Asia Pacific Viewpoint最新文献

Gender considerations have been part of climate change adaptation planning in the Global South for the last two decades. Despite this, studies have reported a gap in understanding how organisations incorporate people's diverse experiences of climate risks into planning and implementing adaptation strategies, particularly for women disproportionately impacted by climate risks. Taking the case of Bangladesh, this study contributes to this knowledge gap by exploring the representation of power in organisational decision-making arenas concerning adaptation planning. The investigation involved an analysis of five major national adaptation guidelines and 22 projects conducted in Bangladesh, in addition to in-depth interviews with 36 development practitioners. This article argues that adaptation planning is a top-down organisational process in Bangladesh. Decisions are undertaken in ‘inner circles’ involving experts, bureaucrats and top officials of major national NGOs and often fail to include the voices of diverse social groups affected by intersecting inequalities, including ethnicity, disability, religion, locality and, in particular, gender. The study elaborates on the need for a major change to planning and decision-making processes to achieve adaptation planning and strategies that effectively reflect women's diversified and localised realities and allow them to respond to climate risks adequately.

In this research note, I outline an approach to embodied experiences of care and caregiving in ethnographic scholarship on care. I describe how ethnographers of care and caregiving can use embodied methodologies, particularly through attending also to the cross-cultural differences in embodied experiences. In this research note, I bring together care research and cross-cultural embodied ethnography with my own work in Asia Pacific to outline an approach to researching care in the pluriverse – the multiple, overlapping realities of ontology, culture and experience that underpin all our lives. I draw on Annemarie Mol's conceptualisation of the body multiple (2002), Anna Tsing's understanding of awkward engagement (2005), Gibson-Graham's reading for difference (2020) and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei's research on hygiene (2014) to consider how researcher bodies might be useful in detecting pluriversal encounters in caregiving.

Crop booms are a significant driver of change for both rural landscapes and smallholder livelihoods. Cavendish bananas have boomed in northern Laos and replaced maize, the previous boom crop, through land leasing contracts between farmers and Chinese companies. This study of two villages in Oudomxay Province explores rural households' participation in this banana boom and the conjunctures that shape variegated livelihood pathways and outcomes. Household participation in the banana boom depended on their assets (land and labour), livelihood context and social pressure. Household income in both villages generally improved, but differentially. The better-off, and those with a wider array of livelihood options, used income from bananas to move to primarily non-agricultural livelihoods, while many poorer households became dependent on wage labour in banana production, at the expense of their health. Women reported to be content to escape agricultural labour through land leasing; but many who contributed labour to banana production felt trapped in ongoing heavy labour, with attendant adverse impacts. These outcomes reflect how the conjunctures of different household, community and external elements, and crop boom-bust cycles, lead to differentiated (‘variegated’) household livelihood trajectories and outcomes for households and for men and women, and suggest points of policy intervention.

Postcolonial Macau is keen to celebrate its colonial legacy to preserve its cultural distinctiveness. This study explores the reordering of a Portuguese colonial site, the Village of Our Lady in Ka Ho, into an architectural heritage in the broader postcolonial context. Employing the Foucauldian concept of ‘other spaces’, specifically ‘utopia’ and ‘heterotopia’, the study argues for the heterotopic nature of heritage. It identifies the discourses and material representations of heritage, their construction and their mirroring of mainstream social ideals. Heritage as heterotopia is a conceptual entity that informs and is realised with material objects. The discourse takes heritage spaces as mediums for performances through symbolic loading on material objects to demonstrate the space's otherness. In addition, colonial nostalgia emerges as a dominant narrative in shaping urban identity. The primary proposition of this research is that heritage is made through othering, and the otherness of heritage is presented through performing. Heritage-making transforms the site from a ‘heterotopia of deviation’ to a ‘heterotopia of performance’, which reveals the societal transition from early modernity that advocates for scientific knowledge to postmodernity that embraces neoliberalism, and then to the arriving era of post-postmodernity based on performatism.

Across the Pacific, socio-cultural networks are a key way to share knowledge and skills. However, as peer-to-peer learning is contextually and culturally located, it is important to understand the place-based specifics of such learning. This article draws on the evaluation of a series of household-based workshops on agricultural development and food security in a remote area of Solomon Islands. It outlines this community's kinship ecology for farmer learning pathways and demonstrates the interdependence of gender and kinship-based social networks, showing how topics related to ethics of living were shared within clans, while food and agriculture topics were shared within households. The article concludes that understanding local knowledge networks can contribute to the design of more effective peer learning for food security and rural development.

The impacts of climate change in the Pacific and worldwide have prompted researchers and practitioners to find ways to define, assess and support community resilience. This paper presents a community resilience framework to help meet this challenge. While traditional framings of resilience in scholarship are often based on deficit models that focus on vulnerability and gaps, this framework draws on strengths-based principles and systems thinking approaches to support a holistic and integrated perspective of community resilience. Pacific community resilience literature underpins the framework, which values and prioritises diverse community insights to support locally defined pathways towards adaptation and resilience building. We offer examples of future application of the framework in a range of contexts such as research, programme design, strategic policy, programme implementation or evaluation.

In structuration theory, Giddens emphasises the importance of social practices in shaping and reproducing social structures, believing that the constitution of agents and structures represents a duality and advocating that structure is both a medium and outcome of the reproduction of practices. The traditional culture and customs embodied in Macanese cuisine can be considered as a structured process. Macanese cuisine reflects the unique food culture and customs of Macao society, presenting an irreplaceable way of life and cultural value. Macanese cuisine has developed based on the traditional customs and practices of the Macanese. It is recognised as an important intangible cultural heritage, receiving protection and promotion from the government. However, high-speed modernity challenges the guarantee for continuity of Macanese traditional customs. Debates continue regarding how to promote the sustainability of Macanese cuisine. This study adopts Giddens' structuration theory to understand the evolutionary process of Macanese cuisine. It reveals the significance of individual agents' initiatives in promoting the rebirth of Macanese cuisine, and preserving the distinctiveness and self-assertion of the Macanese community. Furthermore, the fusion culture that underlies Macanese cuisine can moderate the high-speed modernity of gastronomy tourism and promote this cuisine's sustainability.

Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are vulnerable to climate change impacts, including sea level rise, extreme weather events and other environmental changes. Planned relocation can be an adaptive response to climatic threats. In Fiji, six communities have already relocated. While there is growing interest in planned relocation, there are few empirical case studies from which to learn. Narikoso village, in the Kadavu Province of Fiji, undertook partial relocation in 2020. Drawing on qualitative research (interviews, group discussions, observation), informed by Vanua methodology in 2022, this study examines the impacts of partial planned relocation on people's lives and livelihoods. Seven sustainable livelihood assets – or forms of ‘capital’ – are explored: natural, social, financial, human, physical and cultural, with the addition of spiritual. Our research found that planned relocation altered forms of capital that underpin sustainable livelihoods, leading to both benefits and problems. We argue that planned relocation must not only reduce exposure to climatic and environmental risk, but promote and preserve the integrity of local ecosystems, value continuity of culture and sustain and develop diverse assets that support sustainable livelihoods. This demands deep engagement with climate change-affected communities to ensure that planned relocations sustain people's livelihoods, dignity and survival.

Indonesian rural youth face challenges accessing farmland and sustaining an agricultural livelihood while their labour is not necessarily absorbed by other sectors. In that context, the Omnibus Law on Job Creation (Law 11/2020) promises to liberalise trade and investment across multiple sectors, including agriculture and food security. Combining legal research and political economy approaches to youth and agrarian challenges, we identify amendments to legislation that reduce safeguards for the environment, workers' and farmers' rights and their livelihoods. If fully implemented, the legislative amendments could further narrow youth's options both for secure formal work and futures in farming by accelerating the expansion of infrastructure, industrial plantations and extractive industries that utilise low-wage labour and huge areas of land. This exposes inconsistencies in the government's approach to increase future food security by promoting intensification of agriculture and attracting youth to farming, while enabling agro- and resource extraction that absorbs land yet offers limited and precarious employment prospects.

Debates surrounding craft-making have long centred on the intricate relationship among the head, hand and the materials. While studies have typically differentiated between traditional craft and creative crafts by focusing on specific aspect of the relationship, the co-existence and interdependence of these elements remained largely unexplored. This research focuses on ceramic craft making in Jingdezhen, where traditional and creative crafts coexist. We employ ethnographic research to comprehend the connotation of traditional and creative crafts, examining them from the perspectives of engagement and detachment. In doing so, this study challenges oversimplified narratives that undervalue the making role of traditional craft and position creative craft as a means for self-expression and resistance against alienation. Instead, we emphasise the complex relationship between the two, characterised by mutual dependence and mutual detriment. These findings partly stem from the predominance of detachment in traditional crafts, which prioritise the act of making and, to some extent, maximising efficiency. They also relate to the prevalence of engagement in creative craft, where the pursuit of creativity is supported by traditional crafts.