Waking the Watchdog: Needs, Opportunities, and Challenges of Environmental Advocacy in Modern Bhutan

In a half-century, the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan has emerged from isolation to achieve international recognition as a model of alternative development.The small country’s Gross National Happiness philosophy emphasizes sustainable development, cultural preservation, environmental conservation, and good governance over the long-favored global metric of success: Gross Domestic Product. Bhutan’s historic environmental record has been strong, but modernization and the 2008 transition to democracy are changing the ecological and socio-political landscape, requiring the adaptation of conservation strategy. This paper draws on historic and policy analysis, ethnographic observation, and qualitative interviews with 20 of Bhutan’s key stakeholders to identify needs, opportunities, and challenges to public environmental advocacy in Bhutan. While Bhutan is often characterized as a static, serene Buddhist kingdom, its recent history has been dynamic, marked by major political change, economic growth, and active cultivation of a specific and uniform national identity. Accelerating ecological degradation due to development, vulnerability to global threats such as climate change, and transformation of the governance system create a need to advocate for creative and effective solutions. The rapid rate of change within Bhutanese society allows unprecedented opportunities for powerful civil society action. Interviews with major environmental figures from government, international organizations, and domestic groups show a common call for new, dynamic actors who can serve as a “watchdog” for the environment. Their tasks include producing scientific research and translating it into policy, mediating effectively between government and citizens in the fledgling democracy, and overcoming traditional cultural deference to publically challenge actions that threaten the environment. Thoughtful, responsible, and public environmental advocacy is both necessary and possible, and holds potential to enhance the environmental and democratic integrity of modern Bhutan

Territorializing spatial data: Controlling land through One Map projects in Indonesia and Myanmar

Once confined to paper, national cartographic projects increasingly play out through spatial data infrastructures such as software programs and smartphones. Across the Global South, foreign donor-funded digital platforms emphasize transparency, accountability and data sharing while echoing colonial projects that consolidated statebased territorial knowledge. This article brings political geography scholarship on state and counter-mapping together with new work on the political ecology of data to highlight a contemporary dimension of territorialization, one in which state actors seek to consolidate and authorize national geospatial information onto digital platforms. We call attention to the role of data infrastructures in contemporary resource control, arguing that territorializing data both extends state territorialization onto digital platforms and, paradoxically, provides new avenues for non-state actors to claim land. Drawing on interviews, document review, and long-term fieldwork, we compare the origins, institutionalization and realization of Indonesia and Myanmar’s ‘One Map’ projects. Both projects aimed to create a government-managed online spatial data platform, building on national mapping and management traditions while responding to new international incentives, such as climate change mitigation in Indonesia and good democratic governance in Myanmar. While both projects encountered technical difficulties and evolved during implementation, different national histories and political trajectories resulted in the embrace and expansion of the program in Indonesia but reluctant participation and eventual crisis in Myanmar. Together, these cases show how spatial data infrastructures can both extend state control over space and offer opportunities for contesting or reimagining land and nation, even as such infrastructures remain embedded in local power relations

In the Law & On the Land: Finding the Female Farmer in Myanmar's National Land Use Policy

This paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar’s female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rights-bearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar’s contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities

The Peasant and Her Smartphone: Agrarian Change and Land Politics in Myanmar

292 pagesThis dissertation investigates how farmers, officials and activists navigate Myanmar’s contemporary political and agrarian transformations. I root my analysis in a particular agrarian landscape—the Kalay Valley—that provides a window onto environmental change and ethnic encounter in a privileged site of Southeast Asian state formation: the seam of the hills and the plains. Ethnographic research in and beyond Kalay allows me to examine how two different ethnic groups, the Burmans and the Chins, negotiate the changing values and meanings of land as collective territory, individual property and a source of livelihoods and community life. Recent economic liberalization and legal reforms have achieved neither democratic nor rural transition, as conventionally conceived. Rather, they have brought new technologies of production, communication and rule into the lives of Myanmar’s 35 million farmers, tools that shape both the stakes and terms of struggles on and for land. Each of three parts of the manuscript makes a distinct contribution that advances scholarship on environment, society and state. First, I bring together scholarship on ethnic and territorial boundary-making with insights from political ecology and agrarian studies to show how the erasure and recovery of political borders is embedded in the creation and closure of smallholder agrarian frontiers. Second, I contribute to debates on property, authority and state formation by analyzing Myanmar’s contemporary land reforms and proliferating land claims through the interlinked analytics of legal debris, elastic land, risky rights and performing property. Third, I bring classic agrarian questions of capital, labor, and class into conversation with work on rural-urban connections and the nascent field of digital geography to analyze the adoption of tractors, combine harvesters and smartphones. I highlight the role of new internet connections in sustaining communities across virtual and physical space, theorizing the ‘digital village’ as a simultaneously rural and virtual sphere, in which both soil and seasons, and the affordances of Facebook, structure social life and land politics.2022-08-2

Smart corruption: Satirical strategies for gaming accountability

Although new forms of data can be used to hold power to account, they also grant the powerful new resources to game accountability. We dub the latter behavior “smart corruption.” The concept highlights the possibility of appropriating algorithms, infrastructures, and data publics to accumulate benefits and obscure responsibility while leaning into the positive associations of transparency. Unlike conventional forms of corruption, smart corruption is disguised as progressive, and is thus difficult to spot or analyze through existing legal or ethical frameworks. To illustrate, we outline a satirical strategy for gaming accountability. Identifying the particular mechanisms and outcomes of transgressive activities carried out under the veneer of data-driven transparency, as well as the key actors and organizations most active in gaming accountability, is an important research and political project

Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond

Myanmar, a nation situated between India, China and Southeast Asia, has long histories of colonialism, violence, and resource extraction. This special issue introduction, written in the midst of Myanmar’s 2021 military coup and the COVID-19 pandemic, offers two critical and feminist interventions – ‘remaking’ and ‘living with’ – to understand the contested and embodied political geographies of extractive resource frontiers in Myanmar. ‘Remaking’ focuses on the long roots of resource frontiers, underscoring the historical and spatial processes through which Myanmar’s plural authorities have restructured diverse territories for accumulation and extraction from the pre-colonial period to the recent ‘democratic transition’. ‘Living with’ resource frontiers bring attention to people’s everyday lives, and why and how they adapt, resist, comply, suffer and profit from resource frontiers. In bringing together a diverse set of literatures with original empirical research, the articles in this collection offer analyses of Myanmar’s pre-coup period that inform contemporary post-coup politics. Together, they demonstrate the material, affective, and embodied nature of resource frontiers as they are (re)made and lived with – in and beyond militarised spaces like Myanmar

Organic online politics: Farmers, Facebook, and Myanmar's military coup

Despite perennial hope in the democratic possibilities of the internet, the rise of digital authoritarianism threatens online and offline freedom across much of the world. Yet while critical data studies has expanded its geographic focus, limited work to date has examined digital mobilization in the agrarian communities that comprise much of the Global South. This article advances the concept of “organic online politics,” to demonstrate how digital mobilization grows from specific rural conditions, material concerns, and repertoires of resistance, within the constraints of authoritarian violence and internet control. To do so, we examine social media interaction in the wake of the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, an agrarian nation with recent, rapid digital connection that corresponded with a decade-long democratic turn. Analyzing an original archive of over 2000 Facebook posts collected from popular farming pages and groups, we find a massive drop-off in online activity after the military coup and analyze the shifting temporalities of digital mobilization. Crucially, we highlight the embeddedness of online interaction within the material concerns of farming communities, examining how social media become a key forum for negotiating political crisis in Myanmar's countryside. These findings call attention to rural digital subcultures as fertile sites of investigation and point toward the need for future scholarship on data practices that attends to rooted agrarian struggles

Biodiversity monitoring for a just planetary future

Data that influence policy and major investment decisions risk entrenching social and political inequities