Part 1

• Salween Peace Park and the shaping of territory of life: A Karen approach to grassroots state formation Diana Suhardiman Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies Saw John Bright

  Following the military coup in February 2021, Myanmar entered a period of political turmoil, marked by intense political conflicts and widespread armed struggles. This chapter focuses on grassroots state formation processes in Karen State, Myanmar prior and after the coup. It illustrates how local communities together with civil society organizations create and claim political spaces in natural resource governance through the establishment of the Salween Peace Park. Bringing to light the close interlinkages between place-based knowledge, customary rights systems, and localized power dynamics in natural resource governance, it shows how the Salween Peace Park manifests as a grassroots response to state territorialization attempts. Building on theories on state spaces and institutional emergence as one of key building blocks for the overall shaping of ‘territories of life’, it shows how local communities’ aspirations and Karen’s perceptions of self-determination serve as key political foundation for the park’s formation. The Salween Peace Park embodies a Karen’s approach to grassroots state formation as it questions the notion of nation state, what the state really entails in the context of military dictatorship, and its implications for our understanding of state-citizens relations within and beyond the context of natural resource governance.

• Marine Resource Governance and Sociocultural Dynamics Among Sea Nomadic Communities in Insular Southeast Asia Wengki Ariando Chulalongkorn University

  Coastal and marine resources play a significant role in the lives of sea nomadic communities, which are remnants of a maritime lifestyle. These communities scatter throughout the Insular of Southeast Asia and face multiple challenges related to the management, accessibility, and utilization of marine resources and socio-cultural and environmental complexities. This research delves into the intricate knowledge system that sea nomads from Thailand’s Moken and Indonesia’s Sama-Bajau communities possess, which enables them to coexist with marine resource dynamics. This study aims to comprehend the underlying marine resource governance practices and priorities of these communities. To augment observational data, an extended ethnographic approach was conducted, which involved in-depth interviews with sea nomads and key stakeholders. The sea nomadic collectives uniformly voiced concerns about development, local knowledge, and institutional support. The Moken and Sama-Bajau communities are keenly interested in effectively implementing marine resource governance. However, the erosion of customary institutions and local knowledge systems has amplified vulnerabilities that hinder the realization of state-managed spatial marine governance initiatives. This oversight persists despite the increasing trend toward conservation and tourism-driven developmental models. Resource scarcity and human security in the Anthropocene have impacted the Bajau livelihood and customary management system. The current policies still need to address the multifaceted exigencies and nuanced concerns of sea nomads in the Anthropocene. As a result, sea nomads face marked disenfranchisement, their fundamental rights are jeopardized, and their livelihoods are becoming increasingly precarious in Southeast Asia.

• Imagining Ecological Future Proof through Javanese Rituals Wigke Sukmana Putri Leiden University

  This research explores the possibility of creating a better ecological future through rituals, particularly in the context of Javanese rituals. Although the combination of ritual, ecology, Javanese religions, and the future may seem paradoxical, exploring these themes can lead to a better understanding of how rituals can create a more ecologically just future. However, as practical knowledge, the ritual remains insulated from ecological projects. My reseach finds that the more than human approach presents at the Javanese cosmological concept that include animal spirit naming, cosmology as ecological analysis, ritual works as practical knowledge to order chaos and regulate ecology, and the last ritual as ecological future making.

• Environmental Practices without Discourse: Rethinking Environmental Governance with Plastics in Southeast Asia Brenda Yeoh Immanuela Asa Rahadini Shiori Shakuto University of Sydney Tan Qian Hui

  Southeast Asia is one of the regions that is most affected by marine plastic pollution. In 2018, after China enforced a ban on plastic waste imports, countries in the Global North started sending their plastic waste to Southeast Asian countries. To understand the challenges and drivers that affect plastic waste governance in this region, we conducted qualitative research in Singapore and Japan, which have been exporting plastic waste to Southeast Asian countries. Both countries have implemented plastic waste governance policies that focus on the 3Rs - reduce, reuse, and recycle. Scholars and policymakers advocate that these environmental messages need to be communicated more effectively to the public. However, our interviews with people on the ground reveal that they are not necessarily motivated by environmental discourses, even when they engage in environmentally conscious practices. In both countries, people frequently mention financial incentives as one of the main drivers for engaging in environmentally responsible behavior, among other things. However, a more complex picture emerges when we examine their practices in a culturally and historically specific context. In Japan, people tend to avoid being seen as environmentally conscious because it might suggest that they prioritize the self, being motivated by their own moral consciousness rather than that of their relations. In Singapore, the state’s environmental discourse has limited traction due to the existing infrastructure of the waste management system designed around efficiency and hygiene. Namely, the household chutes and foreign domestic workers both function to keep waste out of sight. Our comparative research suggests that environmental governance through discourse may be challenged by other governance practices around communities and infrastructure. To achieve effective environmental governance in Southeast Asia, we suggest going beyond communicating environmental discourses and instead focusing on unraveling the relationships forged and disrupted by plastic waste at different scales, including homes, communities, and regions.

Part 2

• Nothing for free: Knowledge brokerage and translation within climate adaptation governance in the Mekong Delta Jacob Weger Seton Hall University

  In Vietnam, a multilevel governance apparatus is engaged in furthering the climate adaptation agenda, much of it focused on the Mekong Delta. A politics of translation is at the heart of these operations, as diHerently situated actors reproduce, negotiate, and mobilize knowledge for adaptation in pursuit of varied objectives. In this paper, I examine the role of intermediary actors that work as knowledge brokers and translators,transmitting knowledge upwards, downwards, and horizontally within this governance system, influencing adaptation practice in the process. Drawing on cross-scalar ethnographic research with Vietnamese scientists and researchers, development practitioners, agricultural extension agents, and provincial-level bureaucrats, it considers the agency these actors have in shaping the trajectory of socio-ecological change in the delta. Exploring strategies of translation and the interests they reflect, it finds that knowledge for adaptation is largely constrained by the dominant economic development agenda, where neoliberal discourses and state goals of “building socialism” intersect in defining the success of adaptation and its ideal subjects. Yet the article identifies points of contestation or potential “switch-points” that may represent openings for more transformative pathways to emerge.

• Environmental Governance, Resource Extraction and Indigenous Movement on a Philippine Frontier Shu-Yuan Yang Academia Sinica

  The Philippines shows a positively progressive attitude toward recognizing indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands. The Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA), hailed as a landmark piece of legislation in the modern legal history of Southeast Asia, was passed in the same period when neoliberalism in the country reached its peak. Therefore, the protection of indigenous rights to lands and natural resources faces serious challenges from neoliberal development. The Bugkalot (Ilongot) of northern Luzon is a case at point. In 1995, California Energy, the largest independent geothermal power company in the world, secured a BOT project with the Philippine government to build the multi-purpose Casecnan Dam in the ancestral domain of the Bugkalot. The introduction of such a large-scale development project has unsettled the Bugkalot’s relationship to nature, and they have been involved in long-term disputes with CalEnergy. Since 2013, the Bugkalot started a new wave of protest in front of the Cesecnan Dam to demand royalties and compensations for environmental damages and the loss of biodiversity which they sustain as a result of the project. This paper aims to explore how land becomes an explicit political and cultural concern for the Bugkalot, and how environmental governance lies at the core of power struggles over access to resources and how this access shapes people’s livelihood options. Indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable to the severe consequences of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, whether their resistance to extractive projects can forge bottom-up environmental governance and have significant impact on resource decision-making in the Philippines remains to be seen.

• The politics of marginal land and labour in east Indonesia Jessica Clendenning Rachel Carson Center

  In a rural village on Flores Island in East Indonesia, many families are facing a series of livelihood constraints. Limited, unproductive lands, plant disease, and rising inflation, especially for the price of rice, an everyday staple food, are creating circumstances that see an increasing amount of men, and some families, leaving the village in search of income. As the village itself is far from many off-farm work options, many men go to Labuan Bajo, a tourist port town approximately five hours away, to mine rock, and for others, to find construction work. Through household surveys and in-depth interviews with families living in both the village and Labuan Bajo between 2018 to 2023, this paper investigates what it means to manage land and livelihoods across two different sites. To do so, I apply a political ecology framework to show how tourism development in Labuan Bajo are linked to labour and land use changes in the village; and similarly, how labour and land access in Labuan Bajo remains tenuous from daily expenses, taxes by landholders, and work payments that are often delayed. By studying these events through the lens of political ecology, I discuss how these livelihood changes, and their wider spatial relations, are political. Furthermore, studying these two locations together shows how informal work opportunities in Labuan Bajo further degrade land and livelihoods in an upland farming village.

• Water governance in the Mekong region: the role and impact of civil society organizations Andrea Haefner Griffith University

  The Mekong River Basin is facing growing challenges in managing water resources, environmental protection and sustainable development whilst fostering rapid economic development within a region of riparian states. The need for cheap and renewable energy is rising, fostering the increase in hydropower development where logistically possible. This presentation focuses on what role and impact civil society organizations play regarding water governance in the Mekong region, particularly in regard to hydropower projects. A particular focus is on the Mekong River Commission and its Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement focusing on the Xayaburi and Pak Lay dams.

Abstract