Expanding transboundary environmental governance: A mobile political ecology of sand and shifting resource‐based livelihoods in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Environmental change and governance operate across multiple, interconnected scales. In Southeast Asia, there are calls to broaden the study of transboundary environmental governance to address the range of scales, actors, and flows in analysis. In response, we propose a framework to move beyond statist framings of ‘transboundary’ in the region by drawing on van Schendel's proposal for flow studies on the one hand, to overcome the ‘geographies of ignorance’ that stem from fixed studies of nation‐states, and mobile political ecology on the other, to emphasise the role of resource users and their mobilities in environmental governance. We focus on transboundary sand and sediments in rivers, the rise in sand mining in the region, and its impacts on livelihoods and cross‐border flows. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2019 along the transboundary Salween River in the Myanmar‐Thai borderlands. This research shows that sand extraction not only impacts existing sand‐based livelihoods, like riverbank gardening, but also intersects with migration patterns. Migration here is being exacerbated by sand mining alongside processes of environmental and political‐economic change, but these intersections would be overlooked in a fixed or statist approach. We illustrate these complex changes by presenting two ‘sand stories’ that emerge from our research. This primary research combined with a novel conceptual framing expands our analysis of transboundary by revealing and highlighting the linkages between mobilities and transboundary resource flows. In doing so, our analysis brings people, livelihoods and mobilities to the centre of transboundary environment governance and opens scholarly and practice‐based discussions to the range of actors, scales and resource regimes involved.

A share in the sands: trips, pits and potholes in Accra, Ghana

“…Drawing from fourteen months of ethnographic research in Accra in 2017 and 2021, I engage with the material movements of sand across the city, as it travels from extraction zones (or pits) to lorries and then to places of consumption. The article reveals the diverse labours, livelihoods and income-seeking practices that coalesce around sand's material economies and their multiple temporalities (Kothari and Arnall 2020)aligning with a literature that recognizes the complex and differentiated livelihood implications of sand's extraction and consumption (Anokye et al 2022;Marschke and Rousseau 2022;Marschke et al 2021;Lamb and Fung 2022;Lamb et al 2019). By honing in on the material behaviours and temporal junctures of sand as it shifts its shape, form and direction, the article draws out the ways in which sand emerges as a platform for exchange, negotiation, different forms of labour, diverse livelihoodsand ultimately income.…”

Transboundary environmental governance: Emerging themes and lessons from Southeast Asia

“…Flows of natural resources, finances, technologies, people and ecological knowledge across administrative borders inform hybrid arrangements of transboundary environmental governance. Lamb and Fung (2022) use a mobile political ecology framework to analyze flows and fixes of transboundary sand commons along the Salween River at the Myanmar‐Thailand extraction frontier. Their study provides important insights into two parallel and partly interconnected sets of flows that generate transboundary governance regimes: (a) the sand trade; and (b) out‐migration corridors that hollow out villages alongside, and in response to, the adverse environmental impacts of sand extraction.…”