W. Nathan Green | National University of Singapore (original) (raw)

Articles (Peer-reviewed) by W. Nathan Green

South East Asia Research, 2024

This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies o... more This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies on financialization and rural development in South East Asia. In Thailand, the state remains a large provider of credit to farmers. In Cambodia, most farmers access credit from a globalized, private microfinance industry. Based on qualitative research carried out in 2021 and 2022, we argue that farmer debt has led to divergent outcomes in Thailand and Cambodia due to their opposing systems of rural credit developed over the past half-century. These systems were forged within historically specific conjunctures of international development policies, state–capital relations and domestic politics of debt. Consequently, Thailand’s farmers access credit from the state at significantly lower costs and with more support in various forms. Over-indebtedness is a problem for some farmers, but not because state-controlled financial institutions charge excessive interest rates. In contrast, the cost of private credit is higher in Cambodia, with many farmers facing overindebtedness with little to no support from the government. This article contributes to scholarship on financialization within South East Asia by demonstrating how the legacies and geopolitics of development, alongside the contentious politics of farmer debt, together shape the outcomes of rural credit systems.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2023

China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by co... more China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by constructing large-scale irrigation systems. Funded with Chinese development finance, such infrastructure projects have been interpreted as a 'spatial fix' for capital accumulation in China, which helps explain the shifting balance of power within the region's political economy. However, we argue that explaining the local outcomes of these projects requires mapping out Chinese development finance in relation to the multi-scalar network of actors, circuits of capital, and struggles over water that produce irrigated landscapes. We draw on our joint research about the Chinese-funded and built Kanghot Irrigation Development Project in Cambodia. We explain how the construction of Kanghot was shaped by the historical and political relations between China and Cambodia. Since completion in 2016, Kanghot irrigation has transformed agricultural production by enrolling farmers into a network of volatile commodity markets and harmful pest ecologies. There have also been ongoing community struggles over Kanghot's water due to the project's design and institutional management. By broadening the idea of infrastructure as spatial fix to include these material and social processes of agrarian landscape production, this paper advances a political ecology of Chinese development finance in Southeast Asia.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023

There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographie... more There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio-spatial outcomes, namely debt-driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.

Sociology of Development, 2021

In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have crea... more In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have created new markets for capital accumulation by rapidly expanding the commercial microfinance industry in the global South. In Cambodia, which has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world, the typical loan amount now exceeds the average annual household income and requires land-based collateral. Cambodian borrowers are increasingly over-indebted, compelling families to reduce their food consumption, take out new loans to service prior debts, migrate, and/or sell their land in distress. In this paper, we investigate this last effect of over-indebtedness, distress land sales. We argue that the exclusionary power of microfinance debt—constituted by collateralized legal contracts, discourses of moral responsibility, and public shame—is driving land dispossession among the country’s most vulnerable people. To make our argument, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork, supplemented by quantitative data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey, MIX Market, and two industry-sponsored large-scale quantitative surveys of over-indebtedness. We trace the rise of the commercial microfinance industry, show how it has contributed to over-indebtedness, and consider how household debts can lead to distress land sales. These land sales have largely gone unacknowledged in the industry because they take place through informal channels rather than the court system. We conclude that microfinance-debt induced land dispossession in Cambodia is a product of an overly commercialized international microfinance industry that now values profits over people.

Antipode, 2023

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although criti... more Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022

Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the... more Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other mechanisms. In this paper, I analyze how the International Finance Corporation's impact investments depend on an ideological "way of seeing" poverty, informed by representations of agrarian landscapes, which mystifies the exploitative relations of microfinance debt. I term these representations duplicitous debtscapes. My analysis is based on research about Cambodia, where the International Finance Corporation is a key supporter of the country's biggest microfinance institutions. I argue that the duplicitous debtscapes of the International Finance Corporation and its Cambodian partners veil the conditions of production and social reproduction faced by indebted smallholder farmers, thereby legitimizing capital accumulation for impact investors. Yet these debtscapes are also contested. Thus, I further argue that the outcomes of debtscapes are shaped by the struggle over their representation. By studying impact investment in terms of the visual politics of debt, this paper contributes to scholarship about the financialization of poverty in development and financial geography.

Progress in Human Geography, 2022

This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the gl... more This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financial ecologies and variegated financial capitalism. I argue that agrarian finance is always embedded in the agricultural practices and interdependencies of rural life, but that such relations are increasingly shaped by global finance capital governed by institutions operating at multiple scales.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022

Many people in the global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and... more Many people in the global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. While geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work travels home and affects left-behind family members. However, this scholarship tends to assume that precarity arises primarily in the spaces of production. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Cambodia, we argue that precarity simultaneously emerges from the challenges of social reproduction faced by kin in rural communities. As such, we further develop the concept of translocal precarity to capture the fragility of social reproduction strategies that migrant households employ across space. Translocal precarity is the looming threat that family members’ efforts to support one another may fall apart due to the instability of urban labor markets in tandem with a lack of sustaining infrastructures in rural areas. Our argument advances geographic scholarship on precarity by explaining how it is experienced across the translocal relations that connect the productive and reproductive labor of household members living in different locations.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2020

The Violent Technologies of Extraction offers a mythological conception of the Worldeater, a ghas... more The Violent Technologies of Extraction offers a mythological conception of the Worldeater, a ghastly beast bent on total extractivism. The Worldeater names 'the amalgamation of violent technologies and spirit propelling the global capitalist economy'. The extractive economy of the Worldeater is driven by the imperative of 'integrating and reconfiguring the earth and absorbing its inhabitants, meanwhile normalizing its logics, apparatuses and subjectivities, as it violently colonizes and pacifies various natures' (p. 6). The authors call for total liberation from the Worldeater by abolishing hierarchy, decolonizing degrowth, and creating locally-embedded economies. In short, the book is an iconoclastic, yet thoughtful, contribution to the fields of political ecology and critical agrarian studies.

Antipode, 2021

Debt presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it creates hierarchy between debtors and credit... more Debt presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it creates hierarchy between debtors and creditors. On the other, it forms a basis for social connection. First identified by Marcel Mauss (2002) in The Gift, anthropologists have explored this paradox for well over a century, leading to a rich record of the diverse social life of debt. But what about a geography of debt? If social relations are always spatial-an axiom of human geography-then surely debt plays a role in...

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2021

Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese foo... more Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state support, because national policies in Cambodia prioritize domestic agrarian capital over small farmers. This article advances food regime scholarship by analyzing the multiscalar processes, actors, and negotiations that produce specific agrarian transitions.

Development and Change, 2020

Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 y... more Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 years, the Cambodian government has implemented financial reforms that have commercialized the microfinance sector and promoted industry self-regulation. Echoing long-standing concerns about neo-liberal microfinance, critics maintain that these reforms have hollowed out the Cambodian state's ability to regulate a highly competitive market, thereby exacerbating the problem of over-indebtedness. In contrast, based upon 20 months of ethnographic research in southern Cambodia by the author, this article argues that the microfinance market would not function without local authorities performing key regulatory roles of the state. These local authorities include commune councillors-elected representatives of multiple villages who work closely with village leaders and local police. They are the primary state actors who enforce the property rights and loan contracts upon which Cambodia's microfinance market depends. The author analyses how this local state regulation contributes to household indebtedness by encouraging multiple borrowing, rural out-migration and land repossession. The article advances development studies scholarship on over-indebtedness by demonstrating that the inequitable outcomes of neoliberal microfinance can be better understood, and contested, by interrogating the multi-scalar spaces of state regulatory power.

Climatic Change, 2020

Since 2000, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been facilitating climate ... more Since 2000, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been facilitating climate change financing in support of large hydropower dam development. Although the CDM was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable development, it has financed hydropower dams that have caused serious environmental and social impacts. We consider the case of the Lower Sesan 2 dam in northeastern Cambodia, the largest and most environmentally and socially damaging hydropower dam ever built in Cambodia. LS2 has not received climate change financing through the CDM, as four other large dams in Cambodia have, because the market price for carbon credits is too low to justify the expense required to apply for them. However, it could be registered to receive climate financing post-construction. We highlight the apparent lack of improvements in critical areas of the CDM despite years of criticisms and suggest that there are framing and structural issues that will make reforming the CDM difficult. This topic is particularly timely because the CDM is scheduled to end in 2020, after which time it will be replaced by a new but yet unspecified climate change financing mechanism.

Political Geography, 2020

Since the 1990s, many large hydropower dams have been built in the Mekong River Basin. There has ... more Since the 1990s, many large hydropower dams have been built in the Mekong River Basin. There has been considerable concern about resettlement and compensation linked to reservoir flooding, as well as the impacts of dams on wild-capture fisheries, riparian livelihoods, and aquatic biodiversity and ecosystems. Anti-dam activists in the Mekong Basin have contested these impacts by claiming that dam impact assessments limit the spatial scale of recognized impact areas in order to reduce both the political backlash against projects and the costs of dam development. In this article, we consider the contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in order to understand how the spatial strategies of anti-dam activists influence the recognized scale of dam impacts. We analyze three of the most contested hydropower projects in the Mekong River Basin: the operational Pak Mun dam in northeastern Thailand, the recently completed Lower Sesan 2 dam in northeastern Cambodia, and the planned Sambor dam on the mainstream Mekong River in Cambodia. We argue that the recognized scale of impacts is in part an outcome of anti-dam activists’ different spatial imaginaries and associated scale frames—along with those of state actors, business interests, and project consultants—that inform activist strategies for mobilizing geographically dispersed people to make claims about dam impacts. Although activists have sometimes challenged the spatial extent of project impact assessments, they have also sometimes inadvertently adopted strategies to contest dams that have reproduced project scale frames favorable to dam proponents.

Geoforum, 2020

In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To ad... more In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To address this question, I combine insights about debt from rural political ecology and development finance scholarship in order to analyze the relationship between changing agroecological practices and household indebtedness in a Cambodian rice-farming village. In the past two decades, Cambodians have borrowed from commercial microfinance institutions at the highest rate per capita of any country in the world. With fewer Cambodians farming, and agricultural production increasingly commodified, researchers have begun to study how the fast growth of Cambodia's microfinance industry contributes to these changes. By building upon the concept of financial landscapes, which highlights the diversity of social and material relations of debt in rural economies, I argue that agrarian change in Cambodia is entangled with rising household debts used to fund both agricultural production and social reproduction. I describe how non-monetary debt obligations underpinned labor-intensive rice agricultural practices in the 1980s and early 1990s, but have since been replaced by monetary debt used to fund household basic needs and commodified agricultural production. To make my argument, I draw upon 20 months of ethnographic research within a farming village in Kampot Province. This article contributes to rural political ecology and development finance scholarship by exploring debt in its diverse material and social forms at a time of deepening financialization, and how these debt relations in turn shape the economic and agroecological contours of contemporary agrarian change.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019

This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of fina... more This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry has rapidly grown to become one of the largest markets in the world per capita. The industry has expanded in part because microfinance institutions use land title for collateral on household loans as a method to manage the financial risk of their foreign investors and shareholders. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research conducted with ACLEDA Bank, Cambodia's largest provider of microfinance loans, to examine how the rural land market and microfinance sector are assembled together. I argue that microfinance markets in Cambodia depend on credit officers establishing a capitalist regime of land value. To do so, credit officers engage in daily bricolage, using technologies of representation and data inscription, to create new grids of land evaluation that allow people to treat their land as a financial asset. I also argue that collateral is a kind of technology of control that reworks and respa-tialises household social reproduction for the benefit of financial accumulation. This paper thus contributes to our theoretical understanding of how land, labour, and finance capital are assembled together, and the political economic ramifications of such an assemblage.

Antipode, 2019

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how micro... more This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more-than-individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.

Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restru... more Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring
nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural
limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific
case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore
the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes
of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification
of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist
expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously
decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain nontimber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping
other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, noncommodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated
commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the
commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-
commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed
and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability
of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by
the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society
relations.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016

Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restru... more Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain non-timber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, non-commodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society relations.

Books by W. Nathan Green

Water and Power: Environmental Governance and Strategies for Sustainability in the Lower Mekong Basin, 2019

This chapter narrates a short history of agricultural and environmental change in the village of ... more This chapter narrates a short history of agricultural and environmental change in the village of East Big Lake in southern Cambodia. Primarily based upon villagers’ memories of place, it explores the changing relationship between people and their local environment over the second half of the twentieth century, during which the country gained independence from France and then later became embroiled in civil war, genocide, and national reconstruction. People’s memories of the environmental past are retold through the landscape, drawing upon their personal experiences. The information retold in this historical narrative was learned through a yearlong ethnographic research project, in which the author carried out participant observation, interviews, and structured surveys with a group of 26 families. This chapter provides a local, village-based perspective on Cambodia’s agricultural and environmental history, about which relatively little has been written. It also demonstrates how place, memory, and landscape can contribute to environmental histories.

South East Asia Research, 2024

This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies o... more This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies on financialization and rural development in South East Asia. In Thailand, the state remains a large provider of credit to farmers. In Cambodia, most farmers access credit from a globalized, private microfinance industry. Based on qualitative research carried out in 2021 and 2022, we argue that farmer debt has led to divergent outcomes in Thailand and Cambodia due to their opposing systems of rural credit developed over the past half-century. These systems were forged within historically specific conjunctures of international development policies, state–capital relations and domestic politics of debt. Consequently, Thailand’s farmers access credit from the state at significantly lower costs and with more support in various forms. Over-indebtedness is a problem for some farmers, but not because state-controlled financial institutions charge excessive interest rates. In contrast, the cost of private credit is higher in Cambodia, with many farmers facing overindebtedness with little to no support from the government. This article contributes to scholarship on financialization within South East Asia by demonstrating how the legacies and geopolitics of development, alongside the contentious politics of farmer debt, together shape the outcomes of rural credit systems.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2023

China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by co... more China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by constructing large-scale irrigation systems. Funded with Chinese development finance, such infrastructure projects have been interpreted as a 'spatial fix' for capital accumulation in China, which helps explain the shifting balance of power within the region's political economy. However, we argue that explaining the local outcomes of these projects requires mapping out Chinese development finance in relation to the multi-scalar network of actors, circuits of capital, and struggles over water that produce irrigated landscapes. We draw on our joint research about the Chinese-funded and built Kanghot Irrigation Development Project in Cambodia. We explain how the construction of Kanghot was shaped by the historical and political relations between China and Cambodia. Since completion in 2016, Kanghot irrigation has transformed agricultural production by enrolling farmers into a network of volatile commodity markets and harmful pest ecologies. There have also been ongoing community struggles over Kanghot's water due to the project's design and institutional management. By broadening the idea of infrastructure as spatial fix to include these material and social processes of agrarian landscape production, this paper advances a political ecology of Chinese development finance in Southeast Asia.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2023

There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographie... more There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I develop the agrarian financial ecologies concept, which both directs analysis towards the diversity of credit–debt relations in rural economies, and highlights the relationship between land, labour and debt in the process of agricultural production. I apply this concept to study farm household debt in Cambodia, where indebtedness has become a widespread problem among farmers facing rapid economic transformation in the countryside. By focusing on land and labour, I demonstrate how diverse credit–debt relations within Cambodia's agrarian financial ecology have produced uneven socio-spatial outcomes, namely debt-driven land dispossession. This paper advances geographic theory about the dynamics of value production, circulation and appropriation within geographies of debt. It also extends the empirical remit of existing financial ecologies scholarship by attending to the credit–debt relations that characterise many agrarian livelihoods today.

Sociology of Development, 2021

In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have crea... more In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have created new markets for capital accumulation by rapidly expanding the commercial microfinance industry in the global South. In Cambodia, which has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world, the typical loan amount now exceeds the average annual household income and requires land-based collateral. Cambodian borrowers are increasingly over-indebted, compelling families to reduce their food consumption, take out new loans to service prior debts, migrate, and/or sell their land in distress. In this paper, we investigate this last effect of over-indebtedness, distress land sales. We argue that the exclusionary power of microfinance debt—constituted by collateralized legal contracts, discourses of moral responsibility, and public shame—is driving land dispossession among the country’s most vulnerable people. To make our argument, we draw on ethnographic fieldwork, supplemented by quantitative data from the Cambodia Socio-Economic Survey, MIX Market, and two industry-sponsored large-scale quantitative surveys of over-indebtedness. We trace the rise of the commercial microfinance industry, show how it has contributed to over-indebtedness, and consider how household debts can lead to distress land sales. These land sales have largely gone unacknowledged in the industry because they take place through informal channels rather than the court system. We conclude that microfinance-debt induced land dispossession in Cambodia is a product of an overly commercialized international microfinance industry that now values profits over people.

Antipode, 2023

Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although criti... more Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Building on the concept of monetary dependency from scholarship on financial subordination, I analyse the monetary politics of debt in Cambodia. Drawing on elite interviews and ethnographic research, I argue that Cambodia's extreme monetary dependence on the US dollar has shaped monetary and fiscal policies that compel poorer households to take on private debt to pay for their basic needs. This paper advances critical geographies of debt and development by studying financial subordination and its impact on financial inclusion in the global South.

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2022

Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the... more Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other mechanisms. In this paper, I analyze how the International Finance Corporation's impact investments depend on an ideological "way of seeing" poverty, informed by representations of agrarian landscapes, which mystifies the exploitative relations of microfinance debt. I term these representations duplicitous debtscapes. My analysis is based on research about Cambodia, where the International Finance Corporation is a key supporter of the country's biggest microfinance institutions. I argue that the duplicitous debtscapes of the International Finance Corporation and its Cambodian partners veil the conditions of production and social reproduction faced by indebted smallholder farmers, thereby legitimizing capital accumulation for impact investors. Yet these debtscapes are also contested. Thus, I further argue that the outcomes of debtscapes are shaped by the struggle over their representation. By studying impact investment in terms of the visual politics of debt, this paper contributes to scholarship about the financialization of poverty in development and financial geography.

Progress in Human Geography, 2022

This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the gl... more This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financial ecologies and variegated financial capitalism. I argue that agrarian finance is always embedded in the agricultural practices and interdependencies of rural life, but that such relations are increasingly shaped by global finance capital governed by institutions operating at multiple scales.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022

Many people in the global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and... more Many people in the global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. While geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work travels home and affects left-behind family members. However, this scholarship tends to assume that precarity arises primarily in the spaces of production. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Cambodia, we argue that precarity simultaneously emerges from the challenges of social reproduction faced by kin in rural communities. As such, we further develop the concept of translocal precarity to capture the fragility of social reproduction strategies that migrant households employ across space. Translocal precarity is the looming threat that family members’ efforts to support one another may fall apart due to the instability of urban labor markets in tandem with a lack of sustaining infrastructures in rural areas. Our argument advances geographic scholarship on precarity by explaining how it is experienced across the translocal relations that connect the productive and reproductive labor of household members living in different locations.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2020

The Violent Technologies of Extraction offers a mythological conception of the Worldeater, a ghas... more The Violent Technologies of Extraction offers a mythological conception of the Worldeater, a ghastly beast bent on total extractivism. The Worldeater names 'the amalgamation of violent technologies and spirit propelling the global capitalist economy'. The extractive economy of the Worldeater is driven by the imperative of 'integrating and reconfiguring the earth and absorbing its inhabitants, meanwhile normalizing its logics, apparatuses and subjectivities, as it violently colonizes and pacifies various natures' (p. 6). The authors call for total liberation from the Worldeater by abolishing hierarchy, decolonizing degrowth, and creating locally-embedded economies. In short, the book is an iconoclastic, yet thoughtful, contribution to the fields of political ecology and critical agrarian studies.

Antipode, 2021

Debt presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it creates hierarchy between debtors and credit... more Debt presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, it creates hierarchy between debtors and creditors. On the other, it forms a basis for social connection. First identified by Marcel Mauss (2002) in The Gift, anthropologists have explored this paradox for well over a century, leading to a rich record of the diverse social life of debt. But what about a geography of debt? If social relations are always spatial-an axiom of human geography-then surely debt plays a role in...

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2021

Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese foo... more Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state support, because national policies in Cambodia prioritize domestic agrarian capital over small farmers. This article advances food regime scholarship by analyzing the multiscalar processes, actors, and negotiations that produce specific agrarian transitions.

Development and Change, 2020

Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 y... more Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 years, the Cambodian government has implemented financial reforms that have commercialized the microfinance sector and promoted industry self-regulation. Echoing long-standing concerns about neo-liberal microfinance, critics maintain that these reforms have hollowed out the Cambodian state's ability to regulate a highly competitive market, thereby exacerbating the problem of over-indebtedness. In contrast, based upon 20 months of ethnographic research in southern Cambodia by the author, this article argues that the microfinance market would not function without local authorities performing key regulatory roles of the state. These local authorities include commune councillors-elected representatives of multiple villages who work closely with village leaders and local police. They are the primary state actors who enforce the property rights and loan contracts upon which Cambodia's microfinance market depends. The author analyses how this local state regulation contributes to household indebtedness by encouraging multiple borrowing, rural out-migration and land repossession. The article advances development studies scholarship on over-indebtedness by demonstrating that the inequitable outcomes of neoliberal microfinance can be better understood, and contested, by interrogating the multi-scalar spaces of state regulatory power.

Climatic Change, 2020

Since 2000, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been facilitating climate ... more Since 2000, the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been facilitating climate change financing in support of large hydropower dam development. Although the CDM was designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote sustainable development, it has financed hydropower dams that have caused serious environmental and social impacts. We consider the case of the Lower Sesan 2 dam in northeastern Cambodia, the largest and most environmentally and socially damaging hydropower dam ever built in Cambodia. LS2 has not received climate change financing through the CDM, as four other large dams in Cambodia have, because the market price for carbon credits is too low to justify the expense required to apply for them. However, it could be registered to receive climate financing post-construction. We highlight the apparent lack of improvements in critical areas of the CDM despite years of criticisms and suggest that there are framing and structural issues that will make reforming the CDM difficult. This topic is particularly timely because the CDM is scheduled to end in 2020, after which time it will be replaced by a new but yet unspecified climate change financing mechanism.

Political Geography, 2020

Since the 1990s, many large hydropower dams have been built in the Mekong River Basin. There has ... more Since the 1990s, many large hydropower dams have been built in the Mekong River Basin. There has been considerable concern about resettlement and compensation linked to reservoir flooding, as well as the impacts of dams on wild-capture fisheries, riparian livelihoods, and aquatic biodiversity and ecosystems. Anti-dam activists in the Mekong Basin have contested these impacts by claiming that dam impact assessments limit the spatial scale of recognized impact areas in order to reduce both the political backlash against projects and the costs of dam development. In this article, we consider the contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in order to understand how the spatial strategies of anti-dam activists influence the recognized scale of dam impacts. We analyze three of the most contested hydropower projects in the Mekong River Basin: the operational Pak Mun dam in northeastern Thailand, the recently completed Lower Sesan 2 dam in northeastern Cambodia, and the planned Sambor dam on the mainstream Mekong River in Cambodia. We argue that the recognized scale of impacts is in part an outcome of anti-dam activists’ different spatial imaginaries and associated scale frames—along with those of state actors, business interests, and project consultants—that inform activist strategies for mobilizing geographically dispersed people to make claims about dam impacts. Although activists have sometimes challenged the spatial extent of project impact assessments, they have also sometimes inadvertently adopted strategies to contest dams that have reproduced project scale frames favorable to dam proponents.

Geoforum, 2020

In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To ad... more In the context of neoliberal financialization, what is the role of debt in agrarian change? To address this question, I combine insights about debt from rural political ecology and development finance scholarship in order to analyze the relationship between changing agroecological practices and household indebtedness in a Cambodian rice-farming village. In the past two decades, Cambodians have borrowed from commercial microfinance institutions at the highest rate per capita of any country in the world. With fewer Cambodians farming, and agricultural production increasingly commodified, researchers have begun to study how the fast growth of Cambodia's microfinance industry contributes to these changes. By building upon the concept of financial landscapes, which highlights the diversity of social and material relations of debt in rural economies, I argue that agrarian change in Cambodia is entangled with rising household debts used to fund both agricultural production and social reproduction. I describe how non-monetary debt obligations underpinned labor-intensive rice agricultural practices in the 1980s and early 1990s, but have since been replaced by monetary debt used to fund household basic needs and commodified agricultural production. To make my argument, I draw upon 20 months of ethnographic research within a farming village in Kampot Province. This article contributes to rural political ecology and development finance scholarship by exploring debt in its diverse material and social forms at a time of deepening financialization, and how these debt relations in turn shape the economic and agroecological contours of contemporary agrarian change.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019

This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of fina... more This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry has rapidly grown to become one of the largest markets in the world per capita. The industry has expanded in part because microfinance institutions use land title for collateral on household loans as a method to manage the financial risk of their foreign investors and shareholders. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research conducted with ACLEDA Bank, Cambodia's largest provider of microfinance loans, to examine how the rural land market and microfinance sector are assembled together. I argue that microfinance markets in Cambodia depend on credit officers establishing a capitalist regime of land value. To do so, credit officers engage in daily bricolage, using technologies of representation and data inscription, to create new grids of land evaluation that allow people to treat their land as a financial asset. I also argue that collateral is a kind of technology of control that reworks and respa-tialises household social reproduction for the benefit of financial accumulation. This paper thus contributes to our theoretical understanding of how land, labour, and finance capital are assembled together, and the political economic ramifications of such an assemblage.

Antipode, 2019

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how micro... more This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more-than-individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.

Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restru... more Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring
nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural
limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific
case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore
the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes
of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification
of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist
expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously
decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain nontimber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping
other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, noncommodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated
commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the
commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-
commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed
and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability
of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by
the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society
relations.

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2016

Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restru... more Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transformation of nature–society relations among the Heuny people. We argue that the compensation processes of valuation, abstraction, and privatization of property relations have contributed to the variegated commodification of land and other natural resources used by the Heuny. In contrast to arguments that capitalist expansion leads to ever increasing commodification, however, we demonstrate that compensation variously decommodifies other natural resources, such as certain non-timber forest products and wild fisheries, keeping other things, such as swidden fields and forest land, non-commodified. Moreover, these processes of variegated commodification are spatially variable, largely dependent on Heuny conceptions of space, thus affecting the commodification of land and other natural resources. Ultimately, by linking compensation to processes of (de)-commodification in its various forms, we suggest new ways in which capitalist social relations are being transformed and expanded through hydropower-induced resettlement. Furthermore, we call into question the ability of material compensation to restore previous livelihood and environmental conditions, as changes brought on by the compensation process itself have much deeper and profound implications when it comes to nature–society relations.

Water and Power: Environmental Governance and Strategies for Sustainability in the Lower Mekong Basin, 2019

This chapter narrates a short history of agricultural and environmental change in the village of ... more This chapter narrates a short history of agricultural and environmental change in the village of East Big Lake in southern Cambodia. Primarily based upon villagers’ memories of place, it explores the changing relationship between people and their local environment over the second half of the twentieth century, during which the country gained independence from France and then later became embroiled in civil war, genocide, and national reconstruction. People’s memories of the environmental past are retold through the landscape, drawing upon their personal experiences. The information retold in this historical narrative was learned through a yearlong ethnographic research project, in which the author carried out participant observation, interviews, and structured surveys with a group of 26 families. This chapter provides a local, village-based perspective on Cambodia’s agricultural and environmental history, about which relatively little has been written. It also demonstrates how place, memory, and landscape can contribute to environmental histories.

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2020

E-International Relations, Jul 2015