ABSTRACT
Drawing on field research across four years, this article examines a climate change adaptation project in the Cambodian highlands. It examines the logic and rationality of making vulnerable groups resilient in the context of climate change. It shows how adaption projects tend to understand vulnerability as the result of a series of external threats that arise due to global climate change and are expressed primarily as lost income. Using the example of Knaing village in Mondolkiri province this article shows that when it comes to vulnerability, it is often unhelpful to separate between capitalist relations, state territorialization and climate change. Economic, political, and cultural relations that people in the village find themselves imbedded in are co-produced through the interaction of climatic forces, the expansion of capitalist relations and state territorialization. This article thus tries to sketch out a conception of vulnerability based on villager’s changing agricultural practices and livelihood trajectories in the context of the expansion of Economic Land Concessions, logging of surrounding forests, and settlement of adjacent lands and state conservation efforts.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to one anonymous reviewer, to Philip Hirsch for providing inputs into an early version of this article, and to Channa Kong and Sopheak Chann for accompanying me on field research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Here I follow Grove Citation2014b, 98 who explains that “biopower signals a form of power that promotes the security and well-being of individual and collective life. It operates through contextually specific configurations of techniques of discipline, biopolitics, security, and environmental power that improve life by targeting the individual, the population, its milieu (or setting), and the relations amongst people and things that comprise a milieu, respectively.”
9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
10 See also the Global Commission on Adaptation Citation2019.
13 The Adaptation Fund began operations in 2008 as an official mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to channel climate finance into medium and small adaptation projects in developing states. The World Bank was made trustee of the fund.
14 The Global Commission on Adaptation was started in 2018 by the Government of the Netherlands, the World Resources Institute, and the Global Center on Adaptation. It produced influential reports and articles for the 2019 United Nations Climate Summit.
16 The Global Center on Adaptation, which has offices across the world, forms partnerships with international organizations, governments, and universities to promote climate adaptation and resilience.
39 Critics have long pointed out that the World Bank has been entrusted with a number of international climate change funds and has managed them in line with discourses and practices dominant within that institution, rather than the demands of recipient countries. See Young Citation2002; Rich Citation2013.
42 One of the conditions for receiving AF funding is that projects are carried out in areas with secure tenure – which in many cases, is non-existent in forested areas in Cambodia. See Milne and Mahanty Citation2015.
43 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 3.
44 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 4.
45 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 35.
46 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 35.
47 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 37.
49 Together, these accounted for US$2.8 million of the US$ five million project budget.
50 According to Cambodia’s 2008 census (the last national census) Mondolkiri had a population of 60,811. Mondolkiri is Cambodia’s largest province by land area. See National Institute of Statistics Cambodia Citation2008.
51 Seventy-seven percent of schools lack potable water (compared to a fifty percent national average) and fifty-four percent are without toilets (thirty-four percent national average). The upper secondary completion rate for girls is 10.1 percent and for boys 12.4 percent, compared to a national average of 20.1 and twenty percent, respectively. See Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport Citation2015. In 2011 the adult literacy rate in Mondolkiri was fifty-six percent, compared to a ninety-five percent rate in Phnom Penh. The infant mortality rate in Mondolkiri is 82/1000. See the National Institute of Statistics Directorate general for Health Citation2011.
54 C4 EcoSolutions and Ministry of Environment – Royal Government of Cambodia Citation2012, 37.
55 It is common amongst rural Bunong households to move out of a house when the mother or father dies as it is believed the spirit stays with the house and it is both disrespectful and unlucky for the rest of the family to continue living there.
56 The 2014–2016 El Nina cycle was the most severe recorded since 1950.
57 The Cambodian administrative system features an elected commune chief who appoints chiefs for the villages within the commune.
58 Coconut and jackfruit are particularly prone to drought and even in a regular dry season face major challenges, especially when planted in areas without year-round irrigation, on slopes, and in sandy or rocky soils. Mango trees, which are more drought resistant, still require saturated soils in drought conditions to survive.
60 In comparison, in some of the worst-hit districts of northwest Cambodia, farmers experienced paddy loss rates of over seventy-five percent.
61 It was widely understood by those living in the area that this went well beyond merely collecting already cut timber; just like he had done in Ratanakiri province over the prior seven years where he had been granted a similar right, Try Pheap brought in loggers to collect valuable timber from far and wide. See Milne Citation2015; Pye and Titthara Citation2014.
65 Milne Citation2015. Try Pheap is renowned for paying loggers a piece rate, rather than employing full-time workers. His agents also recruited informal loggers, who were provided with necessary equipment.
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Tim Frewer
Tim Frewer is an independent academic based in Cambodia who works on critical development.
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