This chapter shows how small-scale farmers and fishers around Tonle Sap Lake have been relatively resilient to flooding. However, changing flooding regimes have created more regular shocks for farmers, whilst declining fish stocks are increasing fishing households vulnerability. These flooding-related shocks and associated vulnerabilities link to the creation of debt for farmers and fishers, which influences the decision to send household members to migrate. Whether the incentive for migration is livelihood diversification or debt repayment, the influence of the Tonle Sap’s flood regime from year to year is significant as it is generative of the viability of farming and fishing livelihoods. Household livelihood viability and associated vulnerabilities, however, is in turn determined by social factors, such as the politics and contestations over access to resources in the village, as well as national level policies on fisheries and farming and transboundary water governance.
Flooding is a common experience in monsoonal regions of Southeast Asia, where diverse flood regimes have for centuries shaped agrarian and fisheries-based livelihoods. However, in recent public discourse, the link between flooding and migration is most often made with regard to catastrophic flood events. News images of frequent and intense weather-related flood events in the region’s low-lying megacity and delta regions in recent years has contributed to a perceived link between extreme environmental events and mass migration through displacement. Yet, this focus on mass displacement frames migration in largely negative terms. Mobility is seen as a failure of adaptation to a changing environment, with both trans-border and internal population mobility to some even regarded as a security issue.
By Carl Middleton, Somporn Pengkam, and Areeya Tivasuradej
This chapter illustrates how the Khao Hinsorn community in Thailand have undertaken a CHIA as a means to challenge an expert-led EHIA that backs a proposed coal-fired power station near their community. Through the CHIA, the community successfully revealed analytical shortcomings in the EHIA, and in the process broadened the definition of legitimate knowledge considered within formal state-led decision-making processes. We argue that CHIA has emerged as an important and strategic collective action response in Thailand, which has contributed towards social learning and community empowerment, and thus enabled the contestation of unequal power relations within knowledge production with implications for social justice outcomes.
By Carl Middleton
This chapter examines the transition from state-led hydrocracies to increasingly liberalized modes of water resources development in mainland Southeast Asia, with a focus on large hydropower dams on transboundary rivers. Access to, use of and control over water is highly politicized, and an increasingly diverse assemblage of public, private and civil society actors are involved in water governance.
By Dr. Carl Middleton and Zaw Aung
The focus of this chapter is a water storage dam proposed at Ka Lone Htar village, located outside of the Dawei SEZ itself, intended to supply freshwater to the SEZ’s industries. If built, the dam would fully submerge the village consisting of 182 households, along with several thousand acres of plantations and natural forest. In response to the threat of dispossession and relocation, the Ka Lone Htar community members successfully mobilized and resisted the dam.
By Carl Middleton and Ashley Pritchard
In Southeast Asia, major transboundary rivers such as the Mekong River are central to the food security, livelihoods and culture of millions of people. An increasingly extensive program of large hydropower dam construction is underway in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar to meet domestic electricity demand and for power export to neighboring Thailand, Vietnam and China.
By Carl Middleton
The chapter explains the creation and resistance to change of Thailand’s centralized and fossil-fuel intensive electricity regime through a Sustainability Transition and Multilevel Perspective lens, with an emphasis on the sector’s political economy.
New ways of thinking about and tackling poverty are needed. One approach that has been proposed is innovation for inclusive development (IID), which has been defined as “innovation that reduces poverty and enables all groups of people, especially the poor and marginalized to participate in decision making, create and actualize opportunities, and equitably share in the benefits of development” (IDRC, 2013:5). This book chapter maps out approaches towards and the relationship between inclusiveness, innovation and development, and introduces a new Master-level module titled “Principles, Tools and Practices for Innovation for Inclusive Development (IID) in Southeast Asia” being taught on the MA in International Development Studies Program, Chulalongkorn University.