Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

Understanding of how rural livelihood systems embedded in different social-ecological contexts affect household energy consumption behaviour is critical for facilitating rural energy transition. This study assesses the energy consumption level and structure for three different livelihood systems, including mobile livelihood (ML), semi-settled livelihood (SSL) and settled livelihood (SL), from the pastoral regions of the Tibetan Plateau. Results show that the average household energy consumption in ML, SSL and SL systems is 9250.1, 14 714.3 and 7004.5 kgce, respectively. Although yak dung is the dominant energy source in the ML and SSL systems, commercial energy sources are extensively used. When rural herders are resettled into peri-urban areas, commercial energy sources become dominant though the percentage of yak dung consumption remains high. Mobile livestock production strategies and the associated rangeland tenure regimes and cultural practices are key determinant household energy choice factors of the ML and SSL systems. Comparatively, the role of income is more impactful on fuel consumption patterns in the SL system. Accordingly, this study argues that utilising a livelihood system approach in understanding household energy consumption behaviour allows us to design energy policies and innovative and customised clean energy sources that better fit rural livelihood systems.

Children's voices have been little heard in the Pacific research. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 asserts the child's right to have a say on matters that affect them and for their views to be considered. There has been massive growth in technologically assisted participative research; however, we argue the value of hand drawn maps should not be underestimated in the rush to engage with more advanced techniques. We present data from 267 neighbourhood maps drawn by children in Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa and New Zealand. To better understand the social construction of knowledge in children's everyday lives, we propose two models to conceptualise the complexity of their world, a social connection and a spatial connection model. These models reveal how Pacific Island children negotiate different levels of social connection from home, family, and community through to transnational kinship relations. People, specifically family, provide the geographic basis on which their spatial encounters are overlaid. Irrespective of country or rural/urban/atoll setting, it is social space that is the strongest connector for children as displayed in their maps. Application of our models can be used to reveal how knowledge is socially constructed in Pacific children's everyday lives.

Using China Migrants Dynamic Survey Project data from 2011 to 2017, this study investigates the labour market impacts of equalisation of basic public health and medical services on internal migrants by the difference-in-differences approach in China. The results reveal that equalisation of basic public health and medical services increases the probability of labour participation and the income of internal migrants. Male migrants, married migrants and migrants who cover long migration distances have a much stronger positive response to the equalisation of basic public health and medical services in terms of likelihood of labour participation and level of income. Mechanism checks indicate that the increases in labour participation and income of internal migrants are enhanced by the improvement of medical service utilisation, human capital and social integration after the implementation of the equalisation of basic public health and medical services.

In Indonesia, state and non-state actors frame youth attrition from agriculture as a food security concern and propose policy solutions focused on ‘modern’ farming techniques. Using a critical framing analysis of five national Indonesian news media sources from 2010 to 2020, we examine how government, development and private sector actors portray youth in agriculture, and the underlying assumptions that inform related policy and development agendas. Our analysis reveals contrasting portrayals of youth in agriculture. Youth are often depicted as averse to farming, while also being innovative adopters of modern farming techniques, equipment, and digital technologies. We argue that media frames reflect and reinforce the dominant discourses of state and non-state actors, which have a productivist orientation, proposing technical, capital-intensive agricultural solutions to food insecurity and related issues. News media pays comparatively less attention to structural barriers to youth entry and success in agriculture, such as limited access to land and finance and unfavourable terms of trade.

In Vietnam's capital city Hanoi, the growing popularity of application based (app-based) motorbike taxis has offered many inhabitants new opportunities to pursue a mobile livelihood with ride-hailing platforms. Nonetheless, as this influx of app-based drivers has hit the city's streets, specific livelihood and mobility frictions have emerged, notably with informal, ‘traditional’ motorbike taxi drivers, or xe ôm. In this paper we analyse these evolving sites and moments of friction and their impacts on driver livelihoods and mobilities for both driver groups. We draw conceptually on debates regarding mobility, platform economies, and urban livelihoods, while specifically interrogating the concept of friction to highlight three possible analytical applications. Methodologically, we interpret static and ride-along interviews completed with over 130 drivers. We highlight a range of tactics ‘traditional’ and app-based motorbike taxi drivers have employed to respond to rising frictions, defend their ‘turf’, and maintain their street-based livelihoods. Driver responses reveal differing access to distinctive forms of social capital and social networks, and contrasting levels of agency regarding their mobilities. By conceptually teasing apart the notion of friction, we wish to expand and deepen understandings of the experiences of vulnerability, precarity, and other impacts of platformisation for different motorbike taxi driver cohorts.

The article seeks to understand the different types and sources of politicisation as well as the consequences for Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects. It is argued that while the personalised insulated type of foreign policymaking is conducive to intra-system politicisation, the institutionalised responsive type is associated with extra-system politicisation. While the former type is contingent on political turnovers and brings about abrupt shocks, the latter oftentimes generates societal pushback from socio-economic groups. The article focuses on two flagship Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure projects in Malaysia and Indonesia. Based on fieldwork interviews and process tracing, the article finds that the East Coast Rail Link project in Malaysia has suffered from high risk of political interruption owing to Malaysia's personalised insulated type of foreign policymaking, whereas the Jakarta–Bandung High Speed Rail project in Indonesia has encountered sustained obstacles from Indonesian society and brought about substantial delays under Indonesia's institutionalised responsive type.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how community relational economic practices in virtual spaces are effective in building resilience because they are borne of and sustained by familiar traditional Fijian values of collective work and social interdependence. The researchers adopted a pandemic-induced methodology, conducting online-based talanoa (fluid conversations between two or more people) with a number of people leading, or involved in, these initiatives. We also engaged with online community groups behind a number of initiatives. Examples are provided of online crowdfunding, livestreaming of concerts to solicit donations, and bartering facilitated by social media sites. To conclude, we stress the enduring nature of communal bonds and traditional systems which Pacific people readily adapt and translate into different forums and forms in the face of challenges such as the restrictions and financial hardships caused by COVID-19. The findings highlight that solesolevaki – a tradition of working together for a common cause – can also occur in the digital era: this demonstrates the deep connection of Fijian peoples and their sense of obligation to one another and to their culture, regardless of where they are in the world.

The emergence of a body of work on ethics since the 1990s with a special interest in the self in the Western academia, inspired by Michel Foucault's earlier work, resonates with a concomitant renewed scholarly interest in classical Confucian ethics both in China and internationally. An emphasis on culture and the rejection of a Euro-centric universalist self in these bodies of work accompanies the disavowal of the very possibility of a generic reflexive self. This article seeks to critically examine the ontological positions on the self of these bodies of work, of Foucault's later thoughts, and of classical Confucian ethics. It is argued that there is a theoretical affinity between Foucault's later thoughts and classical Confucian ethics, with both philosophers acknowledging reflexivity as a universally inherited nature of self and making a special consideration of cultural equality and commonality. The examination includes advocacy for a more nuanced approach to notions of cultural equality that relies on targeted research and intercultural dialogue to avoid any predetermining of cultural differences, to allow better-informed appreciation of differences, and to develop a more dynamic conceptualization of culture. This article concludes by initiating a discussion about the design of an integrated approach to cultivate reflexivity through training practices that bring together Foucauldian and Confucian ideas.

Well-being is increasingly being promoted and used to describe social progress. However, tension exists between framings that focus on enhancing individual well-being (living well) and societal or collective framings of well-being (living well together). Well-being is central to Aotearoa New Zealand's COVID-19 response and recovery. The COVID-19 pandemic reopened debates about what kind of society people want to live in. Our research explored the ‘shared typical’ or commonality of experiences of the first wave of COVID-19 response in Aotearoa New Zealand. Semi-structured interviews provided insights into a wide range of concerns participants faced and what that meant for their well-being and the well-being of Aotearoa New Zealand. We found that well-being is both multidimensional and hierarchical, and while people talked about their own well-being, it was often in the context of broader social well-being. These findings support research showing that well-being is relational. We suggest that Indigenous models of well-being are well placed to inform policy strategies enabling holistic well-being, but this needs to be done in ways that pair Indigenous and Western knowledge, rather than integrating or assimilating this knowledge into Western science approaches.

Embodied goods like cosmetic surgery comprise a unique and growing consumer industry, most of all in the Asia-Pacific, yet the rationalisation processes motivating their purchase are less understood. Addressing this lacuna, this article builds upon open-ended surveys and semi-structured interviews of consumers in Seoul, South Korea to articulate a relational approach to examine the rationalisation of purchases of cosmetic surgery as an embodied good. Theorised through the conceptual lens of Bourdieusian capital, participant accounts point to macro-level economic anxieties that inform a micro-level cognitive logic of competition through which consumers rationalise the purchase of embodied goods as a form of aesthetic capital. When performed, this capital is believed to offer actors social distinction that provides workplace and social networking advantages by impressing gatekeepers and alters. Participants are shown to reconceptualise their bodies in a means-end orientation for upward mobility but stress their resignation and powerlessness in being forced to adopt this instrumental reconceptualisation as a response to intensifying economic hardships in contemporary capitalist South Korea.