Massey Research Online - Browsing by Author "Beban A"

Browsing by Author "Beban A"

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Agricultural commercialization in the Mekong region: A meta-narrative review and policy implications
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-03-23) Nguyen A-T; Oya C; Beban A; Gironde C; Cole R; Ehrensperger A
Agricultural commercialization has been a development focus in the Mekong region for several decades, resulting in varying outcomes. In response to competing claims and policy advice, this meta-narrative review not only examines the literature on the impacts of agricultural commercialization in the Mekong on local livelihoods, but also investigates the research traditions that shape the conceptualization of the research topics, study design, and recommended solutions. We explore narratives from three research traditions, namely the neoclassical, Marxian political economy, and neopopulist approaches. On the whole, the neoclassical literature finds positive impacts on household incomes and thus contributes to reducing poverty; the Marxian political economy tradition finds that capitalist development in agriculture creates and deepens social differentiation through which certain groups may benefit while others are negatively impacted; lastly, the neopopulist perspective finds negative impacts compared to previous, traditional livelihoods. The ideological premises informing these studies and implications for policy are discussed.
Agroecological initiatives in the Mekong Region: a systematic literature review and mapping reveals their implications for transitioning to sustainable food systems
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-01) Hett C; Aye ZC; Gironde C; Beban A; Castella J-C; Bernhard R; Ehrensperger A
In the Mekong Region, agroecological approaches provide a niche alternative to the dominant traditional or intensive farming systems. We conducted a synthesis of current evidence on agroecological interventions by means of a systematic literature review and mapping of case studies in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. The majority of the 271 identified cases focussed on practical and technical support. Interventions using holistic approaches, and such that focused on improving food systems through innovative territorial governance, value chain arrangements, and policy frameworks were scarce. Most cases targeted the agroecological optimization and the modernization of traditional farming systems. A mere 18 of our cases addressed gender in relation to agroecology. To scale agroecological transitions, sectoral barriers have to be overcome. There is an urgent need to put a pronounced focus on the diversification of ecosystem services in commercial agriculture and degraded areas and on women’s contributions to sustainable farming.
Challenges to Empowerment of Women through Value Chains: The Need to Move from Individual to Relational Empowerment
(John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Institute of Social Studies, 2024-09-18) Nguyen P; Scheyvens R; Beban A; Gardyne S
This article examines the prevailing assumption by donors that connecting smallholder women to value chains will close the gender gap and empower women. Based on a case study of a programme that seeks to empower women through their integration into value chains in Vietnam, the article assesses women's empowerment across four dimensions: economic, psychological, social and political. The authors argue that women's engagement in value chains does not always financially benefit and empower women because patriarchal power structures within families, communities and businesses make it challenging for women to gain authority over production decisions in higher-value crops. Women in the study gained more autonomy over ‘women's crops’ which yielded small incomes, while men had control over production that was seen as ‘men's work’, and in large-scale and more lucrative production. Gendered power relations affect women's access to economic opportunities: in this context, development agencies should reconsider their approaches to women's economic empowerment by focusing on relational rather than individual empowerment. This means that women's economic empowerment programmes should involve both men and women, with targeted interventions ensuring women are empowered within the household and in their connections with the community, local authorities and businesses.
Currying Favour with the Algorithm: Online Sex Workers’ Efforts To Satisfy Patriarchal Expectations
(Springer Nature, 2024-09-19) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls T
The rise of the online sex work industry is reshaping how people conceptualise and negotiate sexual encounters across digital and offline spaces. This article analyses content from an online sex work forum (AmberCutie Forum (ACF)) to examine how online sex workers establish boundaries between their online and offline lives to manage competing expectations from their partners and viewers. Our analysis reveals a misogynistic double standard whereby workers are seen to threaten monogamous values, while viewers escape the same level of moral culpability. We argue that the cultural logics of monogamy function to delegitimise the labour involved with online sex work and increase the risk posed to online sex workers through retributive misogyny, including cyber-harassment toward sex workers. This impacts sex workers’ emotional and financial wellbeing and reinforces gendered power relations by prioritising stereotypically masculine pleasure over workers’ economic interests.
Disorientations: The Political Ecology of “Displacing” Floating Communities from Cambodia's Tonle Sap Lake
(Wiley, 2024-02-13) Chann S; Beban A; Flaim A; Gorman T; Vouch LL
In this article, we extend a theory of disorientations to reveal how attempts to fix and control both water and people are disrupting once-fluid relationships between the Tonle Sap Lake and communities who have lived with-on the lake for generations. Using ethnographic and participatory mapping methods, we examine the socio-ecological dynamics that preceded and succeeded in the forced relocation of three floating communities in 2018. We argue that communities’ experiences challenge land-centric and event-centric understandings of displacement that pathologise fluid lifeways and fail to account for the materiality of water that has shaped floating villages’ multi-generational relationships with their wetland ecology. We develop the concept of disorientations to illuminate villagers’ experiences of relocation within a collapsing aquatic ecosystem—a collapse catalysed by state efforts to impose fixity on both hydrological flow and community mobility. The lens of disorientations invites displacement debates to consider materialities of place—whether pulsing water or living, shifting soils.
Entrepreneurial Women in a Saturated Marketplace: How Gendered Power Shapes Experiences of Debt in Rural Cambodia
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024) Beban A
Debt can be both a path to freedom and prosperity and a source of exploitation. This article analyses the embodied debt relations of rural shop owners in Cambodia to show how gender, class, and ethnic relations of power shape people’s ability to benefit from micro-credit. Drawing on 25 interviews with rural shop owners, the article analyses how the expansion of micro-finance loans for Khmer and Indigenous women to set up micro-businesses with little capital has encouraged an over-supply of rural shops. Struggling shop owners seek to retain loyal customers and perform obligations of altruism rooted in gender and ethnic norms by offering interest-free credit to customers, a practice that brings benefits to communities but entails gendered risks and embodied labour that is disproportionately borne by poorer women. This analysis reveals how formal debt can articulate with traditions of reciprocal assistance in ways that expand reciprocal bonds, while also enabling exploitation. The expectations placed on “entrepreneurial women” neglect the structural conditions of loan saturation and the intersectional relations of social power that shape people’s ability to run small businesses.
Fair but not Equal: Negotiating the Division of Unpaid Labour in Same-Sex Couples in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Beban A; Roberts G
Research suggests that same-sex couples have a more egalitarian approach to the division of labor (DOL) than different-sex couples. Based on multi-stage interviews with ten same-sex couples in Aotearoa NZ and Australia, we analyze how couples negotiate, perform, and perceive the fairness of their division of reproductive household labor. We found that same-sex couples had diverse patterns of dividing labor, and most were not equally sharing housework. Yet, most couples felt their DOL was fair. We argue that three key factors enabled participants to construct their DOL fairly, even when unequal: flexibility in allocating labor, communication, and revaluing unpaid labor as equal to paid labor, as an act of love, which can be culturally significant. Most participants explained their labor division as pragmatic, based on availability and preference, rather than gender, supporting theories of relative resources and time availability in shaping fairness perceptions. However, all participants were aware of how gender shaped their relationships, and some consciously sought to undo gender and heteronormativity through their labor practices. This study contributes to academic theorizing of how LGBTQ + families “do gender” and “do heteronormativity” through unpaid labor and affirms the importance of intersectional analysis for understanding labor practices and perceptions.
Holding together Hope and despair: Transformative learning through virtual place-based education in Aotearoa, New Zealand
(John Wiley and Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of New Zealand Geographical Society, 2025-02-18) Beban A; Korson C
This article explores how virtual place-based education can foster transformative learning for distance students through a study of the Spatial Awareness Project, a digital storytelling film and podcast we co-created with faculty and students. We found that students engaged with the resources in complex ways, with three dominant themes emerging in qualitative surveys of their emotional engagement: feeling joy, feeling unsettled, and feeling empowered. We argue that digital media that leaves students simultaneously positively affected and unsettled can enable transformative learning through discomfort, creating space for imagining the world in new ways, and sparking new conversations and connections within and outside the classroom.
Institutions, governance and extractives: Where politics and ecologies collide
(Elsevier B.V., 2023-09-01) Beban A; Banks G
Provides an introduction to the Special Issue: Politics and Ecologies. We review recent literature on the political ecology of extraction, and on relational approaches within the field. The introduction then provides a brief precise of each paper and their contribution, as well as the contribution of the collection to the field.
Older women's constructions of equality over the lifecourse
(Cambridge University Press, 2024-01-01) Beban A; Walters V; Ashley N; Cain T
Gender and age are central organising principles of social relations, with socially constructed gendered and age-based norms influencing patterns of social behaviour, power and inequality. Despite recent literature highlighting the importance of subjective measures of equality, including as a significant predictor of wellbeing, there is a gap in studies focused on subjective equality in research on ageing. Drawing on an equality ranking exercise and life herstory interviews with 20 older-aged women (65+) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article focuses on the intersectionality of age and gender, analysing the ways in which participants constructed their experiences of equality over the lifecourse from their standpoint as older-aged women. The analysis reveals a significant rise in subjective equality from childhood to older age, with more varied responses in childhood and a convergence of responses from adolescence onwards. Participants' constructions of equality differed: age was the dominant construct of equality women ascribed to their childhood years, while gender inequality came to the fore during their teenage years. In early to mid-adulthood, women found ways to navigate gendered inequality in various life domains, while in older adulthood equality was constructed as freedom and life satisfaction. This trajectory suggests that the frames individuals use to make sense of equality and their personal experiences are not fixed; they are fluid and shift throughout the lifecourse.
Policing freedom campers: the place, class, and xenophobic dynamics of overtourism in Aotearoa New Zealand
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-09) Aston S; Beban A; Walters V
The concept of ‘overtourism’ has boomed in the past five years as the latest term to refer to anti-tourist sentiment in tourist hotspots. News media’s widespread use of the term suffers from conceptual slippage and a tendency to incite moral panic. However, a deeper theorization of overtourism as embodied, place-based social conflicts shows that this phenomenon is not about absolute visitor numbers or particular tourist activities, but rather about the connection between place, class and the political economy of tourism. Drawing on Urban Political Ecology and qualitative case-studies of freedom camping in two urban areas of Aotearoa New Zealand, we examine how social conflicts between tourists and hosts erupted in poorer urban areas as NIMBYism in privileged areas with greater access to state resources pushed freedom campers out. Both hosts and tourists are agentic in these encounters. Locals frustrated with tourist behaviour they deem visually invasive and physically polluting ‘police’ freedom campers, ranging from facilitating formal police action and governance regulation to vigilante behaviour. Freedom campers subvert these acts of policing, often through the very rules and technologies that are in place to regulate and monitor them. At the heart of these issues is a problem of neoliberal governance which stresses tourism’s ‘economic benefit’ to the regions, while placing responsibility for managing tourist/host relations on local territories.
Prefigurative politics in the platform economy: online sex workers restaging collective mobilisation through informal communities of care
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2025-03-06) Palatchie B; Beban A; Nicholls T
As platform capitalist models of labour intensify, with jobs once done offline moving to online marketplaces, attention must be given to the political standing of platform workers and the constraints and possibilities of collective mobilisation. This study explores the everyday forms of resistance online sex workers undertake in private communication networks, finding that workers are strategically restaging where their collective mobilisation is occurring given the risks of public mobilisation. We discuss the value these communities have for workers and for broader understandings of prefigurative politics being undertaken within the platform economy of online sex work.
Surviving cassava: smallholder farmer strategies for coping with market volatility in Cambodia
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-03-15) Beban A; Gironde C
Cassava has become a ‘must have’ crop for many Cambodian smallholders; yet, the market is volatile and yields are uneven. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Kampong Thom and Ratanakiri provinces, we analyse how farmers cope with volatility. We argue that multiple pathways have emerged: some farmers have ceased producing cassava; some have expanded production; while most farmers engage in ‘ambivalent repeasantisation’, striving to gain autonomy from market fluctuations through the survival work of everyday gendered labour, including investing family and community labour into cassava, shifting back to food crops, managing debt, and creating relationships with traders, while also imagining a life beyond cassava. Uneven fortunes with cassava contribute to land redistribution, deepening class, gender and ethnic divides. The case of smallholder cassava pathways in Cambodia shows us that agrarian transition is neither linear nor unidimensional, and dynamics of ‘depeasantisation’, ‘repeasantisation’, and ‘intensification’ through crop booms cannot be assumed a priori.
The agrarian transition in the Mekong Region: pathways towards sustainable land systems
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-01-01) Ehrensperger A; Nanhthavong V; Beban A; Gironde C; Diepart J-C; Scurrah N; Nguyen A-T; Cole R; Hett C; Ingalls M
The agrarian transition, with its rapid growth in land-based investments, has radically altered agrarian and forest landscapes across the Mekong Region. These processes were enabled and accelerated by choices of actors in the public and private sectors with the aim of alleviating poverty and boosting socioeconomic development. We examine to what extent these goals were achieved and for whom, with a focus on poverty alleviation, gender equality, and forest conservation. Our descriptive assessment shows that the sustainability outcomes of the agrarian transition offer a highly variegated picture that is often not reflected in national level statistics used for monitoring the distance to target towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. Based on our findings, we sketch pathways for a more sustainable agrarian transition in the region. These pathways are explored in greater detail in three framing papers of the special issue “Agrarian Change in the Mekong Region: Pathways towards Sustainable Land Systems’.
The lucky and unlucky daughter: Gender, land inheritance and agrarian change in Ratanakiri, Cambodia
(John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2024-04-01) Beban A; Bourke Martignoni J
In many agrarian societies, women come to own land, and people secure care in old age through land inheritance. The social norms guiding inheritance shape gendered, generational and class-based relations of power in rural areas, and intra-family land rights can be lost when inheritance norms shift. In Cambodia's northeastern Ratanakiri province, rapid agrarian change over the past decade—including the expansion of land grabs, cash cropping and Khmer in-migration—is transforming decision-making around inheritance. Based on a large sample of qualitative interviews and focus groups carried out in 2016 and 2020 with Indigenous and Khmer communities, we focus on the ways in which intergenerational and gendered obligations of care are being reconfigured as land scarcity and inequalities within rural areas become more pronounced. We argue that social norms around land inheritance are in flux, with a proliferation of diverse practices emerging including a shift from matrilineal to bilateral inheritance amongst some Indigenous families, the deferment of marriage and inheritance decisions due to a lack of land and parents taking on debt to buy land and secure care in older age. These changes are reconfiguring gendered and generational identities in relation to land and have potentially negative consequences for land-poor families, in particular, for poor Indigenous women. These changes are symptoms of a larger ‘crisis of care’ in rural communities.
The recognition and formalization of customary tenure in the forest landscapes of the Mekong region: a Polanyian perspective
(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-05-04) Diepart J-C; Scurrah N; Beban A; Gironde C; Campbell NY
Commodity-driven deforestation and forest conservation efforts in the Mekong region have placed multiple pressures on community-based resource systems, undermining tenure security and livelihoods. In response, several initiatives have been mobilized by states, communities, and civil society organizations which aim to recognize and formalize customary forest tenure rights. We draw on insights from Polanyi’s dialectical movement of market expansion and social protection to examine these protective measures as counter-movements that combine forms of state-controlled recognition, community pushback contestations, and more emancipatory movements. We show the omnipresence and contradictions of the state in shaping these counter-movements and the multiple ways in which communities construct new forest tenure arrangements. While there have been important forest tenure reforms and the setup of state-sanctioned mechanisms to give communities greater rights and responsibilities over forests, the process and outcomes of community rights formalization are found to be highly uneven and contingent.

Browsing by Author "Beban A"

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