Transboundary conservation and militarized interstate disputes

Advocates of transboundary conservation argue that borderlands can be a source of cooperation between neighboring states that previously engaged in conflict. It has been stated that, by opening negotiation channels based on environmental issues, jointly managed cross-border protected areas can promote and reinforce harmonious relations between contiguous states. We explore this assertion by empirically testing how transboundary protected areas (TBPAs) are related to militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) between contiguous states. Through the use of global data on protected areas and MIDs, we find that TBPAs tend to be established between countries that have previously been engaged in MIDs. We also find some evidence that TBPAs can be related to a more peaceful co-existence between neighboring countries in Africa, Middle East, and Asia.     

"The perfect business": human trafficking and Lao-Thai cross-border migration

Over the past few years some governments and development organizations have increasingly articulated cross-border mobility as "trafficking in persons". The notion of a market where traffickers prey on the "supply" of migrants that flows across international borders to meet the "demand" for labour has become a central trope among anti-trafficking development organizations. This article problematizes such economism by drawing attention to the oscillating cross-border migration of Lao sex workers within a border zone between Laos and Thailand. It illuminates the incongruity between the recruitment of women into the sex industry along the Lao-Thai border and the market models that are employed by the anti-trafficking sector. It discusses the ways in which these cross-border markets are conceived in a context where aid programming is taking on an increasingly important role in the politics of borders. The author concludes that allusions to ideal forms of knowledge (in the guise of classic economic theory) and an emphasis on borders become necessary for anti-trafficking programmes in order to make their object of intervention legible as well as providing post-hoc rationalizations for their continuing operation.     

联合跨界合作演进特征及驱动机制研究

区域经济一体化发展背景下,为改善地区间贸易开放程度,提升整体竞争力和促进跨行政边界生产要素流动,欧洲、北美和东亚地区已形成多个联合跨界合作区域。传统区位理论认为边界地区不利于形成产业集聚,但联合跨界合作区域受行政边界渗透和隔绝效应的共同影响,面临"市场潜力"和"市场竞争"间博弈,因地制宜形成独特发展模式。从联合跨界合作的动因出发,对影响要素进行研究,总结了典型模式及其驱动机制。研究表明联合跨界合作需因地制宜,全面分析地区投入产出关系,根据实际情况选择适宜的空间管治模式。     

The impossible energy trinity: Energy security,sustainability, and sovereignty in cross-border electricity systems

The article explores energy policy tradeoffs faced by states that expand renewable electricity production and are part of cross-border electricity systems. We develop the concept of an impossible energy trinity (IET), which posits that many states cannot simultaneously achieve energy security, sustainability, and sovereignty. We argue that these states have three options to cope with the challenge of intermittent electricity production from domestic renewables. The dirty option resorts to base or reserve electric generating capacity from non-sustainable sources. The insecure option accepts system stability risks and/or higher electricity prices. The non-autonomous option cedes control over domestic energy rules to pursue integration with neighboring electricity grids and markets. We empirically illustrate our novel concept using the case of Switzerland, which finds itself at the crossroads of the three options. The country has to choose whether to add conventional generation capacities, accept grid instabilities and higher electricity prices, or integrate with the EU electricity market and rules. We discuss generalizations to other countries and ways to manage the IET. We conclude that public pressure for decarbonization and economic pressure to maintain secure energy supply render the non-autonomous option most likely in many states. The operation and governance of transboundary grid structure thereby influence energy transitions on national and subnational scales.     

Towards relational geometries of public participation and hydropower governance in the Lower Mekong River Basin

The Lao People's Democratic Republic's aspirations to become the ‘battery’ of Southeast Asia has involved plans for a cascade of hydropower dams on the mainstream of the transboundary Mekong River. This has triggered the unprecedented undertaking of public stakeholder consultations under the Mekong River Commission's Procedures for Notification, Prior Consultation and Agreement (PNPCA). This paper focuses on PNPCA stakeholder consultations organized in Thailand and Cambodia, and seeks to understand how these stakeholder consultations, despite their merits in information sharing, have come to be criticized by civil society as a ‘rubber stamp’ for ‘participation’ in Lao hydropower development. Building upon the literature on public participation in development, critical hydropolitics, and stakeholder engagement in Mekong water governance, we seek to conceptualize a critical politics of public participation by adopting a relational approach towards identifying the key challenges relating to participation. We suggest that a relational approach must consider how the interrelations between the multiple formal and informal tracks of stakeholder engagement shape one another and overall opportunities for participation, and how power relations within these spaces impact on perceptions towards public participation. Distrust towards state-organized participatory spaces can be traced from the state-organized participatory spaces to another key interrelation: the power relations between state and nonstate actors in the multi-scalar political spaces that extend beyond participatory spaces. This paper examines how anti-participatory forces pose a challenge to the emergence of both state and nonstate participatory spaces, providing additional insights into the state-society dynamics that influence environmental outcomes around large-scale infrastructural development.     

The conflicting logics of cross-border reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe

Europe is currently experiencing an unprecedented process of reterritorialization in the context of European Union integration. Central to this process is the implementation of various cross-border cooperation schemes, commonly known as Euroregions, aimed at redefining fixed, border-induced Westphalian territoriality. The literature on Euroregions has primarily examined the reterritorialization of state power and institutions across borders, documenting the emergence of cross-border governance networks. However, the territorial underpinning of cross-border reterritorialization, as well as the process of territorial constitution of cross-border spaces has been less well explored. This paper examines cross-border reterritorialization from a geopolitical perspective informed by multi-scalar conceptualizations of political territoriality. Actors at supranational, national and local scales often follow territorial logics that are at odds with each other. Competing meanings of territory and territoriality interact to produce a geopolitics of Euroregions that shapes cross-border reterritorialization. The paper focuses on the Euroregions established at the current fringes of the EU, in the Romanian–Ukrainian–Moldovan borderlands.     

International rivers as border infrastructures: En/forcing borders in South Asia

Rivers have long been convenient yet troublesome borders. Inherently itinerant, rivers routinely defy cartographic depictions of borders as static, territorially bounded formations. Such dynamism poses material and conceptual challenges to state regulatory activities, resulting in increasingly heterodox attempts to fix waterbodies through various securitizing mechanisms. I examine the dialectical relationship between rivers and borders through the concept of the river-border complex. I ask how the Ganges River shapes the form and function of the Indo-Bangladeshi border and how, in turn, bordering practices in India regulate flows along the river, which comprises 129 km of India's border with Bangladesh. Drawing on archival records, in-person interviews, and river data, I find that the border and efforts to secure it mediate many flows along the river. The study corroborates previous work within critical border studies that securitizing cross-border flows has the perverse effect of generating greater insecurity in adjoining countries. Crucially, historical analysis of sediment, information, and human flows reveals how international rivers also determine patterns and processes of circulation and thereby warrant reconceptualization as border infrastructures, rather than as merely being subject to them.     

The privatisation of maritime security in Southeast Asia: the impact on regional security cooperation

This paper examines the involvement of new modes of governance (NMoG)/new actors, in establishing new regional regulatory frameworks in Southeast Asia. The basis for this discussion is a framework suggested by Kanishka Jayasuriya who argues that the activities of NMoG can facilitate the establishment of such regional regulatory frameworks. Concentrating on maritime services provided by one new actor, Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs), this paper suggests that the current activities and working practices of PMSCs in Southeast Asia are more likely to undermine regional security cooperation and regional governance, thus challenging some of the tenets of Jayasuriya's framework.     

Global Environmental Governance and the Challenge of Shadow States: The Impact of Illicit Sapphire Mining in Madagascar

The environment has become a key site of global governance because of its transboundary nature: forests, wildlife and oceans have all become central foci for networks of global governance which link international organizations, international financial institutions, states and non‐governmental organizations. This article examines how contemporary forms of global governance can be challenged and even subverted. It uses the concept of shadow states introduced by William Reno to explore how invisible global networks flow through developing states, to show how they constitute important political and economic interest groups, and to assess what kinds of environmental impact they have. It explores how powerful these networks are, and whether they are able to challenge or subvert attempts to manage, control or govern the environment. The author provides an analysis of the ways in which the clandestine networks of shadow states impact on conservation initiatives in the developing world, focusing on the features of global environmental governance and the problems posed by illicit gem mining and trafficking in Madagascar.     

Asphalt Dreams: Road Construction and Environmental Citizenship in Peru

Peru today is one of the main staging grounds for a continent‐wide integration effort. Launched in 2000, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA) calls for an enormous expansion of the continent's transport and energy networks and an effort to increase the region's economic competitiveness. Among its most controversial projects is the Interoceanic Highway linking western Brazil with the Pacific coast of Peru. The highway has attracted fierce criticism from NGOs who point to major environmental impacts, an inadequate mitigation process, and a lack of transparency in funding flows and decision making. In an effort to voice their concerns, these groups engage the idea of ‘environmental governance’ to increase public participation in the development process and promote ecological sustainability. This alternative framework in turn opens up space for ‘environmental citizenship’. This article takes a closer look at how Peruvian NGOs employ this idea and suggests that while the group's advocacy of governance has had success, the building of environmental citizenship will require a move beyond urban Peruvian NGOs as technical experts.     

Towards a Framework for Cooperation: Spatial Public Diplomacy on the Island of Ireland

Abstract

European spatial planning arguments advocate a blend of strategic thinking, coordination and related initiatives to promote and secure territorial cohesion. These ambitions embrace a set of normative agendas around economic, social and environmental convergence, competitiveness, policy coordination and efficient infrastructure provision across space. In practice, territorial management then involves devising interventions across inter-connecting scales of governance which comprise complex agency relations, differentiated places and defined communities. In transnational contexts, attempts to foster appropriate spatial governance arrangements and relations across sovereign borders necessitate re-crafting planning and development cultures and service delivery practices to advance territorial cohesion. Transnational working necessarily involves cooperation across an extended range of institutions, interests, influences and potential actors. This paper examines attempts to secure bi-lateral commitment to a joint planning framework for the two distinct territories on the island of Ireland. Specifically, it traces the formal and informal activities involved in the development of the 2013 Framework for Cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Informed by ideas of cross-border regionalism, it discusses the necessary spatial public diplomacy involved in the social reconstruction of strategic spatial planning to improve policy coordination and cross-border working.     

Border-regional resilience in EU internal and external border areas in Finland

European border regions have witnessed a long history of remarkable mobility shocks stemming from complex ecological and economic changes and geopolitical events. The experience of near-continuous regional and global crisis has increased interest towards the idea of resilience, that is, the ability of communities and regions to adapt and cope with disturbances and transitions. Inspired by the literature of regional resilience and the evolutionary approach, this paper will examine the difference that borders and geopolitical conditions make from the perspective of regional resilience and especially ‘border-regional resilience’. Particular focus will be on irregular cross-border mobilities and consequent transitions in EU external and internal border towns, here the Finnish towns of Lappeenranta and Tornio. The study points out that the geopolitical environment and the openness of the border partly determine the regional development trajectories and the ways of coping with cross-border mobility-related changes. Although the border location entails some vulnerability, formal and informal cross-border institutions and relations of trust are of crucial importance from the perspective of border-regional resilience. The paper proposes a research agenda for studying border-regional resilience in the context of environmental, economic and social changes and geopolitical events.     

The Transmission of Early Bronze Technology to Thailand: New Perspectives

In the four decades since the discovery that a discrete Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age in mainland Southeast Asia, much has been learned about the dating, technology, production, organization, and use of bronze metallurgy in the region, particularly in prehistoric Thailand. Although independent invention of copper smelting in Southeast Asia has not been considered likely by most regional archaeologists since the 1980s, the source of copper-base technology and the mechanisms of adoption remain poorly understood. Arguments claiming that the primary stimulus for the appearance of copper-base metallurgy in Southeast Asia came from early states in the Central Plain of China have dominated recent discussions, but anthropological approaches to technology transmission, adoption, and adaptation have yet to be systematically explored. After summarizing the current evidence for early bronze metallurgy in Thailand, this paper proposes an alternative to the predominant Sinocentric view of the source for Southeast Asian bronze technology. It will be proposed on both chronological and technological grounds that the first bronze metallurgy in Southeast Asia was derived from pre-Andronovo late third millennium BC Eurasian forest-steppe metals technology, and not from the second millennium, technologically distinctive, élite-sponsored bronze metallurgy of the Chinese Erlitou or Erligang Periods. Hypotheses for a transmission route and a research agenda for resolving debates on bronze origins in Southeast Asia are offered.     

Spatial Governance across Borders Revisited: Organizational Forms and Spatial Planning in Metropolitan Cross-border Regions

In Europe, cross-border cooperation in spatial planning has intensified in recent years. Organizations with varying institutional characteristics have emerged in urban areas that cross a national border. They deal with problems stemming from the cross-border situation. The institutional and spatial aspects of organizations on the sub-national level in nine European cross-border metropolitan regions are compared in this article. The analytical concept of metropolitan governance applied here takes into account the simultaneous existence of different cross-border organizations as well as their spatial and functional relationships. Subsequently, this article assesses the impact of governance on spatial planning in two cases, Basel and Lille, where institutional changes occurred on the sub-national level between 2000 and 2010. The way organizational and spatial attributes of new forms of cross-border metropolitan governance influence the coordination of spatial policies is discussed here. The comparison of organizational characteristics and capacity to coordinate reveals important differences. Furthermore, comparing spatial scales shows how new cross-border perimeters are drawn along existing national territories. Organizations' competences and interests are decisive for the coordination and implementation of spatial policies.     

Chinese engagement in Southeast Asian energy and mineral resources: motivations and outlook

Abstract

The energy and mineral resource base of Southeast Asia is relatively modest by international standards. Nevertheless, Chinese energy and mining companies have been investing heavily in the region over recent years, in comparison with multinational companies and state-backed companies from other Asian countries. This paper applies a framework derived from the field of business studies to analyze why the scale of China’s engagement in Southeast Asia has become so great and how the motivations vary between the different energy and resource industries. The motivations for these activities reflect a mix of corporate and state objectives. Corporate objectives include securing energy or resource supply chains, increasing or diversifying their asset base, and enhancing their profits or market share. The motivations of the government range from straightforward support of the companies for the purpose of industrial strategy and security of resource supply, to development assistance and regional strategic positioning. The different motivations of the oil and gas, hydropower, and mining industries arise from the particular character of each market, both within China and globally. Southeast Asia has the twin advantages of geographic and apparent cultural proximity to China. Nevertheless, inexperience and a desire to catch up with their international peers have resulted in companies applying low social and environmental standards in some high profile projects. The subsequent disputes, together with the current low level of resource prices, may constrain the further growth of Chinese investment in the near future.     

Cross-Border Mobility,Unfamiliarity and Development Policy in Europe

In this special issue, we seek to explore experiences, performances and effects of both “unfamiliarity” and “familiarity” across a diversity of inner and outer borders of the European Union. In EU integration discourse, cross-border unfamiliarity is usually considered to obstruct international mobility and diminish opportunities for cross-border cohesion and communities to develop. European development policy, therefore, often focuses on creating mutual understanding in border regions, especially through diminishing the barrier effect of borders. One of the consequences is that more cross-border familiarity is created. However, too much familiarity may also have undermining implications for cross-border mobility, integration and community-building. This special issue, therefore, scrutinizes what “being” and “feeling” (un)familiar imply in cross-border contexts and what consequences both have for spatial practices in and representations of borderlanders in several Euroregions—as well as for European regional development policies aiming for cross-border mobility, integration and community-building.     

The potential and pitfalls of global environmental governance: The politics of transfrontier conservation areas in Southern Africa

This article examines the potential and problems associated with global environmental governance with particular reference to Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in Southern Africa. By taking a political ecology approach, it reflects on theories and practices of global environmental governance through an analysis of transboundary environmental management. In particular, it examines the politics of the struggle over control of and access to key natural resources and how it impacts on the implementation of transfrontier conservation. In order to do this, this article includes an analysis of the complex role of local and global NGOs, the changing role of the state in relation to international actors, the importance of community based natural resource management, the commitment to tourism to make conservation pay its way and the problems associated with illicit networks of traffickers of wildlife products, cars and people.It is important to investigate the politics of TFCAs because they are part of a wider context of increasing forms of transnational management of the environment; such transnational forms of management are often deemed to be more effective than national level management because of the transboundary nature of environmental problems. This article argues that the assumption that transnational management can be neatly implemented needs rethinking. In particular, it highlights the ways that complex networks of actors constitute a significant challenge to global environmental governance. This in turn raises more general questions about the effectiveness of other forms of global environmental governance centred on managing problems such as climate change, pollution or trafficking of endangered species and tropical hardwoods.     

Pop-culture diplomacy in Japan: soft power,nation branding and the question of ‘international cultural exchange’

This paper critically examines the development of what is known as ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ in Japan. In the postwar era, the country’s cultural diplomacy was propelled by the necessity to soften anti-Japan perceptions, notably in Southeast Asia. In the late 1980s, the popularity of Japanese media culture in Asia began to attract the attention of policy makers, while subsequent globalized practices of soft power and nation branding gave greater emphasis to the use of media culture to internationally enhance the image of the nation, which has meant the promotion of ‘pop-culture diplomacy’ and, more broadly, ‘Cool Japan’. It is argued that pop-culture diplomacy goes no further than a one-way projection and does not seriously engage with cross-border dialogue. The Japanese case also shows that pop-culture diplomacy hinders meaningful engagement with internal cultural diversity and suggests the necessity of taking domestic implications of cultural diplomacy seriously.     

Mobility,Stasis and Transnational Kin: Western Later-life Migrants in Southeast Asia

Studies of transnational families tend to filter understandings of mobility and stasis through a bi-national framework that juxtaposes the movement of migrants across international borders with the immobility of in-place kin within equally static national spaces. This article examines the concept-metaphors of mobility and stasis through the eyes of later-life (over 50 year-old) Western migrants living in Penang, Malaysia and Bali, Indonesia. By treating “in-place” kin as mobile subjects I examine the extent to which the movement of individuals and families within and across a range of national borders affects the lives, concerns and movements of these older, Western migrants and retirees in Southeast Asia. By examining the concept-metaphors from the perspective of these migrants I illustrate the extent to which such people both succumb to yet exceed scholarly imaginings of im/mobility and juxtapositions between mobile selves and immobile others. Migrant thinking about these concept-metaphors, I suggest, complicates an ongoing tendency within the field of transnational family studies to view mobility and stasis as categorical opposites and offers fresh insights into the role and relevance of these concept-metaphors in the lives of Western migrants in Southeast Asia and their transnational relations with teenage and adult children, ageing parents and grandchildren.