JOURNAL ARTICLE: Shifting Practices and Experiences of Development Cooperation in Southeast Asia: Understanding Local Voice and Agency

Publication date: March 30, 2024

Publication: Journal of International Development Studies

Authors: Carl Middleton and Soyeun Kim

Download the article here.

Over the past two decades, the landscape of development cooperation has profoundly shifted in Southeast Asia. Actors providing, receiving, influencing and affected by development cooperation have diversified. The role of Western donors that were particularly influential in the 1990s has diluted as new forms of development cooperation have emerged and associated finance grown in size, including South-South cooperation for example by China, climate funds, and philanthropic foundations. Seemingly, a ‘new age of choice’ exists for the governments of Southeast Asia. Yet donors are also pursuing their (national) interests through development cooperation often under conditions of intensified ‘donor competition’, which are navigated with varying degrees of success by recipient countries.

While these trends are relatively well documented in Southeast Asia, less attention has been paid to the perspectives and agency of local actors including civil society, impacted communities, and the diverse voices within governments. This includes the opportunities and challenges within the shifting development cooperation landscape. To explore these topics, on 27 March 2023 the Japan Society for International Development (JASID) organized a WriteShop in collaboration with the Center for Social Development Studies (CSDS) and M.A. and Ph.D. Program in International Development Studies (MAIDS-GRID), Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University. Nine working papers were presented that detailed cases from across Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand, and of these two papers are published in this current issue of the Journal of International Development Studies.

Citation: Middleton, C., & Kim, S. (2024). Shifting practices and experiences of development cooperation in Southeast Asia: Understanding local voice and agency. Journal of International Development Studies, 32(3), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.32204/jids.32.3_1

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co-production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

Publication date: January 2023

Publication: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Authors: Robert A. Farnan, Sally Beckenham, Carl Middleton

Abstract: In Human Geography, there is growing interest in how accounts of development can be wedded to an understanding of society in which the material or technical is connected to the social. Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches this division by emphasizing the inextricable relationship between technology and society. This process of co-production—between science and technology on the one hand and social and political order on the other—drives the focus of the special section and its investigation of ecological knowledge and contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia that this guest editorial introduces.

See the full guest editorial here.

Citation: Farnan, R.A., Beckenham, S. and Middleton, C. (2023), Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co-production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 44: 37-43. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12469

BOOK CHAPTER: Ontological Politics of the Resource Frontier: A Hydrosocial Analysis of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand

Publication date: November 2022

Publication: Extracting Development: Contested Resource Frontiers in Mainland Southeast Asia

Chapter title: Ontological Politics of the Resource Frontier: A Hydrosocial Analysis of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand

Authors: Thianchai Surimas and Carl Middleton

Editors: Oliver Tappe and Simon Rowedder

See more details on the book here.

In this chapter, in the context of the severe drought of 2019 and 2020, we examine the resource politics of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand as revealed through the practices, narratives, and knowledge productions of several competing networks that shape the Mekong River as a resource frontier. These include the community and civil society movement led Ing Peoples Council, and the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission and the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation. Our conceptual approach reflects the growing recognition of the heterogeneity of water cultures and histories (or ‘water worlds’) in recent academic literature, and the multiple ontologies of water that underpin them. This leads to our interest in how resource politics at the resource frontier reveal an enactment of multiple ontologies and their ontological politics, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. Overall, we argue that politics at the resource frontier are ontological politics contesting the very meaning of the Mekong River and its future form, be it as embedded in and patterning the socio-cultural relations of riverside communities in Northern Thailand, or as part of an ecological modernization and economic integration and growth agenda as envisioned by the region’s governments.

Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.

Citation: Surimas, T. and Middleton, C. (2022) “Ontological Politics of the Resource Frontier: A Hydrosocial Analysis of the Mekong River in Northern Thailand” (pp 28-48) in Tappe, O. and Rowedder, Sand (eds.) Extracting Development: Contested Resource Frontiers in Mainland Southeast Asia. ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute: Singapore

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Hydrosocial rupture: causes and consequences for transboundary governance

Publication date: September 2021

Publication: Ecology and Society

Authors: Michelle A. Miller, Alfajri, Rini Astuti, Carl Grundy-Warr, Carl Middleton, Zu Dienle Tan and David M. Taylor

Abstract:

Unsustainable models of growth-based development are pushing aquatic ecologies outside known historical ranges and destabilizing human activities that have long depended on them. We develop the concept of hydrosocial rupture to explore how human-water resource connections change when they are exposed to cumulative development pressures. The research analyzes stakeholder perceptions of hydrosocial ruptures in two sites in Southeast Asia: (1) peatlands in Riau Province, Indonesia, and (2) Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia. In both contexts, capital-driven processes have reconfigured human-water resource connections to generate transgressive social and environmental consequence that cannot be contained within administrative units or property boundaries. Our findings show how these ruptured hydrosocial relations are perceived and acted upon by the most proximate users of water resources. In Cambodia, a policy of resettlement has sought to thin hydrosocial relations in response to biodiversity loss, chronic pollution, and changing hydrology in Tonle Sap Lake. By contrast, in Indonesia’s Riau Province, efforts are underway to thicken human-water relations by hydrologically rehabilitating peatlands drained for agricultural development. We argue that in both of these contexts hydrosocial ruptures should be understood as phenomena of transboundary governance that cannot be addressed by individual groups of users, sectors, or jurisdictions.

Keywords: hydrosocial relations; rupture; Southeast Asia; transboundary water governance

See the article here.

Citation: Miller, M. A., Alfajri, R. Astuti, C. Grundy-Warr, C. Middleton, Z. D. Tan, and D. M. Taylor. 2021. Hydrosocial rupture: causes and consequences for transboundary governance. Ecology and Society 26(3):21. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12545-260321

JOURNAL ARTICLE: Hybrid Governance of Transboundary Commons: Insights from Southeast Asia

Publication date:
July 2019

Publication: Annals of the American Association of Geographers

Authors:
Michelle Ann Miller, Carl Middleton, Jonathan Rigg & David Taylor

Abstract:

This article examines how hybrid environmental governance produces, maintains, and reconfigures common property across transboundary geographies of resource access, use, and ownership. Transboundary commons are a category of environmental goods that traverse jurisdictions and property regimes within as well as between nation-states. They are forged through collaborative partnerships between spatially dispersed state, private-sector, and societal institutions and actors. This article disaggregates these transboundary commoning arrangements into two geographically discrete yet conceptually intertwined categories of governance: mobile commons and in situ commons. We ground our enquiry in Southeast Asia, a resource-rich region where diverse formal and informal practices of resource organization blur the boundaries of environmental governance. Whereas environmental commons are often analyzed in terms of resource rights and entitlements, this article argues that a focus on power relations offers a more productive analytical lens through which to understand the dynamic and networked ways in which transboundary common property is continually being (re)made through processes of hybrid governance in response to changing ecological systems and shifting social realities.

Key Words: ASEAN, common property, cross-border governance, environmental commons, hybrid governance.

Read the article here.