Hart N Feuer

Nomadic pastoral communities are considered some of the most vulnerable to climate change. While Indigenous knowledge can play an effective role in mitigating or responding to some impacts of climate change, the extent of their capacity to adapt their livestock and rangeland management is under question. This research aims to assess the scope and applicability of climate change–related knowledge acquired in the management of summer rangeland, with a case study in Semirom, Isfahan Province, Iran. To do so, objective weather conditions (precipitation, minimum temperatures, and maximum temperatures) were evaluated using the Mann–Kendall nonparametric test and compared with subjective evaluations by nomad community members. Specifically, the study targeted a community of 7700 members of the Qashqai, a conglomeration of nomadic tribes in Iran. Their understanding of the weather was evaluated using focus groups and self-administered questionnaires, with a descriptive approach to data analysis. The findings of the climatic investigation revealed a possible shift in the climate in the study area, particularly in winter and autumn. The findings of subjective evaluation showed similar changes in wind, precipitation, and temperature to be the main characteristics of climate change in the region, with about 90% of informants directly citing decreasing precipitation and increasing temperature and wind speeds. The community evaluation also highlighted some adaptations to climate change, such as delays in beginning the seasonal migration, increased reliance on concrete homes, reservoir construction, decreasing livestock yields, and increasing diversification of resources to feed livestock. Understanding the perceptions of nomadic pastoralists, their meteorological basis, and ongoing climate adaptations can facilitate governmental planning.

The comprehensive uptake of geographical indication (GI) worldwide suggests that global trade is at the threshold of mainstreaming protections for heritage agri-food specialties. The European GI model is in ascendance thanks to a campaign of institutional entrepreneurship that engendered a powerful macro-organization leading the rapid diffusion of sui generis GI. Through its success in recruiting the intellectual property regimes of most East Asian countries into the European orbit of trade and cultural production, it has become hegemonic, with the potential for 'crowding out' useful pre-existing mechanisms of heritage food protection or displacing exchange in agri-food specialties still embedded in the moral economy. Although this new global standard is shaped by the process of integration into new milieux, this paper finds that latent post-colonial tendencies in the European GI model and its poor capacity at self-reflection in the face of inefficiency compromises its potentially unifying role in the heritage food world order.

This paper evaluates the rapidly evolving structural changes in Cambodian-Thai migration pathways to determine how long-term shifts in bargaining power favoring Cambodians intersect with the abrupt restrictions on mobility imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Thailand began encouraging inward labor migration to respond to gaps in the workforce during its recovery from the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and was supported passively by a willing and young labor market in Cambodia. Classical theories describe the ensuing process well: economic conditions in sending countries improved while the need for labor in Thailand increased, causing conditions to improve for inward migrants. However, more poorly characterized by classical migration theories has been the fluid ideas of mobility for workers arising from the liberalization of travel within Southeast Asia and regional integration processes within the ASEAN bloc. In this paper, we characterize migrants’ livelihoods in mobility-dependent sectors, namely fishery and construction sector, and how they have adjusted their aspirations and expectations to match structural shifts in demography and economic opportunity. We find that, until the Covid-19 pandemic began, the balance of bargaining power between migrants, brokers, and Thai companies was in favor of migrants, although many migrants did not realize their increasing leverage. The onset of the pandemic exposed a degree of precarity that has further buried notions of bargaining power that were incrementally developing among migrants.

Since opening to the international community following the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, Cambodia has incrementally adopted a stance of political liberalization. Whether because of the exigencies of reconstruction and development or by intention, large tracts of the institutional domain have been delivered into the hands of development agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations and other private entities. Higher education was no exception, witnessing runaway growth in private-sector capacity in a lax regulatory environment since the government's enhanced capacity, the imminent processes of regional integration in ASEAN are again diminishing the Cambodian state's autonomy and room to maneuver.

Many facets of globalisation are contested on ethical or humanitarian grounds but the defence of local food and agriculture often borders on the spiritual. In particular, the decline or homogenisation of local food and agriculture is often acutely felt because it embodies a spiritual violation of cultural identity and sacredness of the land. The essence of this crisis has been newly characterised in Pope Francis' latest encyclical Laudato si', which captures the spiritual relevance of agriculture by characterising the human response to contemporary ecological decline and culinary shifts. In trying to understand how we arrived at our present state, sociologists of faith, such as the late Jacques Ellul have long described how technology comes to dominate over nature in processes such as agricultural development. In his argument, by incrementally drawing humans away from nature and into technological spheres (by engineering tractors, producing agri-chemicals, and genetically modifying plants), alienation from nature is amplified and the scope of ecological crisis broadens. This phenomenon is not new; indeed, most religious texts and creation myths caution against this alienation through parables and commandments. In light of the new public attention being drawn to the spiritual dimension of the ecological crisis, this chapter explores content from Judeo-Christian texts and Cambodian myths that specifically speaks to this phenomenon. The valorisation of the land found, for example, in the book of Exodus referencing Israel as the 'land flowing with milk and honey', is typical of religious and pseudo-religious narrative that are integrated with political narratives such as nationalism and cultural patrimony. In this chapter, I address how national metanarratives built on these spiritual-historic characterisations play a role in shaping agriculture and food policy and evaluate the spiritual dimension of a few Cambodian initiatives that attempt to moderate the alienation brought about by industrialisation and globalisation.

Japanese agriculture has stagnated since the late 1980s, setting in motion a steady process of farmland readjustment. The notable consequence is an increase in the number of people who quit working on the land and a concurrent decline in cultivated farmland, a process which is often balanced by the development of land rental markets. However, since the total areas of rented land and abandoned farmland have increased in parallel, the contribution of land rental as a countervailing force may be underappreciated. And indeed, a cross-sectional observation paints quite a different picture: a negative correlation between the land rental ratio and the farmland abandonment ratio at the prefecture level. Our econometric analysis suggests that it is not so much farm households but rather non-farm household entities that are deeply involved in the appearance of this relationship over the past two decades. In particular, non-farm household producers play an important role as lessees not only by facilitating land market development but also by preempting farmland abandonment. Land-holding non-farm households, another relevant group of actors, are significant contributors to the supply side of farmland but their land also accounts for around half of the total abandoned area. Our analysis also offers unambiguous evidence that a former institution, namely Landholding Corporations, serve an intermediary role in facilitating the exchange of land use rights. However, although these corporations were expected to help reverse farmland abandon-ment, the limited resources granted by the government tend to make them averse to the kind of risky transactions that are often associated with promoting neglected or unfavorable land.

Pre-prepared food venues (or soup-pot restaurants) in Cambodia and other Asian countries make their decisions about what to cook in a complex food–society nexus, factoring in their culinary skill, seasonality of ingredients, and diners' expectations for variety. As such, soup-pot restaurants exist as tenuous brokers between rural food customs and the prevailing expectations of city dwellers. In urban areas, they are a transparent window into seasonality and market cycles, as well as an opportunity to encounter culinary diversity and participate in the consolidation of an everyday 'national cuisine'. Soup-pot restaurants, in contrast to other restaurant formats, craft an experience that balances the agricultural and social dynamics of rural eating customs with city comforts. Typically , soup-pot restaurants can accomplish this while also serving as a space of dietary learning, providing meals that are culturally understood to be balanced and nutritious, and garnering support for local cuisine from across the socioeconomic spectrum. As a site of research, these restaurants can be seen as potential innovators for managing the consequences of industrialization on food and agriculture, facilitating democratic daily practices of food sovereignty.

German Language:

Restaurants in Kambodscha und anderen asiatischen Ländern, wo vorgefertigtes Essen angeboten wird (sogenannte Soup-pot-Restaurants), gestalten ihren täglichen Speiseplan aus komplexen Gesichtspunkten der Ernährung, der jeweils eigenen Kochkenntnisse, der saisonalen Verfügbarkeit der Zutaten und den Ansprüchen der Gäste an einen abwechs-lungsreichen Speiseplan. Soup-pot-Restaurants spielen eine Vermittlungsrolle zwischen ländlichen Kochsitten und den Ansprüchen der städtischen Bevölkerung. In urbanen Gebieten spiegeln sie die saisonale Verfügbarkeit und Marktzyklen wieder und bieten gleichzeitig den Kunden die Möglichkeit, die kulinarische Vielfalt zu erschließen und sich so auch an dem Fortbestand der " nationalen Küche " zu beteiligen. Im Gegensatz zu anderen Restaurant-Formen, schaffen die Soup-pot-Restaurants eine Art von Ausgleich zwischen der landwirtschaftlich-sozialen Dynamik der ländlichen Essgewohnheiten und den städtischen Annehmlichkeiten. Zusätzlich dazu fungieren Soup-pot-Restaurants als Quelle für Nahrungswissen und regionale Küche für eine breite sozioökonomische Kundenschicht. Außerdem entsprechen die angebotenen Mahlzeiten den kulturellen Er-wartungen für ausgewogene Ernährung. Als Forschungsfeld dienen diese Restaurants als Musterbeispiel für die Bewältigung der Folgen der Industrialisierung in der Ernährung und Landwirtschaft und für die tägliche Praxis der Ernährungssouveränität.

This essay explores the ways in which the materiality of rice is encountered by agents along the production-consumption chain, from farmers to processors to urban consumers. Each agent, whether it is a farmer, miller, trader, consumer, or agronomic research agency, defines what is material (i.e., both tangible and discursively relevant) with respect to his or her relationship to rice. Materiality of rice is informally constituted by each actor in ideological standards that guide and configure how different aspects of rice, such as cultivation, milling, and variety, equate with quality and desirability. Technical standards, which originate from ideological standards and discursive norms, crystallize certain combinations of quality characteristics in space and time. Although technical standards initially exist as points of reference within more comprehensive ideological standards, they can multiply and increasingly dominate the material encounter with rice. Local actors, however, can contest this process by trying to bring technical standards more into line with ideological intentions. More specifically, I explore how a technical organic standard is situated within an ideological standard for natural in Cambodia, a country with strong historical and contemporary sympathies for ecological agriculture. I find that organic/natural is an important platform for promoting popular control over standardization and, more generally, over commoditization of food.

As early as the 1980s, Western civil society spearheaded by development aid and following international agendas began emerging Cambodia. Amidst this international push were a few initiatives that eventually evolved into nationally-active domestic institutions with influence on policy-making. Using the case of agricultural policy, the author describes civil society as competitive space, in which different models of social and technical change vie for attention from the government and people, each hoping to be popularized, legitimized and formalized nationally. In particular, he looks at two organizations representing paradigmatic development discourses, in this case alternative vs. industrial agriculture. He explores how these organizations gained popularity and legitimacy in scientific circles, and now manoeuvre to shape policy according to their particular vision of agricultural development. While governments usually promote or allow discrete discourses to become hegemonic, the Cambodian government has fashioned a more plural space in which competing ideals can be negotiated, taken up, and institutionalized in strategic ways.

The amount of research concerning the role of social capital in economic development has grown immensely in the previous decade, but measurement and usefulness of the concept still remain very pervasive and inaccessible to policy makers. This work departs from others on the topic of social capital because it differentiates between the collective capacity of shared social networks spurred on by norms and values and those social relations propagated by interactions in the market. Using household data collected in two villages in semi-rural Cambodia, this paper shows that market interactions are an embedded aspect of everyday social relations in the village and enhance the ability of social capital to meaningfully contribute to income. Social market interactions directly contribute to livelihood through improvements and dedication to personal business and contribute indirectly through an enhancement of social capital that capitalizes on group efficiency. Specifically, group efficiency is maintained in the short-term by the survival of the limited-group morality currently existing in the villages. Policies and participatory programs intending to improve the basic social behavior contributing to rural productivity should develop a local environment that draws upon established social structures and encourages mechanisms for enhancing communications with marketplaces and other communities.

Presently, there is strong evidence to support the position that development strategies focussing on sustainable agriculture, especially low external input cultivation, are rapidly increasing in influence.  Investigating the dialectic of the evolution in ideas and practices for sustainable agricultural development is important for an understanding of how and whether this new “shift” will affect poverty and development.  Without risky and poorly-understood investments in agrochemical inputs, many poor Cambodian farmers have been able to achieve increased yields over 100% whilst reducing water consumption by employing the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).  The promotion of SRI, and its corollary sustainable initiatives, have been hailed as a major success and have seen full integration into national development schemes and international NGO work. Such technology or technique-oriented development programmes often expand into local organising, empowerment and private sector practice.  This progression often involves increasingly strict normative prescriptions about how society should be transformed and how this promotes sustainability.  Definitions of sustainability, however, tend to be fluid and are thus easily adaptable to new contexts, and easily appropriated to justify various measures.  This thesis explores the pathways through which sustainable agricultural programming has transgressed the boundaries of strict ecological sustainability by highlighting the tensions and advantages of the evolving NGO-model of extension, participatory development practice, and socially responsible enterprise.  By exploring the agricultural livelihoods of involved Cambodian farmers empirically, and in ethnographic detail, and by analysing the concomitant evolution of organisational discourse and practice, I will show how an initial focus on technical agricultural improvement and poverty-reduction has transformed into grand plans for widespread sustainable enterprise promotion in Cambodia.  This has been marked by a shift in accountability that favours a passive, critical mass-based strategy for drawing in previously uninitiated farmers, rather than the grassroots-based micromanagement approach favoured since the inception of rural development programming.  I argue that this is symptomatic of the larger convergence of promising sustainable agricultural initiatives upon the reformist, technocentrist and increasingly hegemonic ‘market sustainability’ or ‘developmentalist’ paradigm of sustainable development.

The environmental movement, which picked up steam from the 1960s in many rich countries, is manifested in modern-day green politics, pollution regulation, nature protection, the re-emergence of renewable energy, and organic agriculture. Discursively, this was, and still is, a post-industrial movement that arose out of atavistic notions of ‘returning’ to the land and reversing toxic pollution and human alienation from nature. Since the mid-1990s, this discourse has penetrated into theory and practice for development in pre-industrial countries, presenting new and often contradictory lessons for modernization. In particular, the concept of ‘ecological modernization’, which was used starting in the early 1980s to describe technology-based efforts to clean up the pollution and reconcile industrial development with higher environmental expectations, is turned on its head when applied to developing countries, as the focus shifts from intervention to prevention. In developing countries, however, prevention does not strictly correspond with a transfer of Western protocols for, among others, environmental regulation, organic agricultural production and sustainable wild harvesting. Instead, prevention is more about proactive engagement with contemporary agricultural discourses and adaptation of technical advancements that provides a basis for novel and more culturally-embedded food and medicine systems.
This dissertation looks at the ‘capability’ (following Amartya Sen) of Cambodian society to reflexively interact with the pressures and opportunities presented by the commodification of food and medicine in light of ongoing discursive debates between industrial and alternative agriculture. It looks at assets available to Cambodians, including the ‘agro-social skill’ arising from rural experience that maintains a differentiated appreciation of agricultural products, as well as the role of historical narratives in creating a common basis of understanding agricultural modernization. Specifically, the dissertation explores the experience of three agricultural product types that are undergoing a contested commodification, namely organic/natural rice, sugar palm products, and traditional medicine. This work evaluates how these traditional product forms are socially reconstructed as heritage or ecological products throughout their commodification by analyzing the ways in which they are marketed, integrated into cultural politics and development, and perceived by rural and urban consumers. The primarily qualitative analysis of trends in production and consumption is also informed by economic analyses of farm productivity and marketing dynamics using a unique method of natural experimentation developed for this work.
In conclusion, this dissertation outlines the evolving successes and dilemmas of various initiatives for promoting ecological and heritage products and uncovers mechanisms by which societal ‘capability’ for proactively encountering agricultural modernization and commodification is either eroded or buttressed. The author suggests that the precondition for successful initiatives in the long-term is the preservation and reproduction of agro-social skill, which provides the reflexivity and ideological motivation to consciously direct commodification of heritage culture and, in broader terms, provide agency in managing the encroachment of capitalist relations.

Following international organisation theory developed by Barnett and Finnemore, bureaucracies such as the UN that see their sources of authority and autonomy threatened by other international organisations—or member states—often react by virulently reasserting their claims to various founts of international authority. The UN has done so by focussing on its inclusive nature and accountability, expert knowledge, protection of vulnerable groups, its progressive thinking, and its prominent role in labelling calendrical time in accordance with its development goals. As argued here, the UN has highlighted and reconstituted these various foci for the purpose of bulwarking and expanding the scope of the UN’s moral authority in the field of international development, and particularly in respect to the World Bank and IMF. The UN has thusly fashioned itself as the unsung hero of development policy, from which vanguard and usually correct views and activities have gone largely unappreciated. I caricature the UN in this way without the intention of discrediting its claims for redress, but in order to draw attention to various organisational pathologies that may emerge through a reactionary generation of moral authority. I conclude by evaluating the extent to which organisational pathologies of the UN undermine its ability to carry out its mandate for international development.

One aspect of Amartya Sen’s conception of capabilities that requires elaboration in the light of recent debates on individual agency and globalisation is his notion of market freedom. Sen acknowledges the problematic linguistic connotations ‘free markets’ in the light of recent hegemonic discourses on neoliberal market globalisation, and prefers to revisit the notion that it is one’s freedom to access and interact with markets that is of chief importance (Sen, 1999: 12). In this paper, I hope to expand upon this conception by investigating the way in which consumers and traders (re)conceptualise their relationship with the physical marketplace in the context of expanding cultural globalisation and neoliberal market forces. In particular, I will answer the question of how various strategies for negotiating the influences of cultural globalisation facilitate or impede access to, and comfort with, local marketplaces whilst critically examining whether the outcomes of these strategies are substantive or superficial. The importance of this question for development rests on normative notions of how, given the imperative to ‘catch up with’ the North, developing countries might develop hybrid or reflexive cultures of consumption and marketplace that accommodate and integrate diverse local approaches to nature and society.