Browsing by Author "Beban A"
Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- ItemAgricultural 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 AAgricultural 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.
- ItemAgroecological 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 AIn 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.
- ItemDisorientations: 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 LLIn 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.
- ItemEntrepreneurial Women in a Saturated Marketplace: How Gendered Power Shapes Experiences of Debt in Rural Cambodia(Taylor and Francis Group, 2024) Beban ADebt 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.
- ItemInstitutions, governance and extractives: Where politics and ecologies collide(Elsevier B.V., 2023-09-01) Beban A; Banks GProvides 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.
- ItemPolicing 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 VThe 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.
- ItemSurviving cassava: smallholder farmer strategies for coping with market volatility in Cambodia(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-03-15) Beban A; Gironde CCassava 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.
- ItemThe 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 MThe 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’.
- ItemThe 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 JIn 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.
- ItemThe 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 NYCommodity-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.