall, the study advocates for multi‐scalar, spatial and longitudinal approaches in examining the complicated social relationships embedded in nature‐based tourism leakage. For tourism projects to ensure effectiveness in improving the livelihoods of the marginalised, close attention must be paid to not only how the tourism facilities are established but also how nature is ‘spatially’ constructed in discursive and material ways such that the tourism benefits are ultimately channelled to the intended parties.\n"]

  March 26, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70041   open full text
• Duterte's International Criminal Court Arrest and the Moral Economy of Reciprocity in the Philippines.
  Fernan Talamayan, John Lee Candelaria.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 10, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThe arrest of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte under an International Criminal Court warrant and his subsequent detention appear to have amplified his popular appeal among Filipino publics. This article unpacks Duterte's enduring popularity by analysing how Filipino cultural values reinforce populist and nationalist narratives, particularly during moments of political crisis. We focus on how utang na loob (debt of gratitude) has been mobilised to defend Duterte and critique the Marcos administration. Our findings suggest that Duterte's supposed policy legacy and his performative political will forged a social contract many Filipinos view as having delivered tangible benefits. Within the Filipino moral economy of reciprocity, such gains engender expectations of loyalty. The Philippine example illustrates how morally charged populist and nationalist discourses can frame political allegiances that resist scrutiny and international accountability.\n"]

  March 10, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70038   open full text
• Reimagining Research Ethics Through Local Knowledge and Leadership: The Community Ethics Advisory Board on the Thailand–Burma Border.
  Naw May Lyar Soe, Saw Than Lwin, Nway Nway Oo, Phyo Pyae Thida Htwe.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 04, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article examines the Community Ethics Advisory Board (CEAB) on the Thailand–Burma border as a locally led ethics advisory mechanism that complements formal and institutionalised ethics systems within and beyond the region. CEAB was created to enable community members to provide guidance on research proposals and activities in their areas, and in response to longstanding concerns about extractive and externally driven research practices that often marginalised local knowledge and leadership. Drawing on internal documentation and reflections of its members, the article analyses CEAB's successes and challenges in ensuring ethical research within a context shaped by conflict, authoritarianism and structural violence. It demonstrates that CEAB grounds research ethics in local knowledge and realities; reframes ‘do no harm’ in ways that consider structural drivers of harm and that emphasise community benefits; and enhances community rights and leadership in research ethics and practices. Yet CEAB members face significant challenges in translating their vision into practice, including lack of resources, lack of enforcement capacity and lack of recognition. These challenges, alongside CEAB's achievements, reveal ongoing struggles over whose knowledge and leadership ‘count’ in research processes. Greater recognition of community knowledge and leadership is in turn essential for more ethical and equitable research.\n"]

  March 04, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70036   open full text
• A Comparative Approach to New Climate Stories: Indigenous Climate Knowledge From the Yunnan Forests and the Tibetan Plateau in China.
  Junhan Hu, Xiyao Fu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. March 02, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis research takes a comparative approach to theorise Indigenous climate knowledge and reimagine global understandings of climate change. It explores the possibilities of joining different Indigenous practices to make a united critique of dominant climate discourses. Our ethnographic study weaves together two geographically and culturally distinct cases—Ganjia and Nyanpo Yutse herders in Tibetan high‐altitude grasslands, and Akha and Dai farmers in Yunnan subtropical mountains. The ethnographic comparison theorises Indigenous climate knowledge from three dimensions (ontology, epistemology and ethics), each addressing an existing major critique of contemporary climate discourse: First, historically mobile livelihoods (seasonal rotation and swidden agriculture) and cultural acceptance of uncertainty make climate a daily change versus an unprecedented crisis faced by all humanity (ontology). Second, embodied and multisensory knowledge of nonhumans (livestock sheep and edible plants) formed in long‐term coevolution provides changing signs of climate versus the positivist and reductionist science of climate itself (epistemology). Third, recurring grassroots practices (snow monitoring and seed saving) and renewed reciprocal relations with nonhumans create agency and hope versus the imaginaries of unavoidable future apocalypse (ethics). Treating climate as an evolving cultural idea, our systemic comparison provides critical reflection on contemporary climate culture by telling new Indigenous stories, stories about how humans make multispecies and meaningful home in climatic uncertainties.\n"]

  March 02, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70035   open full text
• Exploring the Social Lives of Older Long‐Term Hong Kong Immigrants in Australia: Insights From Casinos and Churches.
  Lucille Lok Sun Ngan, Anita Kit Wa Chan.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 06, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nWhile formal social services are crucial for fostering social connections and enhancing well‐being, older long‐term Chinese immigrants often underutilise them. Moreover, the social lives of such immigrants in alternative social settings remain underexplored. This paper examines the social lives of Hong Kong immigrants aged 60 and older in casinos and churches in Australia, where most have lived for over 30 years with at least one child abroad or interstate. Findings from in‐depth interviews revealed that the informants often experienced loneliness owing to significant later‐life transitions, for example, widowhood or children migrating. Notably, much of their social engagement occurred outside ethno‐specific community organisations. Their participation in public social spaces like casinos and churches highlights the importance of these alternative settings as vital social hubs that can mitigate loneliness, challenging the emphasis on kinship and formal services in extant studies. Moreover, despite long‐term settlement, these older immigrants primarily engaged with the Cantonese‐speaking Hong Kong community, which remained central to their social networks. This study broadens our understanding of the social spaces crucial for enhancing older immigrants' well‐being and underscores the importance of considering subethnic and temporal dimensions in addressing their social needs.\n"]

  February 06, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70034   open full text
• Transformation of the Agrarian Landscape and Hope in the Central Kalimantan Peatlands.
  Anu Lounela.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. January 02, 2026
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nIn Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, agrarian state programs and corporate strategies seek to transform indigenous Ngaju Dayak into sedentary farmers. Focusing on the notion of transformation, the paper traces whether and how rural people can engage in struggles against structural injustices. It explores how indigenous Ngaju Dayak people aim to achieve a good life and how hope takes shape in the current context of agrarian change. The article argues that agrarian justice in Indonesia is a complex issue, and many forms of resistance are not openly expressed due to cross‐cutting networks of power, including patron–client relations, unless powerful people engage in resistance too. Examining cases of agrarian reform and food security policies, the paper analyses the entanglements of agrarian change and climate change. It shows that transformative change towards agrarian justice is still far away due to the hierarchical structures and connections of the patron–client relationships that inform relationships between the state, corporations, and rural people.\n"]

  January 02, 2026   doi: 10.1111/apv.70028   open full text
• Volunteering While Researching Conflict and Violence: Reflections on Listening, Solidarity, and Decoloniality in Myanmar's Borderlands.
  Shona Loong.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 25, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nScholars working on conflict and violence often engage with local organisations, yet the methodological and ethical implications of volunteering‐while‐researching are rarely discussed in writing. This article contributes to debates on decolonizing research by conceptualising volunteering‐while‐researching as a practice that—while imbued with tensions—can create incomplete, ambivalent, but nonetheless meaningful openings for researchers to incorporate ethical and decolonial practices into conflict research. Drawing on two volunteering stints with Karen community‐based organisations in the Thai‐Myanmar borderland, this article makes two key contributions. First, volunteering offered me opportunities for everyday listening, making day‐to‐day life replete with encounters that unsettled colonial frames for understanding conflict and violence, including those that shaped my own assumptions. Second, volunteering allowed me to enact solidarity—not by leading or defining it, but by allowing me to support the ways in which community‐based organisations were already building solidarity among people with shared experiences of state violence and war. I distinguish between solidarity with and solidarity between to conceptualise this approach. Overall, while volunteering did not free me from the colonial and neo‐colonial entanglements, it sharpened my awareness of them and allowed me to cultivate new relationalities through which I could enact research characterised by solidarity and care.\n"]

  December 25, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70030   open full text
• Learning How to See: Challenging the Extractive View Through Shared Visual Practices at the Thai–Myanmar Border.
  Pietro Lo Casto.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 23, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nAs an artist working with photography, I am aware of the power of images, especially when used to perpetuate extractive violence on local ecologies by aestheticizing destruction or normalising it, thus rendering entangled lifeways more legible and manageable for systems of exploitation. Situated along the Salween River, where it forms the border of Thailand, my research asks: how might artistic practises not only reflect but also challenge and offer alternatives to such visual rhetoric? In response, I have come to recognise the limitations of images in representing the intricate and layered relationships between the people living in the Salween borderlands and their environment. In this paper I outline a personal journey towards a more ethical visual practise. Over 3 years of fieldwork—grounded in building meaningful relationships with both place and people—I developed an artistic methodology that resists visual strategies that flatten or generalise. Instead, it embraces collaboration and a generative notion of site. Central to this approach is a series of traditionally dyed and woven textile works, created in partnership with an Indigenous artist, that explore the weaver's relationship to the flora, fauna, and geological features of the river. The paper offers new insights into how visual artists can confront the legacy of images in perpetuating power imbalances in Southeast Asia by adopting shared, rather than singular, forms of artistic expression to make local knowledge visible.\n"]

  December 23, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70029   open full text
• Envisioning Climate Politics From Below: Rural Indonesia in the Shadow of Climate Change.
  Rini Astuti, Michaela Haug, John F. McCarthy, Gerben Nooteboom, Darmanto Darmanto, Pujo Semedi, Mia Siscawati.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 15, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nClimate Change is political ‘all the way down’. Yet, the nature of the ‘everyday politics’ emerging from below as climate change impacts rural societies remains underexamined. How do increasing climate variability and climate policies shape agrarian politics and rural futures? How, in turn, do agrarian politics, practices and aspirations for specific rural futures influence the perception of climate change and the implementation of climate policies on the ground? This article examined how rural actors, facing increasingly unstable meteorological conditions under climate change, advance their livelihood aspirations across several rural contexts in Indonesia. We found that largely unacknowledged ontological pluralism and future‐making processes mediate rural people's experiences and responses to climate change and become decisive factors in shaping everyday politics and agrarian‐ecological change over the long run across rural Indonesia. Building on ethnographic research, this study argued that notions of everyday politics must be expanded to account for the ontological complexities and anticipatory strategies employed by rural communities in the context of climate change, thereby revealing a more nuanced understanding of how local practices and institutions navigate and shape their futures.\n"]

  December 15, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70025   open full text
• The Definition and Control of Land and Populations in the Crisis Century: Counterinsurgency, Disaster Risk Reduction, and Territorialisation in the Philippines.
  Kenneth Cardenas.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 15, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis article attempts to make historical and institutional sense of the Philippine state's violent responses to unfolding ecological crises. It reframes the relationship between a ‘weak’ state and a ‘high‐risk’ territory as part of an ongoing process of territorialisation, that is, ways of knowing and controlling territories and populations. By tracing organisational forms and lineages, personnel and practices, it finds that the Philippine state had come to rely on its security forces to organising and staff its new disaster risk management bureaucracies. This is partly an outcome of the military developing the central state's most credible capability in disaster response, through civil‐military operations; a reoccurrence of patterns that span previous rounds of state formation, as impelled by managing risks over a tenuously consolidated territory; and an entrenchment of a pathway of elite formation of rewarding retired officers with experience in combat command with posts in the civilian bureaucracy, itself a way of managing the risk of unrest among security forces. Routines, subjectivities and ideologies of counterinsurgency came to be transposed to reducing and managing disaster risk, alongside the deprecation of other possible forms of expertise.\n"]

  December 15, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70027   open full text
• The Politics of Acknowledgements: Strategy, Sincerity and Scholarly Gratitude in Burma/Myanmar Studies.
  Rosalie Metro.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. November 04, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nAcknowledgements are an important way to publicly address intellectual debts and to express appreciation for the relationality of scholarship, which too often is seen as an individual product. In Burma/Myanmar studies, acknowledgements often follow particular conventions because of the authoritarian context and the colonial roots of the discipline. While acknowledgements can be seen idealistically as ‘paratexts’ that build scholarly community, or cynically as performative documents that seek to establish credibility, I argue that they often contain a combination of what Buddhists would call parahita (benefit for others) and atahita (benefit for self)—and that we can move toward the former by honestly examining the latter. This paper explores the ethics of acknowledging and asking permission to acknowledge collaborators who are situated inside, outside, and on the borders of the country and of academia, within a system of economic and political inequality stemming from coloniality and authoritarianism in Burma/Myanmar. I offer an unscientific typology of ‘moves’ that authors use to acknowledge others they perceive as more powerful, less powerful, or equally powerful. I also lay out recommendations for ethical practice in acknowledgements, which might mitigate inequalities and inspire research as mutual aid.\n"]

  November 04, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70022   open full text
• Harbour of Confluence: Macao Trade Paintings and East–West Exchange.
  Cristina Osswald, Bo Wen, Lingzi Pan, Xieqihua Liu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 22, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis paper explores Macao Trade Paintings as a new artistic category within global art history, a new topic under Macaology. It firstly outlines the historical background and research lineage of the emergence of China Trade Paintings. Secondly, it defines its concept and proposes three research hypotheses. Evidence for the research hypotheses is collected through micro and macro case studies. That is, the differences of Macao Trade Paintings regarding China Trade Paintings are analysed through artistic aspects, content, historical, economic, and sociological perspectives, thereby emphasising the uniqueness of Macao Trade Paintings. Comparisons of the paintings reveal how Macao Trade Paintings map out Macao's pictorial image and purpose of creation; and through the analysis of the representative painters and their works, content, style, and taste, it is elaborated that Macao Trade Paintings are a unique artistic and cultural product of the exchange between Chinese and Western cultures, and therefore should not be categorised as China Trade Paintings. These transcultural painted artworks reflect a unique phase of a ‘glocalization’ process.\n"]

  October 22, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70019   open full text
• From Loss to Transformation? Towards Pluralistic and Politicised Agrarian‐Climate Futures.
  Joel Persson, Kelly Dorkenoo, Monin Nong, Sodavy Nhong, Van Hai Thi Nguyen.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 16, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nUnderstanding how actors perceive and anticipate future states of the world is gaining traction in climate change governance scholarship and related calls for sustainability transformations. However, smallholder farmers, indigenous groups, and local communities, who are expected to bear disproportionate burdens of loss and damage from climate change, remain underrepresented in future‐oriented research. In this paper, we outline key barriers to integrating bottom‐up perspectives on visions of the future in sustainability transformation research and develop a framework to support transdisciplinary research to more productively engage with diverse perspectives on agrarian‐climate futures. The framework is derived from (a) literature on climate change, loss and damage, anticipatory climate governance, and critical agrarian studies; (b) interviews, focus group discussions, and a stakeholder workshop in Ratanakiri province, Cambodia; and (c) an analysis of Cambodian climate change policies. It consists of five dimensions: (i) desirability; (ii) viability; (iii) agency; (iv) heuristics; and (v) responsibility. The framework aims to support researchers in better accounting for complex rural‐agrarian realities and reorienting future framingsfield from loss towards nurturing a “brighter” side of transformation. Integrating diverse rural‐agrarian perspectives on climate futures is critical for fostering and co‐creating more just and locally contingent pathways.\n"]

  October 16, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70015   open full text
• Agroecology and Transformative Adaptation to Climate Change.
  Jean‐Christophe Castella.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. September 18, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nThis paper examines transformative adaptation to climate change through the EFICAS Project (Eco‐Friendly Intensification and Climate‐resilient Agricultural Systems) implemented across 12 upland communities in northern Laos from 2014 to 2020. Using participatory methodologies, including theory of change processes, village‐level land use planning and community‐based monitoring, the project aimed to support community‐led adaptation to climate change through agroecological transformation. The analysis reveals three fundamental paradoxes challenging conventional adaptation approaches. First, the ‘paradox of transformation from below’ shows how external facilitation, however participatory, creates dependencies that undermine autonomous local agency. Second, ‘adaptation pathways as emergent social constructs’ demonstrates that communities navigate change through ongoing social negotiation rather than linear planning processes. Third, ‘transformative adaptation as institutional redesign’ reveals that technical practice adoption alone is insufficient—meaningful transformation requires renegotiating power structures and social relations governing resource management. Key findings include the critical importance of institutional change over technical solutions, the social construction of adaptation pathways through collective sense‐making, and the persistence of innovations that emerged through community initiative vs. those dependent on external support. The study suggests that effective climate adaptation support should focus on creating enabling conditions for local experimentation rather than prescribing specific interventions, emphasising long‐term relationship building and strengthening communities' capacity for continuous adaptation within complex social‐ecological systems.\n"]

  September 18, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.70013   open full text
• Macau as Method: Recombinant Urbanism in Post‐Socialist China.
  Tim Simpson.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 14, 2025
  ["Asia Pacific Viewpoint, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nIn ‘Asia as Method’, Chen Kuan‐Hsing argues for the value of an indigenous inter‐Asian approach to analysing the effects of European imperialism on the countries and citizens of Asia. This article mobilises both Chen's inter‐Asian referencing strategy and the city‐state of Macau to explore Macau's role in China's engagements with global capitalism. Macau was a European enclave in the Middle Kingdom, the site of China's initial encounter with capitalism during the Ming era, and the country's longest‐enduring foreign territory. Adopting a geological or new materialist approach to Chinese urbanism, the article tracks the reiteration of the socio‐spatial Macau model in China's 19th century treaty port concessions, 20th century special economic zones, Greater Bay Area megacity, and the new demonstration zone of Hengqin Island, which is adjacent to Macau. The use of ‘Macau as method’ demonstrates the city's function in a recombinant spatial logic of development in which antecedent geo‐spatial forms from China's earlier encounters with capitalism are recovered and reused. As such, Macau serves as an indigenous model for China's contemporary post‐socialist development.\n"]

  February 14, 2025   doi: 10.1111/apv.12442   open full text
• New Zealand going global: The emerging relationships economy.
  Eric Pawson, Harvey C. Perkins.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 19, 2017
  The paper examines the value‐generating strategies used in some of New Zealand's primary activities in a rapidly changing trading context in which the countries of East Asia increasingly figure. These strategies range from scaling up volume, with a consequent conspicuous impact on rural landscapes, to innovative value‐enhancing relationships linking producers, processors and consumers in processes which value landscapes for the contribution they make to provenance stories. Our argument is that higher‐value strategies are necessarily more intensely collaborative and involve a pursuit of engaged relationships, especially between onshore producers and manufacturers and consumers at a distance. We term this collaborative form of strategising as ‘the relationships economy’. We illustrate our argument using two case studies, dairying and merino. While there are great differences in scale between them, and dairying focuses significantly on volume‐generating capacity, there are players in dairying who are adopting higher‐value relationships‐based approaches similar to those developed in the merino industry. The common thread connecting the case studies is that of intentional enactment, which echoes earlier periods in New Zealand's trading history when considerable work was undertaken by industry participants to create new markets for primary products.

  October 19, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12170   open full text
• Explaining urban governance in the midst of political transformation: The city of Macao.
  Li Sheng, Penny Yim King Wan.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. September 15, 2017
  This paper takes a close look at the urban governance and political culture of Macao, the world largest casino city. Macao has experienced spectacular economic growth since gaming liberalisation in 2002 and China's Free Individual Travel scheme launched in 2003. However, the booming gaming sector has crowded out other sectors of Macao. It has not only made the city's economy mono‐structured and consequently extremely vulnerable to external shocks and fluctuations but also induced serious social divisions and political controversies within the local community. By tracing the root cause of the ongoing dilemma and crisis in the mode of governance, the dynamic relationships between formal and informal institutions, consensus politics and the social group culture are intensively discussed in a historical context. In fact, the sustainable development of the former Portuguese colony has largely been hindered by its residents' passive attitudes toward political communication, non‐transparent urban governance, the absence of a middle class and the dominance of pro‐establishment social groups.

  September 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12167   open full text
• Benefits and risks for Melanesian households from commercialising Canarium indicum.
  J. Carter, E.F. Smith.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. September 08, 2017
  This research note discusses the benefits and risks for Melanesian households arising from attempts to increasingly commercialise Canarium indicum, an edible tree nut indigenous to Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Qualitative data were generated during workshops and interviews with Canarium industry stakeholders about the impacts associated with a series of interventions designed to encourage further commercialisation of Canarium. The findings are organised according to three dimensions that elucidate the social implications of industry development for local communities: (i) income and growth; (ii) equity; and (iii) voice and choice. Broader distribution of benefits within and between countries, as well as among supply chain actors, requires a stronger policy response at regional (Melanesia) and national scales, equitable gender representation to avoid reinforcing existing inequalities, and delegation of decision‐making power to the appropriate level to facilitate effective community participation and their links with other stakeholders. Thus, it remains to be seen whether Canarium‐related benefits arising from its commercialisation can be sufficiently reliable compared with either other sources of income (e.g. existing employment opportunities for those located near urban areas) or utilising the resource for subsistence purposes.

  September 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12169   open full text
• Migration management and mobility pathways for Filipino migrants to New Zealand.
  Wardlow Friesen.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. September 08, 2017
  There has been an increasing focus on migration management by academics and policy makers, especially in relation to temporary and transitional forms of mobility. This paper considers the acceleration of Filipino migration to New Zealand in recent years, partly driven by changing policies allowing migrants to transition from student and work visas to permanent residence. It outlines the history of Filipino migration to New Zealand, the roles of the Philippines and New Zealand governments and intermediaries in migration management and the nature of student, temporary work and permanent residence migration. The transitional pathways used by Filipino migrants are analysed in relation to the influence of skills and educational characteristics in creating opportunities for some and vulnerability for others.

  September 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12168   open full text
• Farmers' perceptions of and responses to environmental change in southwest coastal Bangladesh.
  Md Jahangir Kabir, Rob Cramb, Mohammad Alauddin, Christian Roth, Steven Crimp.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 28, 2017
  Coastal Bangladesh is highly vulnerable to climate change and salinisation; hence, farm‐level adaptation is critically important. Farmers' perceptions of and responses to environmental change were investigated in two villages in Khulna District. Perceived environmental trends included increases in temperature, extreme weather events, soil toxicity, erratic rainfall and scarcity of water for irrigation. Perceptions of climate trends were consistent with measured trends in Khulna. On‐farm adaptation strategies included adjusting planting dates, excavating trenches in rice‐fields, adopting new crops, salinity‐reducing technologies, livestock‐rearing and home‐yard cropping. Non‐farm adaptation strategies included wage employment, short‐term migration and self‐employment. Adaptation was facilitated by income‐earning opportunities, training, and credit, and impeded by lack of access to water, markets, capital, and extension services. Farmers suggested policy support for dissemination of stress‐tolerant cultivars, access to irrigation, and price stabilisation or crop insurance to assist adaptation. While the study shows an impressive degree of awareness and adaptation, external support is needed to increase adaptive capacity.

  August 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12165   open full text
• Governing climate change in Hong Kong: Prospects for market mechanisms in the context of emissions trading in China.
  Alex Y. Lo, Maria Francesch‐Huidobro.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 23, 2017
  Hong Kong continues to struggle over which environmental governance approach is in its best interest while fulfilling its environmental obligations. With regard to climate change, Hong Kong's approach is characterised by a passive form of governance that is highly dependent on China's national policy directions. This is reflected, for example, in Hong Kong having not set its own mitigation targets. Market mechanisms have received little attention in developing a city‐wide climate change strategy. A transformative impulse, China's national emissions trading scheme, may provide momentum to a market‐based approach. However, the necessary conditions for such a market mechanism to be successfully implemented in China remain relatively undeveloped. This raises question about early participation by Hong Kong. Direct benefits are likely to be limited, due to Hong Kong's economic structure and weak demand for emissions reduction. Besides, there are regulatory barriers to enforcing emissions targets and/or recognising emissions allowances and credits from China. We therefore argue that nationwide emissions trading may, at this time, present more challenges than opportunities for Hong Kong to leverage its efforts on climate change mitigation. An alternative is to promote voluntary emissions trading that will require active involvement and leadership by businesses.

  August 23, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12166   open full text
• Bonding, bridging and linking social networks: A qualitative study of the emergency management of Cyclone Pam, Vanuatu.
  Astrid Vachette, David King, Alison Cottrell.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 13, 2017
  Cyclone Pam (March 2015) was an unprecedented event in Vanuatu forcing the simultaneous involvement of national and long‐term international actors, well integrated into the national disaster governance system, as well as numerous short‐term international actors, unfamiliar with the geopolitical and cultural disaster context of the country. Cooperation between these three groups of actors evolved through the three scales of bonding, bridging and linking social networking. This paper questions the different drivers and challenges within and across these scales of social networks affecting cooperation among the three different groups of actors during an emergency. Using a mixed methodology based on social network analysis, this paper utilises the case study of Cyclone Pam in Vanuatu to study the strengths and weaknesses of the disaster governance system in place based on bonding and bridging social capital to conduct disaster risk management and to prepare the integration of linking social capital when external support is needed. This paper contributes to the identification of key considerations in the development of resilience‐building strategies: the interactions of diverse actors to address disaster management needs and the reciprocal impacts of these interactions within and across the three different scales of social networks.

  August 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12150   open full text
• Regional reproductive quests: Cross‐border reproductive travel among infertile Indonesian couples.
  Linda Bennett, Mulyoto Pangestu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 01, 2017
  Infertility is a significant reproductive health problem effecting at least 15% of heterosexual Indonesian couples during their reproductive lives. This article explores the preferences and decision‐making processes of 15 married infertile Indonesian couples, of high socioeconomic status, regarding intra‐regional reproductive travel in Southeast Asia. We consider the reproductive destinations of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, revealing their distinct attractions for different couples. We identify a variety of push and pull factors influencing the choice to leave Indonesia to pursue assisted reproduction technologies (ART), as well as the factors shaping the choice of travel destination. One intractable push factor motivating couples to leave Indonesia is the strict regulation of ART, which designates gamete donation and surrogacy as illegal. The paramount concern of our informants was to maximise their chances of reproductive success, and perceptions of higher success rates for conception via ART elsewhere in Asia informed their travel choices. Emotional and psychological concerns were also crucial in determining travel destinations and included a strong desire for privacy; the desire for emotional support whilst attempting conception via ART; the desire for emotional intimacy with one's partner; and the wish for religious compatibility with fertility providers and treatment protocols.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12160   open full text
• Navigating the ‘grey areas’: Australian medical travellers in China's stem cell bionetwork.
  Jane Brophy.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 01, 2017
  The last decade has seen a marked rise in the phenomenon of the so‐called stem cell tourism, whereby people travel from their home countries to access unproven stem cell treatments abroad. Despite increasing attempts on an international level from regulators, policy‐makers and scientists to deter people from undergoing potentially harmful treatments, patient demand persists. Over the last decade, China has emerged as a leading destination for people seeking such treatments, where providers of treatments operate in varying ‘shades of grey’. While Chinese government intervention has had some impact on the availability of treatments within China, top‐down regulatory measures face limitations considering strong patient demand and the geographical flexibility demonstrated by both patients and providers. This article draws on interviews with Australian patients who have travelled to China for stem cell treatments, or considered it and decided against it, as well as representatives of stem cell clinics in China and other stakeholders. It argues that Australian patients and/or carers articulate a culturally situated moral imperative to act in the face of limited conventional biomedical options and that commercial clinics capitalise on this to attract new patients and sustain the demand – either ‘underground’ in China, or by moving to other jurisdictions.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12162   open full text
• Medical travel facilitators, private hospitals and international medical travel in assemblage.
  Heng Leng Chee, Andrea Whittaker, Heong Hong Por.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 01, 2017
  International medical travel may be viewed as an ‘assemblage’ of various components such as infrastructure, hospitals, finance, transport, technologies, staff, facilitators and patients. In this paper, we focus on the articulations of medical travel facilitators (MTFs) and private hospitals in producing international medical travel in the context of the neoliberalising processes that had led to the rise of corporate hospital care in Malaysia in the 1990s. We draw from three hospital case studies for a comparative perspective. We highlight the shifting, unstable and contingent relations and interactions of the MTFs, as one component of the assemblage of international medical travel, with hospitals and medical travellers. We identify the practices of MTFs in providing patients with information and advice about hospitals and doctors as efforts to shape patients' choices in the selection of health‐care providers and in decision‐making. The assemblage approach allows us to see how the MTFs emerge and stabilise as a collective identity for individuals and companies performing particular functions through their multifarious articulations with other components in various sites of assemblage.

  August 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12161   open full text
• Crossing boundaries of state and religious power: Reproductive mobilities in Singapore.
  Danicar Mariano, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Yi'En Cheng.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 13, 2017
  Singapore has one of the tightest regulations over assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Asia, a consequence of Singapore's strong state, the priority it gives to reproduction, and the numerous religious groups in the country and their direct and indirect influence on the Bioethics Advisory Committee, which recommends ART regulations for the country. Together, these key actors give shape to the ‘local moral worlds’, which undergird ART governance in the country. Drawing on in‐depth interviews and data from online forums, we illustrate Singaporean fertility seekers' attempts to juggle myriad and sometimes confusing obligations to the state, society and religion in making reproductive choices. We then explore the limits and possibilities for fertility seekers to circumvent the restrictive rules and ‘moral safety valves’ set in place in their home country simply by stepping out to another jurisdiction across national borders. The paper goes on to show how the Internet communities serve as a bridgespace, propelling fertility mobilities by enabling Singaporeans to see creative possibilities in patchwork regulations. At the edges of state and religious power, fertility‐seeking subjects take advantage of liminal spaces, grey areas, or permissive regimes to gain several degrees of freedom to practise adaptive fertility strategies that may be ‘unofficial’ but ‘licit’ or ‘socially acceptable’.

  July 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12163   open full text
• Archipelagic genes: Medical travel as a creative response to limitations and remoteness in the Maldives.
  Eva‐Maria Knoll.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 29, 2017
  Medical travel has become a self‐evident and intrinsic part of the medical landscape in the Republic of Maldives. This article raises the question of how exactly this has emerged as part of today's reality. The analysis describes the unfolding of a pronounced Maldivian medical travel culture by focusing on a particularly pressing health issue. The population of the Maldives has to face the world's highest prevalence of beta‐thalassaemia, a genetic disorder affecting the body's ability to create red blood cells. The country's 300:1 sea to land ratio, however, with its small population of 340 000 scattered over 200 islands is a challenging context for the curative and preventive measures in thalassaemia governance. The article follows the trail of thalassaemia‐related intra‐archipelagic and extra‐archipelagic medical travel of patients and clients requesting a blood transfusion, iron monitoring, bone marrow transplantation and prenatal diagnostic services. It discusses medical travel organised as a biosocial group activity, financed by insurance and religious bodies while interacting with the migration of health professionals.

  June 29, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12157   open full text
• Local expert experiences and perceptions of environmentally induced migration from Bangladesh to India.
  Robert Stojanov, Ingrid Boas, Ilan Kelman, Barbora Duží.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 18, 2017
  This study investigates local expert perceptions of the role of environmental factors, especially in terms of contemporary climate change, in population movements from Bangladesh to India. The aim is to delve into locally held understandings of the phenomenon and to gain a better understanding of these migration processes, which are actively intertwined with local experiences. Both Indian and Bangladeshi experts were interviewed using semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews in order to explore insights from locally held perceptions and understandings of contextual factors. In total, 10 Bangladeshi and 15 Indian experts were interviewed, covering different disciplines, sectors, regions and job types, together providing a more complete and grounded picture of views of environmentally induced migration in Bangladesh and India. The results show that climate change is perceived by local experts as one of the key factors influencing migration in Bangladesh, both internally and externally. The interviewees, however, placed environmentally induced migration in a broader context of labour and economic migration. In particular, migration for environmental reasons in Bangladesh was evident long before the emergence of climate change as an issue. According to the interviewed experts, this does not preclude increased environmentally induced migration within and from Bangladesh in the future, but its analyses ought to be placed in historical and economical contexts.

  June 18, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12156   open full text
• Spaces of connectivity: The formation of medical travel destinations in Delhi National Capital Region (India).
  Heidi Kaspar, Sunita Reddy.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 15, 2017
  Existing research on the formation of Asian medical travel destinations has highlighted a variety of activities that attract and accommodate patients from abroad. This paper contributes to the literature by drawing insights from an Indian case study, a major transnational health‐care hub in Asia that has gained little scholarly attention thus far. Using connectivity as an analytical lens, we understand medical travel destinations as a contingent product of relating, connecting and assembling. We study how connectivity is embodied and how it unfolds in care encounters at corporate hospitals in the capital of New Delhi and surrounding urban areas. The following entities are the most effectual in the networks that constitute medical travel destinations in the National Capital Region: (i) circulating narrations of personal experiences; (ii) language interpreters; and (iii) commission fees. We further elaborate on how these connectors work to link foreign patients with Indian hospitals and how they affect itineraries as well as patients and other involved actors. Finally, we suggest that the approach deployed provides a suitable framework for future research aimed at gaining a better understanding of the wider impacts of medical travel by following these connections and examining their workings at places both close and distant.

  June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12159   open full text
• Trading faces: The ‘Korean Look’ and medical nationalism in South Korean cosmetic surgery tourism.
  Ruth Holliday, Olive Cheung, Ji Hyun Cho, David Bell.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 15, 2017
  This paper addresses the growing phenomenon of cosmetic surgery tourism through a focus on the development of this industry in South Korea. Unlike many discussions of this topic, the paper decentres dominant narratives based on west‐goes‐east or north‐goes‐south journeys. Instead, we look at regional flows by exploring the experiences of Chinese patients travelling to South Korea in search of facial cosmetic surgery – procedures often referred to as the ‘Korean Look’ and associated with exported Korean popular culture. We focus on the contested understandings of the motives for and outcomes of this surgery between Korean surgeons and Chinese patients, documenting one example of the cultural investments and (mis)understandings that can impact on the experiences of medical tourists as they travel across national borders in search of treatment. We situate the development of cosmetic surgery tourism in Korea in the context of a discourse we call ‘medical nationalism’, showing how surgeons in particular reproduce this discourse in terms of pride in their contribution to the economic and reputational success of South Korea on a world stage. However, we demonstrate finally that, as a privatised, feminised and trivialised form of medicine, cosmetic surgery will always fail to deliver in this respect.

  June 15, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12154   open full text
• Cross‐border patient movement from the Lao PDR and the interplay between social networks and economic and cultural capital: A qualitative study.
  Jo Durham.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 09, 2017
  Healthcare is most often examined within the confines of nation‐states. Such an analysis, however, is not necessarily indicative of reality, with people often travelling across borders for healthcare. This paper explores cross‐border travel for medical care by patients in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The paper shows that while travelling across borders for medical care is not new, how, why and who travels across borders have changed in tandem with changes in the political and socio‐economic landscape. The paper is based on a review of the literature and qualitative interviews with patients who had crossed the border for planned healthcare (N = 43), Laotian medical officials working in public institutions (N = 5) and international health advisors (N = 6). Patients came from different districts, a range of socio‐economic backgrounds, had crossed borders for planned healthcare in the last two years and, based on key informant subjective assessments, were information‐rich respondents. The study reveals how Lao cross‐border patients creatively use the cultural and social resources at their disposal to obtain the healthcare they desire. In particular, it draws attention to the interplay between social, economic and cultural capital, and habitus in navigating access to transnational healthcare.

  June 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12155   open full text
• Showcasing the sovereignty of non‐self‐governing islands: New Caledonia.
  Gerard Prinsen, Yves Lafoy, Julien Migozzi.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. June 09, 2017
  Since 1983, no non‐self‐governing island connected to a (neo‐) colonial European or American metropole has acquired full Westphalian sovereignty and these islands continue to operate within constitutional frameworks that connect them to these metropoles. Large majorities in referendums on several of these islands have rejected full sovereignty. This paper opens with a review of the essential elements of the concept of sovereignty in a historical and global context, before studying how sovereignty is unfolding in new forms in non‐self‐governing islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. As a case study, an analysis is presented of how pro‐France (loyaliste) and pro‐independence (indépendantiste) parties in New Caledonia are negotiating sovereignty with France. Evidence is given of how these New Caledonian parties are creatively using classic Westphalian signifiers of sovereignty normally reserved for sovereign states such as flags, diplomatic representations and international treaties, while still negotiating New Caledonia's sovereignty with France. This suggests that in contrast to Westphalian sovereignty, a unique ‘Islandian’ concept of sovereignty is emerging. Islands that are not sovereign in a Westphalian sense can creatively disassemble and reassemble signifiers of Westphalian sovereignty to strengthen their continuous negotiations with their metropoles and their neighbours.

  June 09, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12151   open full text
• Regional circuits of international medical travel: Prescriptions of trust, cultural affinity and history.
  Andrea Whittaker, Chee Heng Leng, Por Heong Hong.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. May 10, 2017
  Intra‐regional medical travel by patients from Indonesia to Penang in Malaysia is embedded in and facilitated by regional circuits. Although such movement is fuelled by dissatisfaction with the health‐care services offered in Indonesia, we argue that these contemporary movements for health care are also a continuation of existing exchanges for trade, education and cultural ties that have long existed. In the first part of the paper, we consider the historical interconnections between the locations of Medan and Aceh in Indonesia and Penang in Malaysia. Based upon fieldwork and interviews with 70 intra‐regional patients travelling to Penang for treatment, we describe how these interconnections are now manifested in travel for medical care. We argue that the temporary exit from the Indonesian health system to pursue care in hospitals in Penang by some Chinese Indonesians and Acehnese follows patterns and logics based on social histories of discrimination and conflict as well as geographical convenience. This highlights the need to contextualise such travel not just as geographic movements across space but also through the depth of time and local histories.

  May 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12158   open full text
• FIJI Water, water everywhere: Global brands and democratic and social injustice.
  Catherine Jones, Warwick E. Murray, John Overton.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 22, 2017
  Over recent decades, the demand for bottled water has grown exponentially at the global scale. In the marketing of such products, discourses of purity and paradise have often been invoked. Marketed as a ‘Taste of Paradise’, FIJI Water has gained enormous international success as an ostensibly clean and green product. Celebrity endorsements – reaching as high as US President Barack Obama – have abounded, driven in part by the belief that the corporation is both environmentally and socially responsible. This paper describes and analyses the rise of FIJI water and critically assesses the sources and impacts of its economic success. It goes on to explore its local social and environmental impacts in the context of a country that has been subject to waves of democratic crises where the fate of the polity has been influenced by FIJI Water's actions. FIJI Water has come to assume the role of development trustee in the villages most affected by the growth in exports. The democratic crises in Fiji has given FIJI Water profound developmental influence, and this has brought both costs and benefits at the local socio‐environmental scale.

  February 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12144   open full text
• Escaping Zaria's fire? The volcano resettlement problem of Manam Island, Papua New Guinea.
  John Connell, Nancy Lutkehaus.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 20, 2017
  Most resettlement in the Pacific, whether for political, economic or environmental reasons, has been in some respects unsuccessful, often resulting in land disputes, social conflicts, marginalisation, impoverishment and return migration. Resettlement after volcanic eruption poses particular problems because of necessary immediacy, temporal uncertainty over the duration of the displacement and the wish of most of those displaced to return, when possible. The eruption of the Manam Island volcano in 2004–2005 displaced over 9000 people to the nearby mainland. Successful resettlement, one of the largest necessitated in the Pacific region, has proved difficult, resulting in land disputes, violence, disease and inertia, as a consequence of 10 years of government inability to achieve a permanent resettlement plan or enact a plan. Despite formal opposition, and intermittent volcanicity, many Manams have chosen to return to the island. The Manam Islanders' experience provides a warning about the complex challenges inherent in population resettlement in only subtly different cultural, geographical and political contexts.

  February 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12148   open full text
• Performing ‘Chinese‐ness’ in Singkawang: Diasporic moorings, festivals and tourism.
  Chin Ee Ong, Meghann Ormond, Dian Sulianti.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 16, 2017
  Through an examination of two festivals – Qing Ming and Cap Go Meh – in the town of Singkawang in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan), we show how Singkawang‐bound Chinese Indonesian tourists and their Singkawang‐based relatives produce a diasporic heritage network through ‘moorings’ generated by both transnational and internal migration. Instead of returning to a singular ‘homeland’ in distant China, these tourists return to Chinese‐majority Singkawang as a result of their personal genealogical roots and of their broader cultural allegiance with a kind of Chinese‐ness that Singkawang has come to represent within a post‐Suharto Indonesia. Through these two festivals, we demonstrate how personal heritage practices like ‘roots tourism’ and visiting friends and relatives are intimately bound up with identity and developmental politics at local, national and international scales. In so doing, we identify a range of ways in which migratory and tourism flows by Chinese Indonesian internal migrants shape relations to their ancestral hometowns and cultural ‘homelands’ in Indonesia within the context of membership to and participation in a broader transnational diaspora.

  February 16, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12149   open full text
• Intra‐household constraints on educational attainment in rural households in Papua New Guinea.
  Sean Ryan, Gina Koczberski, George Nicolas Curry, Emmanuel Germis.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 08, 2017
  This paper examines intra‐household and socio‐cultural factors leading to differential outcomes in educational attainment by gender and birth order amongst smallholder oil palm households in Papua New Guinea. Not all children share equitably in the household resources allocated to education: females have lower average education levels than males, and high birth order children have higher education attainment than lower birth order siblings, indicating preferential parental investment in sons and early born children. The findings demonstrate that despite households having regular access to relatively high incomes from oil palm and residing in close proximity to schools, primary school net enrolment rates remain significantly lower than those for East Asia and the Pacific region, and the millennium development goal of universal primary education has not been met. This finding is likely to be the result of a combination of intra‐household factors including gender power imbalances, low parental education levels, the agency of youth in educational decision‐making and the weakening attraction of education as a means of improving income‐earning potential.

  February 08, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12143   open full text
• Culture and the commodification of water in Samoa.
  Cluny Macpherson, La'avasa Macpherson.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. February 07, 2017
  While ‘solutions’ to challenges of water supply in the Pacific may seem obvious to hydrologists, engineers and planners, their implementation may not be straightforward. Water is embedded in cultural, religious and political contexts, and what seems obvious to planners may seem neither obvious, nor acceptable, to citizens. However, these contexts change continuously, and opportunities arise for changes in narratives around ownership, supply and management of water. Citizens' beliefs about the state's ‘rights’ will vary with societal context, and will shape the ways in which ownership and management of water is worked out in specific locations. This paper outlines thinking and discourses around ownership and management of fresh water in Samoa, and the constraints which culture has imposed on water supply over time. Water discourses have shifted from questions about ownership of specific sources to general discussions about conservation and management of natural resources. This shift has resulted, in part, from the ways in which government has managed the process and, in part, from growing public awareness of water within the larger environmental context. The paper focuses on Samoan material, but some of the generic issues have wider significance in the Pacific because similar variables combine in similar ways.

  February 07, 2017   doi: 10.1111/apv.12139   open full text
• Beyond ‘voting with your chopsticks’: Community organising for safe food in China.
  Theresa Schumilas, Steffanie Scott.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 27, 2016
  This paper describes the recent emergence of alternative food networks in China in the context of widespread food quality concerns. Drawing on interviews and public blog posts, we illustrate how participants in these networks are moving beyond instrumental market relations and developing the collective agency necessary to participate in shaping China's food system. We argue that the initiators and participants in these alternative food networks are not only individual shoppers who ‘vote with their chopsticks’, but are also nascent activists deploying grassroots community organising strategies. We reveal how these networks are using inclusive and reflexive processes to build diverse networks, how they are using internet communications to extend their reach, voice dissent and engage in nascent ‘bottom up’ policy formation, and how they are building influential connections and actively, but unofficially, expanding linkages to broader emancipatory spaces of global and social justice movements.

  December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12127   open full text
• Food localism and resistance: a revival of agriculture and cross‐border relations in Hong Kong.
  Yuk Wah Chan.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 27, 2016
  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.

  December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12130   open full text
• ‘Right’ food, ‘Responsible’ citizens: State‐promoted food education and a food dilemma in Japan.
  Maria Yotova.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 27, 2016
  With increasing food contamination incidences and rising concerns about food safety and the future of Japanese culinary traditions, shokuiku (food education) has become a central motif of the Japan government's food polices in recent years. Trying to navigate consumer choices amidst the increasingly globalised culinary scene and the food fear in the aftermath of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Basic Law on Food Education has interwoven discourses on health, the ‘goodness’ of local food, and the political ideologies of being responsible and patriotic citizens in support of the local economies of Japan. Through an empirical study of the school lunch system, this paper examines how food education policies have become an effective apparatus to instil state ideologies and promote national economic interests. Supposedly, shokuiku aims at promoting food knowledge, quality local foods and the health of the Japanese people, yet, against the backdrop of widespread radiation contamination fears, the rigid policies in food education have posed challenges to the state and generated a ‘food dilemma’ to be faced by many Japanese parents.

  December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12135   open full text
• Return migrants, mini‐tours and rural regeneration: A study of local food movement in Taiwan.
  Eric Siu‐kei Cheng.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 27, 2016
  Since the turn of the century, food safety has been one of the most significant social issues in Taiwan. In face of a series of alarming food‐poisoning scares, which pushed many Taiwanese to search for good safe food, the Taiwanese authorities have initiated a variety of strategies to handle food production issues. At county level, government sponsored projects, such as rural regeneration projects, have coincided with a wave of return migration, in which young city dwellers have returned to rural towns in order to engage in sustainable food production. There is also a popularising trend of ‘mini‐tours’, a leisurely activity that sees urban tourists visiting rural regions in search of ‘authentic’ traditions, such as those around food. This confluence of food safety concerns, official rural regeneration schemes, civil movements for sustainable food production, local tourism and emerging discourses on authentic food and food localism has fashioned an interesting food scene in Taiwan. This paper will examine the impacts of these joint forces. It will also illustrate how local food producers have struggled to construct a new food producer–consumer relationship that also contributes to the sustainable development of Taiwan.

  December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12128   open full text
• The spatio‐temporal change of China's net floating population at county scale from 2000 to 2010.
  Luyin Qiao, Yurui Li, Yansui Liu, Ren Yang.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. December 27, 2016
  China's total floating population exceeded 245 million at the end of 2013 and is the largest mobile population in the world. This paper explores the spatial distribution pattern and change characteristics of the net floating population at county scale from 2000 to 2010 using census data. The results show the following: (1) the net floating population increased by 120 million over 10 years, and the mobility of the population had enhanced in this period; (2) the floating population migrated to the three economic zones and provincial capital cities, while the traditional agricultural regions with dense populations experienced continuous outflow of population (which altered spatial agglomeration patterns); (3) eastern China has a high level of natural environment suitability and was a major destination area, but more pressures were placed on the carrying capacity of big cities; and (4) western China, with a relatively weak carrying capacity for resources and environment, was a net outflow region in 2010 – although five provinces had small‐scale net inflow because of western‐style development strategies. This study is offered as a contribution to understanding the features of China's floating population and will be useful for those shaping policies that guide population migration.

  December 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12132   open full text
• I, River?: New materialism, riparian non‐human agency and the scale of democratic reform.
  James L. Smith.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. November 09, 2016
  This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non‐human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconceptualisation of rivers as democratic entities but that local socio‐historical conditions must also be taken into the account. In order to make its case, the article not only surveys the context for considering rivers as non‐human persons in a juridical context but also discusses the new material context that assists modern democracies in the renegotiation of the demos that forms the body politic of democracy – often in the face of neoliberal exploitation and a legacy of extremes in instrumentalism. The article argues that the incorporation of water in the democratic project of enfranchisement is an essential exercise born of many Western beliefs and ideals but articulated uniquely at a regional and national level.

  November 09, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12140   open full text
• Enforcement encourages participation in resource management: explaining a fisheries management paradox in Hawaii.
  Lauren M. Ballou, Nathan Albritton, Leah S. Horowitz.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 24, 2016
  This paper uses a case study of fisheries co‐management in Hawaii to explore barriers to community participation in resource management and the reasons for these impediments. Our study suggests that while fishers may disobey regulations to maximise personal gain, they may also understand the necessity for regulations and desire more stringent enforcement. This seeming paradox reflects the tension between a recognised need to conserve resources through restricting harvests and competitive pressure among individual fishers. When fishers observe insufficient enforcement on the part of government agencies, this may fuel an already present sense of disrespect for and distrust of the government, inhibiting community participation in co‐management efforts. This study suggests that rather than attempting to directly encourage community members to participate in co‐management efforts, managers should instead focus on enhancing enforcement to alleviate communities' frustration and disrespect. Thus, enhanced enforcement efforts may boost participation in management activities and lead to a more sustainably managed resource.

  October 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12133   open full text
• Contentious space and scale politics: Planning for intercity railway in China's mega‐city regions.
  Jiang Xu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 18, 2016
  Over the past three decades, we have seen a flourishing of scholarship which explores the emerging political spaces and variegated scales of governance in China. This research draws on political economic tradition to argue that the way in which cities and regions are governed is indeed infused with socio‐political struggles which are proliferating at a range of spatial scales. Such theoretical interpretation is illuminating, but it has been subject to increasing criticism from the poststructuralist approach that views scale as an epistemological construct. This paper uses the Pearl River Delta Intercity Railway System (PRD‐ICRS) as a case study to challenge the onesidedness of both the political economy tradition and the poststructuralist approach in reading scale. It employs the “scale politics” thesis to argue that scale is more than a material existence (or institutionalised structure) that represents a particular arrangement of political power, being subject to perpetual transformation through regulatory projects and strategies. It is also a “representation trope” deployed in political discourses to acquire persuasive power to frame and legitimise these projects and strategies. Scale is thus both material and discursive. Understanding the two moments of scale enables a fuller dissection of political transformation.

  October 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12142   open full text
• ‘The weather is like the game we play’: Coping and adaptation strategies for extreme weather events among ethnic minority groups in upland northern Vietnam.
  Sarah Delisle, Sarah Turner.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 11, 2016
  The Vietnamese government, along with country‐based non‐government organisations, are well aware of the vulnerability of Vietnam's coastal and low‐lying areas to extreme weather events. Yet scant attention has been paid to extreme weather hazards affecting Vietnam's northern mountainous regions and the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers residing there. Building on conceptual tools from vulnerability, food security and sustainable livelihoods literatures, we examine the impacts of extreme weather, namely drought and severe cold spells, in Vietnam's northern uplands. We explore the degree to which these events impact the livelihood portfolios and food security of ethnic minority farmers, and examine the coping strategies households initiate, based on their ecological knowledge as well as recent market integration initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with ethnic minority Hmong and Yao semi‐subsistence households undertaken yearly from 2012 to 2014, we demonstrate that financial capital – now more central to households' livelihoods than ever before due to state‐sponsored agricultural intensification – is an important means for farmers to cope with extreme weather events. Yet concurrently, longstanding culturally rooted social capital, networks and ties remain critical. Nonetheless, short‐ and long‐term adaptation is not widespread, leading us to investigate possible explanations.

  October 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12131   open full text
• The politics of water democracy: insights from grassroot struggles in the Ecuadorian Highlands.
  Jaime Hoogesteger.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 11, 2016
  In the past two decades spaces for user participation have been opened within water governance structures at many scales. In this contribution, based on a case study of the Provincial Water Users Federation Interjuntas‐Chimborazo in the Ecuadorian Highlands, I explore how and why formal participation of water users in itself is problematic in terms of democracy. The case shows that for organised peasant water users to work on more democratic water governance, the creation of upscaled federations, alliances, networks and sometimes street protests is crucial to open up spaces in which their interests are represented. This suggests that democracy is not merely about participation, but more importantly, it is about the politics of how democracy is made through conflicts, protests, negotiations and the creation of strategic alliances that challenge the structures and processes through which decisions are taken.

  October 11, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12141   open full text
• REDD+ on hold: Lessons from an emerging institutional setup in Laos.
  Thoumthone Vongvisouk, Guillaume Lestrelin, Jean‐Christophe Castella, Ole Mertz, Rikke Brandt Broegaard, Sithong Thongmanivong.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. October 06, 2016
  The prospects of receiving funding for REDD+ have set many developing countries on a pathway of policy reforms to integrate REDD+ in national legislation. Progress has been slow partly due to the lengthy international negotiations on REDD+ but also because the policy reforms have not been backed by sufficient commitment to make REDD+ implementation feasible. To contribute to a better understanding of why policy and institutional reforms have not been successful in taking REDD+ implementation further, we analyse the institutional landscape of the forestry and environmental sectors in Laos as a case in point. We interviewed stakeholders from national to village levels and found that REDD+ has been effectively on hold in Laos. This is because of recent institutional transformations, rapid staff turnover and limited implementation capacity of government agencies at the national and sub‐national levels all of which have led to a heavy reliance on international support and external consultants. The result is that Laos may not be ready to benefit from the international agreement on REDD+. The situation in Laos provides a compelling example of how difficult REDD+ implementation has proven to be in countries where institution building is still in process.

  October 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12134   open full text
• Moral economies and markets: ‘Insider’ cassava trading in Kon Tum, Vietnam.
  Phuc To, Sango Mahanty, Wolfram Dressler.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  Vietnam's uplands have been increasingly integrated into commodity production for global markets. This paper focuses on the role of the cassava trader in connecting upland villagers as cassava producers to an emerging global cassava market. In Vietnam's Central Highlands, ethnic minority villagers engaging in a mixed economy of subsistence and cash crop production still practice communal resource use and reciprocal labour arrangements – customs associated with the (contested) notion of ‘moral economy’. In this context, traders have strategically traversed the insider–outsider divide, enlisting trust and reciprocity to extend the patron–client relationship between traders and villagers. In the absence of state support for upland communities, these traders have embedded themselves within village social relations through the provision of multiple goods and services, including loans. Villagers turn to these traders during times of hardship through degrees of mutual dependence in often unequal trade relations. The ‘benevolence’ of the traders, however, is an explicit strategy to legitimise their economic benefits. The relationship is deepened because traders fill a vacuum in state services by providing technical support to farmers cultivating cassava. Beyond benefiting themselves, in their status as community ‘insiders’, traders promote market penetration into the uplands with associated social and environmental implications.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12119   open full text
• Anatomy of a boom: Cassava as a ‘gateway’ crop in Cambodia's north eastern borderland.
  Sango Mahanty, Sarah Milne.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  This paper examines how a boom in industrial cassava served as a ‘gateway’ to intensify capitalist relations in Cambodia's north eastern borderland. Situated on Cambodia's border with Vietnam, Mondulkiri province has experienced a rapid increase in cassava production and trade since 2006, with transformative consequences for the region's forests and farmers. Using field data from 2012 to 2014, we explore how the boom ignited and intensified over time, through a conjuncture of conditions. Alongside strong market demand for cassava, these included resource abundance (soil fertility, timber, land, labour), connectivity to markets and cross border networks, and facilitative governance conditions. Over time, the boom strengthened capitalist relations, particularly through farmer debt and the revalorisation and accumulation of land. However, unlike booms of tree crops elsewhere, we argue that it is the very impermanence of cassava that is formative here, because the crop's short‐term nature and low overheads facilitate practices like land laundering and land mortgaging. Like the ‘gateway drugs’ that were believed to place users on a path to addiction and risk, this paper shows that gateway crops such as cassava may similarly place farmers on a trajectory of more intense competition and reduced choice in their engagements with capitalist modes of production.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12122   open full text
• Sparking development or consuming the countryside? Lao charcoal commodity networks in the Mekong Region.
  Keith Barney.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  One of the unexpected outcomes of increased regional integration in southern Laos has been a boom in household production and roadside sale of wood charcoal. This paper develops an ethnographically informed analysis of charcoal as a socially embedded market, providing insights into the sociopolitical relations of access, legal and extra‐legal regulations, and the distribution of rents that characterise this trade. Contrary to some assumptions about charcoal as a necessarily exploitative commodity, this paper points to some of the advantageous income smoothing opportunities that charcoal presents for many rural Lao households and detail the complex ways in which charcoal production can relate to forest sustainability and degradation. The paper elaborates a perspective of entrepreneurial Lao charcoal communities, energetically utilising locally available natural resources, for direct cash income. Charcoal production networks also connect everyday household livelihoods in Laos to large‐scale extractive industry, in ways that have been arguably underemphasised previously. At the same time, the charcoal trade highlights the structural limits to notions of smallholder agency and local participation in commodified market relations, within broader political‐economic contexts decidedly shaped through uneven development, and accumulation through dispossession.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12123   open full text
• Of migrants and middlemen: Cultivating access and challenging exclusion along the Vietnam–Cambodia border.
  Timothy Gorman, Alice Beban.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  In a possible sign of a new trend in Southeast Asia, economic pressures are driving smallholder shrimp farmers from Vietnam's Mekong Delta across the Cambodian border in search of new land. Building from ethnographic research with Vietnamese shrimp farmers in Kampot province, Cambodia, this paper explores the structures, mechanisms and relations that facilitate and impede the ability of Vietnamese migrants to gain and maintain access to land in Cambodia. The Vietnamese migrants in our study bring capital and farming skills, but their ambiguous legal status and their lack of social networks and experience with the terms of access in Cambodia render them vulnerable to exclusion and dependent on a local broker to mediate their interactions with landowners and authorities. We recount the migrants' attempts to overcome the uncertainty of their mediated access by bypassing the broker and cultivating direct social ties with Khmer villagers, border authorities and the landowners themselves. This study generates new insights into the dynamics of cross‐border livelihoods in mainland Southeast Asia and more broadly illuminates the central importance of migrant–broker relationships and migrant agency in seeking to overcome dependency on brokers by forging new social relations in border areas.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12120   open full text
• Illegal but licit: Migrant mobility and the negotiation of legality in the northeast Thai–Lao borderlands.
  Soimart Rungmanee.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  Based on research in a border village in Northeast Thailand and two villages in Laos, this paper discusses how formal regulations on cross‐border migration are negotiated, such that the practice becomes socially acceptable amongst receiving communities. This paper focuses on the border‐crossing experiences of Lao migrants to argue that regulations governing the Thai–Lao borders have been circumvented in response to labour demands in the Thai borderlands and mutual interest between local state officials and borderlanders. It is illegal for undocumented migrants to cross the Mekong to work in the farms along the Northeast Thai–Lao borderlands, but the practice has become socially acceptable. This licit status helps Lao migrants to navigate local state authorities, who are also involved in local social relations.The importance of local social relations is emphasised by differences in cross border‐migration between jobs in agriculture and jobs in service industries. In urban settings, migrants do not participate in local social relations to the same extent. Consequently, they are viewed as illicit, as well as illegal. While acknowledging the ongoing legal constraints on migrants and their movements, this paper seeks to provide an understanding of how state authority in the border regions is mediated by enduring social relations that create a legitimate space for informal and mutually beneficial actions.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12124   open full text
• Timor‐Leste's demographic challenges for environment, peace and nation building.
  Merve Hosgelen, Udoy Saikia.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  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.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12117   open full text
• Obtaining non‐farm wage employment in rural Vietnam.
  Jürgen Brünjes, Javier Revilla Diez.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  This paper analyses how rural households engage in different segments of non‐farm wage labour markets using panel data from three Vietnamese provinces that also include perceived reasons for obtaining employment. We show that it is important to appreciate the heterogeneous nature of rural non‐farm wage employment from a livelihood perspective. Different jobs vary in terms of seasonality, earning potential, social insurances, location and entrance requirements. Most notably, public service jobs are most favourable from a livelihood perspective. Regarding factors influencing participation, education has a positive effect on engagement in public and private service jobs, a negative effect on participation in construction jobs and no significant effect on employment in industry jobs. Further, family contacts are crucial in the process of finding non‐farm employment in all sectors. The disaggregated approach allows a better conceptualisation and can lead to better targeted policy recommendations.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12116   open full text
• Beyond prices: The cultural economy of water in the Cordillera highlands of Northern Luzon, Philippines.
  Corazon L. Abansi, Maria Consuelo C. Doble, Jessica K. Cariño, Agnes C. Rola.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  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.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12126   open full text
• Tonkin's uplands at the turn of the 20th century: Colonial military enclosure and local livelihood effects.
  Jean Michaud, Sarah Turner.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. July 27, 2016
  In colonial Southeast Asia, the process of enclosure aimed to integrate communities living in the borderlands, along with their lands and resources, into the state project. In 1891, the newly established French colonial administration in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) decided the upland region bordering China should be physically and administratively enclosed to achieve these aims. The governor general ordered the French military to administer these borderlands and to complete two surveys of local ‘tribes’ in 1897–1898 and 1903–1904 to make upland populations and their livelihoods more legible and, the administration hoped, more controllable. By examining details of these surveys, we not only obtain proof of this enclosure project but we also gain rare insight into and a snapshot of upland border livelihoods at the turn of the 20th century. The surveys reveal details regarding local cross‐border trade strategies, marketplace manoeuvres, the means by which the colonial government enforced a common currency and, despite such attempts, the enduring nature of barter. We probe how local populations reacted to the state's processes of legibility, and in particular, how upland residents adapted their trade livelihoods to the new realities of being included within the colonial state and, progressively, within the national economy.

  July 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12121   open full text
• Last days in the Carteret Islands? Climate change, livelihoods and migration on coral atolls.
  John Connell.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  It is widely assumed that the impacts of climate change on atolls will render them uninhabitable. The Carteret Islands, an iconic Pacific atoll, is experiencing physical changes, documented in the media, the outcome of multiple factors, alongside critical economic livelihood problems. Its population has sought to resettle on nearby Bougainville Island, but land has not become available. The search for migration opportunities parallels trends on coral atolls elsewhere where survival strategies have involved regional and international ties, with cultures of migration, focused on more distant international destinations. Carteret Islanders have not been able to mobilise similar relationships. For many atolls and atoll states, migration has increasingly become a livelihood strategy, irrespective of climate change. That is likely to become even more true in the future, but the outcome will be dependent on policies and practices in metropolitan destination states.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12118   open full text
• Diaoyu Dao, Diaoyutai or Senkaku? Creative solutions to a festering dispute in the East China Sea from an ‘Island Studies’ perspective.
  Godfrey Baldacchino.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  This paper draws on extensive island examples with a view to offer ‘creative’ solutions to the ongoing dispute over the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai/ Senkaku Islands between China (and Taiwan) and Japan in the East China Sea. In spite of the rhetoric and apparent intractability of island conflicts, there are various examples from the past (and the present) that suggest how island disputes may be decided, and in ‘win–win’ ways, to the satisfaction of the different parties involved. The resolution of island territorial problems can benefit greatly from a critical appreciation of how other small islands, also contested, have had their situation resolved in non‐zero‐sum ways. In such cases, sovereignty has been shared, split/divided or expunged; in other cases, sovereignty disputes have been put aside in order to co‐develop and co‐exploit natural resources. There is also one example of a UNESCO World Heritage Site consisting of a string of small islands and surrounding waters whose management is shared between three countries.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12111   open full text
• Trading in waste: Integrating sustainable development goals and environmental policies in trade negotiations toward enhanced solid waste management in Pacific Islands countries and territories.
  Trisia Farrelly, Paul Schneider, Polly Stupples.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  This paper provides a broad survey of existing literature on contemporary solid waste management (SWM) in the Pacific region to underscore an urgent and compelling need for improved SWM. Despite advances in waste management systems and funding for technical support and capacity building from a range of sources, waste continues to threaten public and ecological health and the economy in Pacific Islands Countries and Territories (PICTs). SWM in the Pacific requires innovative thinking in a challenging environment of remoteness, limited available land, fragile ecosystems, vulnerability to natural hazards and subsequent climate sensitivity. Many PICTs are under considerable pressure to open their markets up to trade liberalisation. Increasing links to the global economy through trade liberalisation could either further exacerbate waste management challenges in the Pacific or contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development goals. The authors argue that if the PICTs' urgent waste management challenges are to be meaningfully addressed, the region's leaders must ensure trading partners conform to local environmental protection policies and that trade agreements align with sustainable development goals.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12110   open full text
• Livelihood diversification with certification‐supported farming: The case of land reform beneficiaries in the Philippines.
  Rie Makita.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  The promotion of intensive farming through organic and fair trade certification appears contradictory to the increasing significance of non‐farm income sources in rural Asia as well as in many other parts of the rural South. By observing a sugarcane producer co‐operative comprising land reform beneficiaries in the Philippines, this paper explores the reality of livelihood diversification as practised by member households of the certified co‐operative, focusing on the compatibility of certification‐supported farming with diversified activities. In this case, diversification at the household level progressed both away from farming and into farming. Behind the long‐term use of agricultural certification, there are compelling reasons for continuing both certification‐supported farming and diversified activities, and for employing mechanisms that further the compatibility at all phases between the former and the latter, and maximising income‐generating opportunities. The operation of communal land with agricultural certification may be an effective form of assistance to land reform beneficiaries who share a strong desire to be landowners.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12106   open full text
• Dams and state security: Damming the 3S rivers as a threat to Cambodian state security.
  Mak Sithirith.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  State security is a key concern for countries when dealing with transboundary river governance issues. While there is a considerable amount of literature on transboundary river cooperation in general, there has been little on transboundary cooperation and the damming of shared rivers in terms of their impacts on state security. As a result, this article seeks to answer the following questions in relation to the lower Mekong basin: (i) How is the damming process embedded in transboundary cooperation? (ii) How does this type of cooperation contribute to peace and security in the study area – the 3S river basin? And, (iii) how can transboundary cooperation be improved so as to address state security issues? To answer these questions, this study reviews the relevant literature and uses two case studies, one of the Yali Dam in Vietnam and the second of the Lower Sesan 2 Dam in Cambodia. In doing so, the article examines dam developments in the lower Mekong basin, their environmental and human security impacts, and how they contribute to or threaten state security in Cambodia. It concludes that dams on international rivers induce insecurity among states downstream and that cooperation between riparian states is key to addressing this insecurity.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12108   open full text
• The introduction of oil palm in Northeast Thailand: A new cash crop for smallholders?
  Siriluk Somnuek, Maja M.A. Slingerland, Clemens M. Grünbühel.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  As part of the Thai Government's objective to increase energy security through biodiesel, oil palm was introduced to Northeast Thailand in 2005. Nong Khai Province was selected as a pilot project because of its suitable environmental conditions. This study assesses the acceptance of policy interventions and socio‐economic conditions by adopters and non‐adopters. We found that total farmland size was significantly higher among oil palm producers than among non‐producers. Nevertheless, the area under oil palm cultivation did not increase in accordance with land size in the way rubber did. Oil palm and non‐oil palm farmers had almost equal amounts of rice area thereby providing household food security. Oil palm did not replace food crops. Farmers investing in oil palm tend to base their livelihood around on‐farm production, whereas non‐adopters tend to diversify with off‐farm income sources. Oil palm was found to be one component of a diversified farming system and an additional income source, albeit not the primary one. In conclusion, oil palm was a crop that had been tried by (wealthier) farmers with sufficient capital, and an aim to further diversify on‐farm household income. Oil palm is certainly not (yet) contributing substantially to household income in Thailand's Northeast.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12114   open full text
• The urban governance of brownfield restructuring in China: The case of Guangzhou's T.I.T Creative Industry Zone.
  Philipp Zielke, Michael Waibel.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  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.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12105   open full text
• An attempt at implementing a holistic inclusive development model: Insights from Malaysia's land settlement scheme.
  Mohd Zufri Mamat, Boon‐Kwee Ng, Suzana Ariff Azizan, Lee Wei Chang.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  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.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12115   open full text
• Multifunctionality and agrarian transition in alternative agro‐food production in the global South: The case of organic shrimp certification in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.
  Reiko Omoto, Steffanie Scott.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 19, 2016
  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.

  April 19, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12113   open full text
• Farming for survival and rice for investment: The intersection of Japanese aid and Cambodian development.
  Akiko Horita.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 08, 2016
  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.

  April 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/apv.12112   open full text
• Impacts of newly liberalised policies on customary land rights of forest‐dwelling populations: A case study from East Kalimantan, Indonesia.
  Mariko Urano.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  Based on interviews and participant observation conducted in the province of East Kalimantan, Indonesia, from 2008 to 2012, this paper examines why the agrarian reforms have failed to secure the land rights of local farmers. Since the fall of the authoritarian government in 1998, Indonesia has seen limited, but growing government recognition of customary land rights of local farmers living in forest areas. I present a case study of two villages, in which the greater discretion on the part of the local community to negotiate with large‐scale oil palm estates has led to the abuse of power by local elites, as well as territorial tensions between local communities. The finding questions the optimistic view that state recognition of customary land rights of communities would automatically lead to the security of landownership of local farmers, and its underlying image of harmonious local communities in which members share coherent interests. The agrarian reform that has centred on communities' rights of control over land and natural resources is problematic. When local communities do not possess capabilities for resolving conflicts in an equitable and transparent manner, third‐party intervention is needed to assist communities to strengthen local land rights.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12042   open full text
• Struggling or in transition: Small household growers and the coffee industry in Papua New Guinea.
  Benedict Y. Imbun.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  The challenge of ensuring economic opportunities are made available to a country's population is a key function of any government. It is particularly acute in many developing countries where the subsistence economy is dominant and where limited formal employment opportunities exist. For such countries, reliance on cash cropping provides a central plank in earning foreign exchange. More importantly, it provides an important source of cash incomes for the largely subsistence‐based population. Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one such example with a significant rural population dependent on cash crops for their economic livelihood. This paper discusses the country's coffee industry in the context of its producers, most importantly the contribution made by small household growers, and the issues and challenges they face. The paper traces the emergence of coffee as a cash crop in the PNG highlands and discusses, among other things, recent developments in extension and points out possibilities for government intervention to ensure the continued viability of the highlands coffee industry. Conceptually, the discussion acknowledges the significance of relational economics and its underpinnings, particularly reflections of duality of labour, perceptions of coffee as cash crop and markets in the context of Indigenous growers.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12041   open full text
• Land/seascapes of exclusion: The new colonial project.
  John Leo Ryks.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  This paper describes how the transformation of coastal New Zealand is directly connected to the dislocation and marginalisation of many Māori coastal communities. It focuses on how this transformation is played out in text and talk and how certain types of boundaries function as important determinants in the construction and social order of coastal New Zealand. The high value and demand placed on specific, accessible ‘cadastral’ parcels of private coastal property dictates that much of New Zealand's coast is mapped according to constructs of wealth and desirability. In other parts of the country where development pressures on the coast are less prevalent, coastal communities are less evidently connected to markers of affluence and/or ‘whiteness’. In these less disciplined spaces, uncertainty and liminality is more influential in the making of coastal places. Through an analysis of interviews with coastal planners and residents of coastal communities it is revealed that particular hegemonies, through the discourses they produce, attempt to assert a particular socio‐spatial epistemology on counter‐hegemonic groups in an effort to develop and manage the coast. Communities that revealed an alternative social ordering are described as messy and difficult to manage, while other coastal communities are marketed as exclusive, where model residents inhabit model places.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12038   open full text
• Urban squatters and the poor in Fiji: Issues of land and investment in coastal areas.
  Jennifer Joy Bryant‐Tokalau.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  Pacific land issues are not only about Indigenous ownership in rural areas. Within urban areas in particular, land historically alienated into State control produced consequences only now being realised. In Fiji, all State land is claimed by communal landowners and such claims were said to be one reason for the 2006 coup. It has been suggested in recent times that urban informal settlements on the qoliqoli (coastal and foreshore land) are at risk and face increasing challenges from landowners. This paper examines a neglected area of urban State land in Fiji and comments on the future of the urban poor in Fiji if land tenure is unresolved.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12043   open full text
• Social vulnerability to climate‐induced natural disasters: Cross‐provincial evidence from Vietnam.
  Olivier Rubin.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  This paper conducts an analysis of the socioeconomic determinants of Vietnam's cross‐provincial variations in natural disaster vulnerability. The purpose is twofold: (i) to capture disaggregated vulnerability variations normally obscured by national statistics, thereby providing more nuanced insights into Vietnam's vulnerability to natural disasters; and (ii) to take advantage of the fact that the overall political system and key institutional structures to a large extent are constant across Vietnam's provinces, which makes the analysis a novel addition to the many disaster studies based on cross‐national variations. The paper's analysis indicates that much of Vietnam's cross‐provincial variations in natural disaster fatalities and economic costs can be explained by differences in key socioeconomic factors. High provincial rates of inequality, poverty and infant mortality, for instance, appear to drive up natural disaster fatalities. Local adaptation efforts should focus as much on these broader socioeconomic dimensions as they focus on the geophysical susceptibility to natural hazards of individual areas.

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12037   open full text
• Chinese urban migrants' sense of place: Emotional attachment, identity formation, and place dependence in the city and community of Guangzhou.
  Junxi Qian, Hong Zhu.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  In this paper, we study urban migrants' sense of place in Guangzhou, China, focusing on the structural relations between place attachment, identification and dependence as the three key place dimensions. Through both quantitative structural equation modelling and qualitative analysis of in‐depth interviews data, our research suggests that migrants' sense of place demonstrates complex relationships between the three registers of emotional attachment, identity formation and functional dependence. The construction of sense of place is also related to the personal experiences of living as urban ‘outsiders’. Our research also reveals a striking difference between the city and community levels in terms of the ways in which migrants' sense of place is constructed. Urban migrants tend to exploit the functional utilities of microscopic urban spaces to meet their demands for recreation, education and socialisation. On the other hand, their sense of place to the city is largely compromised by their attachment to the hometown and conditioned by their personal identification to the city. 本文中，我们研究中国广州城市移民的地方感，重点关注地方依恋，认同，依赖这三个重要的地方维度间的结构关系。通过SEM定量分析，以及对深度访谈数据的定性分析，本研究认为移民地方感的建构显示出情感依恋，认同形成和功能依赖这三个维度的复杂关系。地方感的建构和作为城市‘他者’的个人经历息息相关。本研究还表明，在移民地方感的建构方式上，城市和社区尺度之间有惊人的差异。城市移民试图利用城市微观尺度空间的功能以满足他们对娱乐教育和社交的需求。另一方面，他们对于城市的地方感会被他们对家乡的依恋大大削减，同时也会受到其自身对城市认同的影响。

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12039   open full text
• Development of refining and petrochemical industries in East Asia: An interpretation based on the Flying Geese Paradigm.
  Clara García, Enrique Palazuelos.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. April 01, 2014
  Several East Asian countries, with scarcely any crude oil, have developed since the second half of the twentieth century strong production capacities in refining and petrochemicals. This has been the case in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and China. This paper assesses whether the development of refining and petrochemical industries in these countries may be better understood with the aid of one of the major interpretative paradigms of structural change and foreign relations in East Asia: the Flying Geese Paradigm. The article concludes that, overall, the production and external relations in oil‐related industries do indeed follow a Flying Geese Paradigm pattern. We observe, nevertheless, some dissonances that are attributable to the particularities of intermediate sectors (such as refining and basic petrochemistry).

  April 01, 2014   doi: 10.1111/apv.12040   open full text
• Land reform, dispossession and new elites: A case study on coconut plantations in Davao Oriental, Philippines.
  Jeroen Adam.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  This article elaborates on how agrarian social structures and relations have changed after redistributive land reform under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) on coconut plantations in the province of Davao Oriental, Philippines. Three major arguments can be derived from this question. First, despite the objective of this land reform to transfer control over land and labour to poor agricultural workers, a majority of the coconut farmers are trapped in new forms of debt‐bondage and, as a result, are forced to transfer the rights over their resources and/or land. Second, a regional business elite has managed to obtain control over these lands and resources through all sorts of informal arrangements. Lastly, medium‐sized landed elites in coconut plantations have been disadvantaged because of CARP implementation since they became dispossessed from their sole form of economic power, land.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12011   open full text
• Wan laki aelan? Diverse development strategies on Aniwa, Vanuatu.
  Katherine Wilson.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  In a challenging contemporary context of isolation and inequality, inhabitants of small Pacific islands have employed a variety of strategies to ensure that their livelihoods are both secure and sustainable. On the outer island of Aniwa, subsistence activities still constitute the basis of island life but are complemented by an increasingly diverse mix of cash‐generating livelihood practices. Different motivations and constraints, including access to natural, physical, financial, social and human capital, affect the composition and success of household livelihood portfolios. Despite the significant inequality in household cash incomes on Aniwa, traditional sharing and exchange relationships between households on the island and between island and migrant households ensure sufficient food and shelter for all villagers. Rather than being a one‐way drain on the island's skills and income‐generation potential, the constant flows of people, money and goods between the home island and migration destinations sustain the outer‐island community and its diasporas. Aniwa thus exemplifies how diversification and migration can provide a basis for sustainable and resilient island livelihoods.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12012   open full text
• Transformative practices: Imagining and enacting relationships in the context of resource development, the Argyle case.
  Kim Doohan.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  Failure to recognise or acknowledge and respond to local cultural manifestations of Indigenous peoples' attempts to maintain or reassert themselves in spaces of intercultural engagement in resource management denies the power of their own cultural foundations and principles. This paper reviews experience of informal negotiations at the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia. It argues that giving careful consideration to specific cultural practices and processes associated with place and the social relations these practices engender facilitates development of transforming practices that change outcomes.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12021   open full text
• Design principles in tribal and settled areas spate irrigation management institutions in Punjab, Pakistan.
  Muhammad Asif Kamran, Ganesh Prasad Shivakoti.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  The paper investigates how political processes shape the institutional arrangements and then affect performance of Indigenous irrigation systems. External interventions in the form of coercive authority and new rules resulted in a shift of resource governance from farmers to state officials in state‐administered areas of Pakistani Punjab during British rule. The primary farm‐level data were collected from 280 spate irrigation farmers from four systems. The analysis of systems‐level agricultural production and institutional performance indicators of irrigation systems in identical environments is conducted. We examined Elinor Ostrom's Design Principles that characterise long‐enduring, self‐governing resource systems to compare robustness of tribal and state‐administered area spate irrigation institutions. The state intervention in Indigenous irrigation systems weakened collective action and distorted equity in access to customary irrigation rights in state‐administered areas. The study concludes that tribal areas systems working without state intervention have evolved effective local irrigation management institutions based on social and ecological values to ensure sustainable self‐governing resource regimes.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12020   open full text
• Confusion over land rights and development opportunities through communal titles in Sabah, Malaysia.
  Gaim James Lunkapis.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  Confusion over land rights issues and opportunities created through communal titles may just be rhetoric to some, but for the poor rural communities, it is a matter of survival. As this paper reveals, this may be due to contradictory interpretations between native communities and state agencies of what constitutes native customary rights. The methods and materials used are based on case studies in the state of Sabah, Malaysia with regard to the policies, programmes and projects that have been implemented in rural areas. This was made possible through interviews with key informants, textual analyses and state documents, and through observations of projects implemented in the rural areas of Sabah. Based on the information gathered, this paper reveals a worrying pattern of state and peoples' interactions over the provision of communal titles and state projects.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12019   open full text
• Caring as Country: Towards an ontology of co‐becoming in natural resource management.
  Sandie Suchet‐Pearson, Sarah Wright, Kate Lloyd, Laklak Burarrwanga,.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  This collaboratively written paper takes the reader on a journey to Bawaka, in North East Arnhem Land, northern Australia, to explore how a Yolŋu ontology of co‐becoming can inform natural resource management (NRM) theory and practice. By focusing on the process of gathering and sharing miyapunu mapu (turtle eggs) and the foundational Yolŋu concept of wetj, we challenge NRM to take seriously Indigenous ways of knowing and becoming, and to attend to the vibrant, more‐than‐human relationality of our world. We discuss this relational cosmology, highlighting the importance of being aware and attentive, as well as the underlying ethical imperative of responsibility and obligation. We argue that as important as the concept of Caring for Country has been for NRM in Australia, it is critical that the human imperative to care for Country is balanced with a multi‐directional and beyond‐human understanding of the human–Country relationship. This requires engagement with the ways Country also cares and acknowledgement that humans are part of Country and not separate from it. We therefore propose a reframing, that we not only Care for Country but Care as Country. This has implications for understanding the ways that humans can and should relate to the environment as they exist together through co‐becoming.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12018   open full text
• Decolonising the interface between Indigenous peoples and mining companies in Australia: Making space for cultural heritage sites.
  Jillian K. Marsh.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  Howitt () claims that state control over mineral and energy resources and developer–Indigenous relations constitute the ‘active erasure’ of Indigenous knowledge and governance. The cultures and interests of Indigenous players are diverse and at times conflicting during Indigenous–mining interface, and collective bargaining has been shown to substantially weaken these positions, especially in regard to those Indigenous players primarily concerned with the protection of localised heritage. This paper explores a case study from a remote region of South Australia to document this erasure and its implications and to advocate decolonisation of the regulatory interfaces between mining and Indigenous peoples in resource, environmental and heritage governance. It adopts an Indigenous standpoint for research and argues the need for academic research to accept responsibility for some weaknesses in existing systems. The experiences of Adnyamathanha people are used to support an argument that Indigenous empowerment through informed decision‐making and a decolonising engagement strategy are yet to be fully realised as key components of an effective interface between Indigenous and commercial players.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12017   open full text
• ‘It's not about believing’: Exploring the transformative potential of cultural acknowledgement in an Indigenous tourism context.
  Pascal Scherrer, Kim Doohan.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  This paper directly challenges the persisting argument that in the host–(uninvited) guest relationship of Kimberley coastal tourism in Australia's far northwest, Traditional Owners (the hosts) have a pedagogic responsibility to first educate the tourism industry (the guests) of their impacts on them in order to facilitate culturally appropriate and sustainable tourism experiences. We contend that such an argument reflects a deeply entrenched context of erasure and power imbalance between Australian Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people. We highlight, using three decades of public records, the fact that government and industry have ignored and continue to ignore knowledge and learning shared by Kimberley Aboriginal peoples in attempts to rectify serious issues of cultural impacts and risks to visitors arising from unsanctioned tourism activities on Traditional Owners’ land and sea country. We argue for the possibility of tourism operating in a mutually satisfactory hybrid space in which acknowledgement, tolerance and respect discharges the need for understanding different ontologies that operate within that space but provides the potential for learning. Using Bourdieu's notion of transformative practice, we propose that the development of such a hybrid space could transform the problem of unsanctioned tourism access to the Kimberley coast into an iteration that could facilitate its taming and thus a shift towards sustainable practices based on mutual recognition and respect.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12016   open full text
• Seeking synergy between community and state‐based governance for biodiversity conservation: The role of Indigenous and Community‐Conserved Areas in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo.
  Justine Vaz, Agnes Lee Agama.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  Sabah in Malaysian Borneo contains a range of diverse ecosystems and some of the richest concentrations of biodiversity in the world. Yet the state's existing protected area network is too fragmented and of insufficient size to safeguard biodiversity in the long term. Experts have emphasised the need for a landscape level approach to shore up conservation areas through the creation of ecological corridors of compatible mixed use. In light of the 2003 Durban Accord which signalled a shift towards greater levels of community participation in conservation, this article features the efforts made by the state to explore the potential role of Indigenous and Community‐Conserved Areas (ICCAs) in strengthening biodiversity conservation. Selected case studies are used to showcase some of the ways ICCAs are already making important contributions to safeguarding ecological services and maintaining habitat connectivity in the state. Recognising the role of indigenous and local communities in sustaining Sabah's unique biocultural landscapes is a critical component of a long‐term approach to sustaining irreplaceable natural heritage. Sabah's legal framework actually contains sufficient provision for greater synergy between community and state‐based governance of biodiversity areas, yet aspects of Sabah's political economy must be addressed before this ideal can be realised.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12015   open full text
• Intercultural capacity deficits: Contested geographies of coexistence in natural resource management.
  Richard Howitt, Kim Doohan, Sandie Suchet‐Pearson, Sherrie Cross, Rebecca Lawrence, Gaim James Lunkapis, Samantha Muller, Sarah Prout, Siri Veland.
  Asia Pacific Viewpoint. August 06, 2013
  Focusing on the coexistence of competing and contested interests in intercultural natural resource management (NRM) systems in Australia and Malaysia, this paper explores the ways in which ontological pluralism and the interplay of socio‐cultural, political–economic and biophysical influences shape NRM systems. We aim to foster a discursive space in which to reframe the challenges of capacity building in the rapidly changing spaces of intercultural NRM systems. The paper synthesizes the conceptual arguments of field research to conclude that capacity deficits of dominant institutions, processes and knowledge systems drive many systemic failures in land and sea management affecting Indigenous peoples. We advocate urgent action to build intercultural competence and new capacities and competencies in those institutions. The paper reframes intercultural NRM in terms of coexistence and invites wider debate about these ‘new geographies of coexistence’ in intercultural NRM systems.

  August 06, 2013   doi: 10.1111/apv.12014   open full text