Increasingly, research seeks to understand how environmental distress motivates migration, often focusing on the importance of singular events such as flood, drought or crop loss. This article explores the case of a Cambodian community where environmental shocks have been frequent over the past decade and international migration has increased. It shows that as a result of recurring and varied environmental shocks, households increasingly perceive agriculture-based livelihood strategies as unwise and risky. This perception is widespread even among households not directly experiencing income loss. As a result, households use migration as a replacement for local livelihood strategies. These findings support two arguments relevant for future research and policy. First, that environmental shocks have importance beyond their immediate, direct impact. Second, that recurring shocks can influence preferences for and risk perceptions of local investments. Thus for policies to effectively address environmental vulnerability and/or rural development in precarious environments, they must incorporate local understandings of risk and possibility.
This article explores an unexpected and overlooked consequence of the expansion of microcredit: how it interacts with migration patterns. Drawing on qualitative research in northwest Cambodia, this study explores the uses, meanings and implications of ‘migra‐loans’ — microcredit loans that are used in tandem with household strategies of international migration. Using microcredit in combination with migration allows households to immediately meet consumption goals and utilize the credit being actively promoted by microfinance institutions, while also retreating from insecure and less profitable local livelihood strategies. These strategies problematize expectations about the developmental potential of microcredit, and highlight the importance of local context in framing rural livelihood choices.
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.
In the context of sharply increasing levels of international migration, development actors across Southeast Asia have begun to focus their attention on programming intended to make migration safer for aspiring and current migrant workers. These projects, however, typically begin with the assumption that more regular, orderly migration is also safer for migrants, an idea built into the language of the Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Compact on Migration. This article questions this assumption. It takes as its starting point the observation that migrant workers who move through legal channels do not systematically experience better outcomes among a range of indicators. Based on data collected from Cambodian, Burmese, Laotian, and Vietnamese labor migrants recently returned from Thailand, this work highlights the limits of regular migration to provide meaningfully "safer" experiences. Although migrants moving through regular channels report better pay and working conditions than those who moved through irregular channels, they also systematically report working conditions that do not meet legal standards, and routinely experience contract substitution. In other areas, regular migrants generally fare similarly to or worse than irregular migrants. They are more likely to experience deception and to have written or verbal agreements broken in migration processes. On arrival in Thailand, they routinely have their documents held, and they are more likely than irregular migrants to experience harassment and abuse both in the migration process and at their worksites. They are also more likely to return involuntarily and to struggle with financial insecurity and indebtedness after returning. These findings challenge mainstream development discourses seeking to promote safer migration experiences through expanding migration infrastructure. At the same time, they highlight the need for policymakers, development actors, and migration practitioners to reconsider the conflation of "safe" with "regular and orderly" migration throughout their programming.
Over the past two decades, Cambodia has experienced an unprecedented credit boom, a growth in lending so rapid that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) referred to it as "one of the fastest financial deepening episodes by historical crosscultural standards" (IMF, 2016, p. 4). This deepening has been driven by the expansion of microcredit. In tandem, over-indebtedness has increased among microcredit borrowers, and debt has become a significant political and economic concern. This article explores how over-indebtedness is understood and explained by stakeholders across microcredit value chains. To do so, we draw on interviews with microfinance institution (MFI) executives, investors, branch managers, partners, financial literacy trainers, loan officers and borrowers in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. We find that across the sector, dominant framings of over-indebtedness privilege borrower-centric explanations, while discounting the structural drivers of excessive lending and borrowing. As a consequence, current efforts to limit over-indebtedness are unlikely to produce the kinds of solutions that are most needed to reduce the debt stress among borrowers. These arguments have implications across the Global South, particularly for contexts where microfinance is rapidly expanding. K E Y W O R D SCambodia, credit/debt, development, microfinance, over-indebtedness | O141 BYLANDER Et AL.
This paper explores how gender norms and expectations shape the migration decisionmaking processes of Cambodian young people, in a community characterized by high levels of migration to Thailand. Based on qualitative fieldwork with migrant and nonmigrant youth, I examine how young people make sense of migration and its local alternatives, and highlight the various gendered pressures that young people, and particularly men, experience for migration. Given the lack of local life-making alternatives that neatly conform to hegemonic masculine ideals, young men experience strong pressures for migration and encounter negative social judgments where they seek to stay put. In contrast, young women experience less forceful migration pressures, perceive meaningful alternative life-making projects in the village, and feel more free to actively resist migration. More generally, my findings highlight the importance of interrogating gendered processes of migration not only in terms of how they affect women and those who choose to migrate but also with consideration to how they affect men, and those who choose -or would prefer -to stay home.
Over the last decade, the expansion of microfinance institutions (MFIs) has dramatically shifted the availability of credit across the developing world. This recent development provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between household labor migration and access to and use of formal credit. Both theories of migration and the expectations of formal credit providers have suggested that labor migration and credit are substitute solutions to the demand for capital in the developing world, with the implication that greater access to formal financial services may stem migration out of rural places. Using household survey data from Cambodia, an MFI-saturated country, we find that households using formal credit and households with greater access to formal credit are more likely to have labor migrants than households without access. This association persists across size of loan, purpose of loan, remittances behavior, and for domestic migrations. These findings complicate our understanding of the relationship between credit and migration, and call for a greater recognition of the importance of context in framing migration behavior. (Massey et al. 1998;Stark 1982;Taylor et al. 1996). As economic development disrupts subsistence or small-scale household production, households require capital to facilitate their transition to market-based production and consumption, and insurance to mediate risk while doing so. However, financial services are often lacking or inaccessible in developing economies. NELM theory views labor migration as a solution to this developmental dilemma, as migrant wages can be remitted or returned for investment and consumption at home, as well as used for risk management. More specifically, NELM theory proposes that migration and credit function as substitute solutions to a basic and crucial need for capital, and that migration serves as a substitute to insurance by providing a means of diversifying risk, in developing economies. By extension, both scholars and policy-makers have suggested that the development and expansion of credit and insurance markets in migrant-sending areas may stem out-migration (e.g., De Brauw and Rozelle 2008;Massey et al. 2002;Rozelle et al. 1999;Taylor et al. 1996;Zohir and Matin 2004). Reviews of research on the causes of migration characterize absent or limited financial markets as ''fundamental causes'' of migration (Taylor et al. 1996, p. 405), but studies exploring the relationship between access to credit or insurance markets and migration are mostly lacking. Studies of the relationship between credit and migration are complicated by the very nature of the dilemma: because poor, rural households do not have access to credit and insurance, there is limited empirical basis on which to consider the suggestion that migration is a response to their absence. Research in support of NELM, therefore, has tended to focus on patterns of remittance use, return migration, and business development (Durand et al. 1996;Garip 2012;Lindstrom and Lauster 2001;Taylor 1...
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