Global precarity chains and the economic impact on Cambodia’s garment workers

Brickell, Katherine; Chhom, Theavy; Lawreniuk, Sabina; So, Hengvotey

doi:10.31389/lsepress.cov.h

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…It is also possible that we did not capture the effect of the pandemic on local economic stability. Our sampling occurred between September 2020 to February 2021, just before mass layoffs (as opposed to temporary unemployment) occurred at the garment factories that many women (and by extension, many households) across Cambodia rely on (Brickell et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We can speculate that a lack of similar responses in Cambodia and Laos reflect a lack of such alternative employment for men; Cambodian factories have tended to be female-dominated (e.g. Brickell et al, 2022), and Laos lags behind both countries in industrialization (Nakata, 2021). However, we also note that while increased employment and economic stability are expected to improve some conservation challenges such as direct hunting, increased economic stability and by extension available income can facilitate the use of wildlife, as seen in Vietnam (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Perceptions of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on communities and wildlife trade: Preliminary qualitative analysis from hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

Davis

Castaneda

Crudge

et al. 2023

Conservat Sci and Prac

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The COVID‐19 pandemic has accelerated efforts to engage critically with forest‐adjacent, rural, communities who rely on wildlife. We interviewed 109 hunters of wildlife across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos regarding the effect the COVID‐19 pandemic has had on them, as well as within their communities. We found that “negative economic impacts” was a prevalent theme due to loss of employment, rising prices, and restrictions on trade resulting from city‐wide lockdowns, factory closures, and border closures. In Vietnam, hunting was stated to have increased as young men returned to their villages; however, in Vietnam and Cambodia trade in wildlife was believed to have decreased due to the inability of middlemen traders to travel easily. Our results from Laos illustrated general economic cost, but otherwise no impact of COVID‐19 on hunting and trade in wildlife. Here, we show the complex impacts of a pandemic, with contextually specific conservation positives (such as decreased trade), and conservation negatives (such as increased hunting to supplement loss of employment). We illustrate the importance of establishing sustainable, non‐wildlife‐dependent livelihoods within rural communities, to mitigate hunting and the potential for disease transmission, and the value in engaging with hunters to understand locally and spatially specific trends in global conservation challenges.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptions of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on communities and wildlife trade: Preliminary qualitative analysis from hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

Davis

Castaneda

Crudge

et al. 2023

Conservat Sci and Prac

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In other words, individuals are taking out more microloans in order to survive on a day-to-day basis, but repaying the microloan from the labor of other family members. This survival tactic essentially places a growing responsibility for the future repayment of these microloans onto those engaged in precarious forms of employment in Cambodia and elsewhere [87]. Moreover, history shows that when the repayment of microloans becomes the responsibility of other family members and friends perhaps doing a little better, the monetizing of social relationships in this way is almost always a way of destroying them in the longer term [88].…”

Section: Have Mcis Provided a Healthy Supply Of Microcredit To The Ma...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Land Titling and Microcredit in Cambodia: Examining the Reality of Hernando de Soto’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’

Bateman

2024

Land

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Starting with the work of Hernando de Soto in the 1980s, the role of land tenure soon attracted the attention of the international development community as a neoliberal-oriented theory of change rooted in the possession and use of private individual land titles by the poor. One of the central mechanisms proposed by de Soto was a three-step process that involves the poor (1) “securing” their tenure with land titles, (2) using their newly acquired land titles as collateral to leverage large amounts of microcredit to be used to establish a functioning microenterprise, and then (3) escaping from their poverty due to the jobs and income associated with founding and running a microenterprise. This paper explores what I call de Soto’s “three steps to heaven” theory of change, a concept that was taken on board with gusto by leading Western governments and virtually all of the main international development institutions, particularly the World Bank. I argue that Cambodia provides the ideal setting for evaluating de Soto’s concept because, since around 2020, it has possessed the largest microcredit sector in the world (on a per capita basis), thanks largely to the obligatory use of land titles as the collateral required to obtain microcredit. While the first two of de Soto’s “three steps to heaven” have been realized, the evidence shows that the assumptions related to step three have proved to be extremely problematic: the ubiquity of microcredit that was achieved since the early 2010s via steps one and two has not, in general, improved the lives and communities of Cambodia’s poor through accelerated microenterprise development. It appears, instead, to have contributed to deeper poverty, insecurity, vulnerability and inequality. I conclude that de Soto’s “three steps to heaven” theory reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the real institutional drivers of sustainable local economic development and poverty reduction.

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Global precarity chains and the economic impact on Cambodia’s garment workers

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Perceptions of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on communities and wildlife trade: Preliminary qualitative analysis from hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

Perceptions of the COVID‐19 pandemic's impact on communities and wildlife trade: Preliminary qualitative analysis from hunters in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

Land Titling and Microcredit in Cambodia: Examining the Reality of Hernando de Soto’s ‘Three Steps to Heaven’

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