Philip Hirsch
Biographic Data
| ID | 102751 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip Hirsch |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip |
| FAMILY NAME | Hirsch |
| SIGNATURE | HIRSCH P |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3887-6203 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 363 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Clarifying rupture: An authors’ reply
In our article, ‘Rupture: Towards a Critical, Emplaced, and Experiential View of Nature-Society Crisis’, we advocated for contextually rich and critical understandings of environmental crises and their catalytic effects. This authors’ reply responds to four commentaries whose authors raise helpful questions and insights. We first review the spatial and temporal connections between specific rupture episodes and ongoing processes of extraction and …
Rupture: Towards a critical, emplaced, and experiential view of nature-society crisis
We are currently seeing a global escalation in social and environmental disruption, yet concepts like the Anthropocene do not fully capture the intensity and generative scope of this crisis. ‘Rupture’ is being used as a term for specific and intense episodes of change, such as wildfires or toxic pollution releases. This is a useful addition to our lexicon for nature-society change but needs to be more robustly theorized. Defining rupture as an in…
Selective border permeability: Governing complex environmental issues through and beyond Covid-19
COVID-19 has changed the permeability of borders in transboundary environmental governance regimes. While borders have always been selectively permeable, the pandemic has reconfigured the nature of cross-border flows of people, natural resources, finances and technologies. This has altered the availability of spaces for enacting sustainability initiatives within and between countries. In Southeast Asia, national governments and businesses seeking…
Scaling the environmental commons: Broadening our frame of reference for transboundary governance in Southeast Asia
The transboundary environmental commons in Southeast Asia are normally conceived in terms of shared resources and environmental impacts that transcend national borders. The Mekong's ‘fugitive resources’ of water, fish and sediment and the issue of Indonesia's smoke haze drift into Malaysia and Singapore dominate discussion. Assumed national interests shape actors and institutional arrangements for transboundary commons governance. Failure to addr…
Limits to neoliberal authoritarianism in the politics of land capitalisation in Thailand: Beyond the paradox
Thailand presents several paradoxes that complicate linear assumptions about capitalisation of land and consequent processes of accumulation, dispossession and concentration. These paradoxes become apparent when today's conundrums are considered in their historical contexts of commercialisation, establishment of transferable property rights and financialisation, each tempered both by state policy and by counter-movements that have maintained smal…
Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia
Integration, fragmentation and assemblage in the Mekong: Elaborating on responses to shifting regional geopolitics
Routledge Handbook of the Environment in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia hosts the world’s third-largest expanse of tropical forests after the Amazon and Congo basins, and a treasure of terrestrial biodiversity. Countries in the region are diverse in terms of their forest management regimes and broader political economies – as well as the extent to which their original forest endowments have been degraded or converted to other land uses – but there are nevertheless many commonalities across national con…
He Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach to River Basin Development
The Mekong: A Socio-Legal Approach River Basin Development. By Ben Boer, Philip Hirsch, Fleur Johns, Ben Saul and Natalia Scurrah. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016. Softcover: 251pp. This book is impressive assemblage of scholarship by four professors of and one researcher in human and environmental geography--all based at Australian universities. In eight chapters that bear no single author identification, the book presents the and hydropower dev…
The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams
The Mekong: A Socio-legal Approach to River Basin Development
An international river basin is an ecological system, an economic thoroughfare, a geographical area, a font of life and livelihoods, a geopolitical network and, often, a cultural icon. It is also a socio-legal phenomenon. This book is the first detailed study of an international river basin from a socio-legal perspective. The Mekong River Basin, which sustains approximately 70 million people across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vie…
Emerging Issues In Southeast Asian Geography: Local, Non-Local and Collaborative Scholarship
This paper reviews several prominent journals to identify key trends and issues in Southeast Asian geography. The review identifies the locus of articles' geographical scholarship, the balance between issue-based versus other types of articles, and the trends in the subject matter of the issue-based publications. The paper considers the meaning of an ‘issue-based’ approach to geography in local and non-local geographical scholarship on and in Sou…
Transborder governance of forests, rivers and seas
Transborder governance of forests, rivers and seas Wil De Jong, Denyse Snelder & Noboru Ishikawa (eds), 2010 Earthscan, London xvii + 217 pp.+index. ISBN 978-1-84971-223-1 (hard) Exploiting, sharin
Reviving Agrarian Studies in South-East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy
This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South-East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away f…
Land Conversion - Post-agrarian Exclusions
Conclusions
Volatile Exclusions - Crop Booms and Their Fallout
Licensed Exclusions - Land Titling, Reform and Allocation
Counter-exclusions - Collective Mobilizations for Land and Territory
Appendix — Annals of Southeast Asian Land History
Introduction - Setting the Scene
Intimate Exclusions - Everyday Accumulation and Dispossession
Ambient Exclusions - Environmentalism and Conservation
Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia
Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia
This is a ground breaking book that draws on insights from multiple disciplines to map out the new contours of struggles for land in Southeast Asia. The volume provides a framework for analyzing the dilemmas of land relations across the Global South and beyond
Powers of Exclusion: Land Dilemmas in Southeast Asia
Revisiting frontiers as transitional spaces in Thailand
This paper explores the notion of frontiers as 'in-between' spaces that define particular transitions. Three contexts of frontier and their rapidly changing nature form the basis of the analysis. Agricultural frontiers (typically between farmland and forest) are defined by new relations of production and interplays between conservation, shifting modes of agriculture and natural resource use and management. Peri-urban frontiers (between countrysid…
Re-thinking frontiers in Southeast Asia
The frontier has a long tradition in geographical study. Exploration, conquest and the colonial project were all about pushing back the frontier of civilisation, and seeking riches at and beyond the resource frontier. Turner's thesis put frontiers as geographical peripheries at the heart of what defines the national character (Turner 1920). In another sense, frontiers define the national ‘geobody’ (Winichakul 1994), so that cores are delimited an…
Rupture: Towards a critical, emplaced, and experiential view of nature-society crisis
We are currently seeing a global escalation in social and environmental disruption, yet concepts like the Anthropocene do not fully capture the intensity and generative scope of this crisis. ‘Rupture’ is being used as a term for specific and intense episodes of change, such as wildfires or toxic pollution releases. This is a useful addition to our lexicon for nature-society change but needs to be more robustly theorized. Defining rupture as an in…
Forests, Forest Reserve, and Forest Land in Thailand
The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams
Can SIA empower communities
Contemporary Politics of Environment in Thailand
Research Article| April 01 1989 Contemporary Politics of Environment in Thailand Philip Hirsch; Philip Hirsch Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Larry Lohmann Larry Lohmann Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1960) 29 (4): 439–451. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644886 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share I…
Scaling the environmental commons: Broadening our frame of reference for transboundary governance in Southeast Asia
The transboundary environmental commons in Southeast Asia are normally conceived in terms of shared resources and environmental impacts that transcend national borders. The Mekong's ‘fugitive resources’ of water, fish and sediment and the issue of Indonesia's smoke haze drift into Malaysia and Singapore dominate discussion. Assumed national interests shape actors and institutional arrangements for transboundary commons governance. Failure to addr…
Negotiating local livelihoods: Scales of conflict in the Se San River Basin
The Se San is an important tributary river basin of the Mekong. In 1993, Vietnam began building the Yali Falls Dam 80 kilometres upstream of the point at which this westward flowing river enters Cambodia. Ninety indigenous communities along the Se San River in two provinces of north‐eastern Cambodia have been impacted severely by flooding, and a dramatically altered hydrological regime that affects fisheries and all other aspects of livelihood, s…
Common Property as Enclosure: A Case Study of a Backswamp in Southern Laos
In this study we examine the enclosure of a common pool resource and ways in which a changed property rights regime has been legitimized by reference to the common property arrangements inherent therein. Legitimizing discourses of common property are situated in the wider discursive context of postsocialist development, territorialization, and community benefits. The resource in question is a backswamp 1 The term “backswamp” is used to denote a p…
Poverty and Agrarian-Forest Interactions in Thailand
In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationships between poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions of whether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment, and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence on forest-based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond the impasse is to set such debates within the context of agr…
Patterns of Forest Settlement in Western Thailand
Most studies of land settlement are concerned with planned schemes. This is despite the fact that unplanned settlement has more often been the major process by which agricultural land is settled in many countries. In this local study of spontaneous forest settlement in western Thailand, the recent history of two communities is traced in order to shed light on the process of settlement Common assumptions about frontier communities are examined cri…
Selective border permeability: Governing complex environmental issues through and beyond Covid-19
COVID-19 has changed the permeability of borders in transboundary environmental governance regimes. While borders have always been selectively permeable, the pandemic has reconfigured the nature of cross-border flows of people, natural resources, finances and technologies. This has altered the availability of spaces for enacting sustainability initiatives within and between countries. In Southeast Asia, national governments and businesses seeking…
Large Dams, Restructuring and Regional Integration in Southeast Asia
Large dams are a dramatic intervention affecting ecosystems, livelihoods and resource use, notably in upland areas. Dams are significant, both in terms of their scale of impact and due to their role in appropriating part of the upland resource base for mainly lowland and urban beneficiaries. Whereas in the past the tensions associated with impact of dams in Southeast Asia have been played out within national borders, mainly in Thailand, the new i…
A State of Uncertainty: Political Economy of Community Resource Management at Tab Salao, Thailand
Community resource management has attracted increasing interest as a direction for more equitable, effective, and sustainable use of the environment. Development programmes and academic studies have investigated institutional and organizational potentials and obstacles. Relatively little attention has been given to the local and wider politicaleconomic contexts in which local initiatives are expected to operate. A case-study of resource managemen…
The State in the Village: Interpreting Rural Development in Thailand
Limits to neoliberal authoritarianism in the politics of land capitalisation in Thailand: Beyond the paradox
Thailand presents several paradoxes that complicate linear assumptions about capitalisation of land and consequent processes of accumulation, dispossession and concentration. These paradoxes become apparent when today's conundrums are considered in their historical contexts of commercialisation, establishment of transferable property rights and financialisation, each tempered both by state policy and by counter-movements that have maintained smal…
Reviving Agrarian Studies in South-East Asia: Geography on the Ascendancy
This paper examines the recent revival of agrarian studies in the social science scholarship of South-East Asia following a period of decline from the 1980s onward. The hiatus provides an opportunity to examine the changed empirical contexts and theoretical framings of agrarian change in the intervening period. Renewed interest in rural agricultural and social change is also marked by a disciplinary shift, with the centre of gravity moving away f…
Real and Virtual Experiential Learning on the Mekong: Field Schools, e-Sims and Cultural Challenge
This paper describes two innovative and linked approaches to teaching and student learning in the environmental and development geography of the Mekong region, a region remote from students’ normal experiential options. The first approach is field-based learning through Field Schools carried out in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The second approach is a structured role-playing web-based simulation exercise (e-Sim) on Mekong Basin environmental manag…
Dammed or damned? Hydropower versus people's power
In recent years, a number of controversial large dam schemes have caught the attention of the international media. While Bakun, Narmada, and Nam Choan have not become household words like Chernobyl or Bhopal, the international development community in general, and the environmental lobby in particular, have become increasingly aware of the social and ecological problems associated with hydropower projects. The World Bank has recently appointed ne…
Integration, fragmentation and assemblage in the Mekong: Elaborating on responses to shifting regional geopolitics
Settlement and resettlement on marginal land: A case study from Thailand
Spontaneous land settlement has received less attention than planned schemes, and state policy on spontaneously cleared land is likewise neglected. A case study of a Thai resettlement scheme on land settled spontaneously illustrates the wider concern of heightened competition for marginal land. State policy and practice as revealed in the Tab Salao case shows the state as one of a number of actors in the local political economy of resource compet…
Deforestation and Development in Thailand
Dammed or damned? Hydropower versus people's power
In recent years, a number of controversial large dam schemes have caught the attention of the international media. While Bakun, Narmada, and Nam Choan have not become household words like Chernobyl or Bhopal, the international development community in general, and the environmental lobby in particular, have become increasingly aware of the social and ecological problems associated with hydropower projects. The World Bank has recently appointed ne…
Patterns of Forest Settlement in Western Thailand
Most studies of land settlement are concerned with planned schemes. This is despite the fact that unplanned settlement has more often been the major process by which agricultural land is settled in many countries. In this local study of spontaneous forest settlement in western Thailand, the recent history of two communities is traced in order to shed light on the process of settlement Common assumptions about frontier communities are examined cri…
Settlement and resettlement on marginal land: A case study from Thailand
Spontaneous land settlement has received less attention than planned schemes, and state policy on spontaneously cleared land is likewise neglected. A case study of a Thai resettlement scheme on land settled spontaneously illustrates the wider concern of heightened competition for marginal land. State policy and practice as revealed in the Tab Salao case shows the state as one of a number of actors in the local political economy of resource compet…
Contemporary Politics of Environment in Thailand
Research Article| April 01 1989 Contemporary Politics of Environment in Thailand Philip Hirsch; Philip Hirsch Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Larry Lohmann Larry Lohmann Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1960) 29 (4): 439–451. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644886 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Share I…
Local contexts of differentiation and inequality on the Thai periphery
The State in the Village: Interpreting Rural Development in Thailand
Marginal people on marginal land
What makes a people marginal? Clearly it is not physical remoteness from the hub of civilization per se. In advanced capitalist society, the most marginalized populations often reside a stone's throw from the seat of modern capitalism, our great financial districts. In Southeast Asia, nevertheless, the most marginalized of a diverse range of marginal populations—upland dwelling ethnic minorities—do reside on the physical as well as social periphe…
Forests, Forest Reserve, and Forest Land in Thailand
Democracy and the transfer of technology: A comment on Australia's involvement in resource development in Asia
(1993). Democracy and the transfer of technology: a comment on Australia's involvement in resource development in Asia. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 131-135
Can SIA empower communities
The Thai Countryside in the 1990s
This paper begins by reviewing the situation of rural Thailand in the 1990s from a number of angles. This is followed by a reconsideration of some key paradigms that have consciously or unconsciously coloured the way most ob servers have viewed and discussed rural Thailand in the past. Finally, the chang ing situation of the Thai countryside is considered in the light of wider changes affecting the country. Rural Thailand in the 1990s The Thai co…
A State of Uncertainty: Political Economy of Community Resource Management at Tab Salao, Thailand
Community resource management has attracted increasing interest as a direction for more equitable, effective, and sustainable use of the environment. Development programmes and academic studies have investigated institutional and organizational potentials and obstacles. Relatively little attention has been given to the local and wider politicaleconomic contexts in which local initiatives are expected to operate. A case-study of resource managemen…
Large Dams, Restructuring and Regional Integration in Southeast Asia
Large dams are a dramatic intervention affecting ecosystems, livelihoods and resource use, notably in upland areas. Dams are significant, both in terms of their scale of impact and due to their role in appropriating part of the upland resource base for mainly lowland and urban beneficiaries. Whereas in the past the tensions associated with impact of dams in Southeast Asia have been played out within national borders, mainly in Thailand, the new i…
Implications of economic reform in Vietnam: Agrarian and environmental change in Hien Luong
Economic reform in Vietnam has been pervasive. To date, there have been few studies of the wider implications of reform outside urban and lowland agricultural areas. This study of agrarian and environmental change in a mountainous commune in north‐western Vietnam shows some of the consequences of the transitional economy for more peripheral communities and ecosystems. The study focuses on some key aspects of change, notably large scale infrastruc…
The politics of environment in Southeast Asia: Resources and resistance
The Politics of Environment in Southeast Asia charts the emergence of the environment as an issue of public debate in the region. Through a series of case studies the authors explore the coalescence of social forces around environmental issues, the process of alliance formation, and the role of state institutions, media and NGOs in the complex political battles over resource allocation. The volatile tensions between the winners and losers in this…
Globalisation, Regionalisation and Local Voices: The Asian Development Bank and Rescaled Politics of Environment in the Mekong Region
Globalisation is manifested in the Mekong Region both through processes and discourses that reflect the ideology of a borderless world allowing easy passage of capital and commodities, and through resistance to such processes in an increasingly transnationalised civil society movement. However, more immediately significant supranational integrative agendas take the form of regionalisation, a process that has received less attention but which rais…
Politics of Environment in Southeast Asia
The Politics of Environment in Southeast Asia
Flexible Networking in Research Capacity Building at the National University of Laos: Lessons for North-South Collaboration
This paper describes a research-training project for building social science research capacity at the National University of Laos (NUOL),supported by IDRC. At the international level, the project was structured as a flexible network of resource persons from six countries. The main successes of the project turned out to be unanticipated: the project offered significant insights to NUOL's ongoing assessment of its administrative capacity to manage …
Negotiating local livelihoods: Scales of conflict in the Se San River Basin
The Se San is an important tributary river basin of the Mekong. In 1993, Vietnam began building the Yali Falls Dam 80 kilometres upstream of the point at which this westward flowing river enters Cambodia. Ninety indigenous communities along the Se San River in two provinces of north‐eastern Cambodia have been impacted severely by flooding, and a dramatically altered hydrological regime that affects fisheries and all other aspects of livelihood, s…
Common Property as Enclosure: A Case Study of a Backswamp in Southern Laos
In this study we examine the enclosure of a common pool resource and ways in which a changed property rights regime has been legitimized by reference to the common property arrangements inherent therein. Legitimizing discourses of common property are situated in the wider discursive context of postsocialist development, territorialization, and community benefits. The resource in question is a backswamp 1 The term “backswamp” is used to denote a p…
Real and Virtual Experiential Learning on the Mekong: Field Schools, e-Sims and Cultural Challenge
This paper describes two innovative and linked approaches to teaching and student learning in the environmental and development geography of the Mekong region, a region remote from students’ normal experiential options. The first approach is field-based learning through Field Schools carried out in Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. The second approach is a structured role-playing web-based simulation exercise (e-Sim) on Mekong Basin environmental manag…
Poverty and Agrarian-Forest Interactions in Thailand
In this paper we address the often sterile and circular debates over relationships between poverty and deforestation. These debates revolve around questions of whether forest loss causes poverty or poverty contributes to forest encroachment, and questions of whether it is loss of access to forests or dependence on forest-based livelihoods that cause poverty. We suggest that a way beyond the impasse is to set such debates within the context of agr…
Land and Longhouse: Agrarian Transformation in the Uplands of Sarawak – By R.A. Cramb
Geography (33 works) · Political science (33 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (24 works) · Politics (20 works) · Economics (19 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Development economics (10 works) · Law (10 works)