Vanessa Lamb
Biographic Data
| ID | 105377 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vanessa Lamb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vanessa |
| FAMILY NAME | Lamb |
| SIGNATURE | LAMB V |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1717-6777 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 167 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
‘We need solidarity’: Reflections on Building and Troubling Solidarity in Research Ethics in Myanmar
Calls for solidarity by civil society are taking place alongside changes in how researchers navigate shifting research landscapes. Yet what solidarity‐based research entails in practice and how this might guide, critique, or challenge institutionalised ethics can be elusive. This is particularly the case in complex conflict and authoritarian research environments like Myanmar, which require us to question how solidarity can be practiced with civi…
Infrastructure in the making: Food preparation as solidarity infrastructure
Infrastructure has been understood as a circulator of goods, resources, people, and ideas and form of control, with the potential to displace and enact violence. Recent work broadens the concept to include social infrastructures and networks. Whether built or unbuilt, infrastructure is always contested and in the making. It requires ongoing care and engagement for establishment, operation, and use. In this paper, we illustrate how the social netw…
Toward a sustainable future of sand
Caring for the river‐border: Struggles and opportunities along the Salween River‐border
Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range o…
Rivers as borders? Navigating in‐between the tensions of water‐state‐society geographies
What is unique about bringing rivers and borders into conversation with one another, and what are the implications for geographical research? This article and Special Section charts new directions in the study of rivers as borders. By emphasising a river‐centric approach, we collectively challenge traditional terra‐centric views prevalent in border research and show that rivers as borders are much more than just convenient tools for territorial d…
Constructing the global sand crisis: Four reasons to interrogate crisis and scarcity in narrating extraction
Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin
We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We fin…
Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics
For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged 'critical hydropolitics' as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on 'the state' as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we …
Environmentalisms in Twenty-First Century Thailand: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Emerging Trajectories
How have Thailand's environmental politics changed across the last five decades? How have they remained the same? What role do environmental movements in Thailand play in the country's current moment of extended military-led rule and global environmental change? This article addresses these questions by presenting a critical genealogy of Thailand's environmental politics. It begins with a larger framing of environmental movements within the conte…
The fence ‘didn’t work’: The mundane engagements and material practices of state-led development in China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir
Central China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir supplies clean water to major cities as part of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). Fencing is presented as essential to establishing borders, controls, and authority over the water reservoir and surrounding areas that were previously settled lands. Drawing on Tania Li’s work, as well as work by geographers and anthropologists on the contested production of the state and the border through practic…
The imaginary of a modern city: Post-politics and Myanmar’s urban development
Theories of ‘post-politics’ provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this ‘age of post-politics’ are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the fut…
Dilemmas for advocacy organisations in Myanmar’s changing political landscape
In response, U Win Myo Thu
Hydrosocial practice in an urbanising floodplain: Local management and dilemmas of beneficial flooding
In Southeast Asia, how flooding is named or studied is not only a matter of fact, but distinctions of flooding as ‘beneficial’ or ‘disaster’ elicit specific reactions from city management, government and residents. This is particularly true in cities across Myanmar, which have been chronically under-resourced to deal with flooding. This paper investigates the overlooked informal work of residents to manage flooding in urbanising Hpa An, a seconda…
Asia’s changing cities: Water, climate and power in the transformation of urban spaces
This introduction to the special issue lays out the key themes and arguments across the five research papers and Viewpoint. Foremost, we highlight how by bringing this research across diverse Asian cities together into one special issue, the work reveals how water is foundational to the city. To illuminate how our work on water urbanisms in Asia has the potential to ‘rethink the way in which cities operate’ (Xiao, 2016, 3367), this special issue …
Nature Based Solutions for urban water management in Asian cities: Integrating vulnerability into sustainable design
Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for urban water management seek to harness natural processes and (re)connect diverse flows in the urban water cycle for increased ecological sustainability. Developed in Australia, the US and Europe, the application of these approaches for urban water management tends to focus primarily on improving the environmental sustainability of grey water infrastructure. In many Asian cities, where the coverage of existing grey…
Work and struggle of fishing livelihoods in the Delta: Development and ‘new’ change along the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, Myanmar
Fishing constitutes a key source of income and food for rural communities worldwide. This is the case in predominantly rural Myanmar (World Fish, 2019), particularly in the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River Delta. Fishing has long been a central livelihood strategy and valuable source of food security in the Delta, and now also generates a substantial contribution to the gross domestic product. However, the livelihood practices of the fishers, particu…
Hydropower Politics and Conflict on the Salween River
This chapter examines the hydropower politicsHydropower politics of the Salween River, with a focus on the projects proposed in Myanmar and their connections with neighboring China and Thailand via electricity trade, investment, and regional geopolitics.
Salween: What’s in a Name?
In this short chapter, I walk the reader through the ways the river conventionally referred to as ‘Salween’ is called upon differently in distinct places by many people.
Introduction: Resources Politics and Knowing the Salween River
This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and concepts of the edited volume across three themes: resource politics, politics of making knowledge, and reconciling knowledge across divides.
A State of Knowledge of the Salween River: An Overview of Civil Society Research
This chapter presents an overview of civil society research on Salween, providing an overview of the existing knowledge of the basin and a start to identifying key knowledge gaps in support of more informed, inclusive, and accountable water governance in the basin.
Knowing the Salween River: Resource Politics of a Contested Transboundary River
This open access book focuses on the Salween River, shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand, that is increasingly at the heart of pressing regional development debates. The basin supports the livelihoods of over 10 million people, and within it there is great socio-economic, cultural and political diversity. The basin is witnessing intensifying dynamics of resource extraction, alongside large dam construction, conservation and development interven…
Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: What the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia
2020). Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: what the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 95-115
Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand
Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geograp…
Who knows the river? Gender, expertise, and the politics of local ecological knowledge production of the Salween River, Thai-Myanmar border
This article examines how local knowledge about riverine ecologies influenced the production of expert, gendered, and ethnic identities, and interrogates how these identities and knowledges are ‘co-produced’. Drawing on work in feminist political ecology and science studies, I highlight the links between the production of knowledge and identity. Research was carried out through fieldwork in two villages along the Salween River, at the border betw…
Perceptions and practices of investment: China’s hydropower investments in Vietnam and Myanmar
China is a major investor in hydropower in mainland Southeast Asia. These investments have triggered substantial public concern, with anti-Chinese attitudes intensifying across the region. Yet, Chinese involvement varies across the region. We examine the “practices and perceptions” of Chinese hydropower investment in Vietnam and Myanmar, attending to the framing of dominant explanations of these investments. We caution against reinforcing xenopho…
Gendered eviction, protest and recovery: A feminist political ecology engagement with land grabbing in rural Cambodia
We examine what we argue has been overlooked in the Cambodian context: the roles and practices of women in relation to men and their complementary struggles to protest land grabbing and eviction, and subsequently rebuild community and state relations. We present research carried out in Cambodia in 2014–2015 in Kratie, the country's most concessioned province. Through a feminist political ecology lens, we examine how protest and post-eviction comm…
"Where is the border?" Villagers, environmental consultants and the 'work' of the Thai-Burma border
Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand
Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geograp…
Who knows the river? Gender, expertise, and the politics of local ecological knowledge production of the Salween River, Thai-Myanmar border
This article examines how local knowledge about riverine ecologies influenced the production of expert, gendered, and ethnic identities, and interrogates how these identities and knowledges are ‘co-produced’. Drawing on work in feminist political ecology and science studies, I highlight the links between the production of knowledge and identity. Research was carried out through fieldwork in two villages along the Salween River, at the border betw…
Knowing the Salween River: Resource Politics of a Contested Transboundary River
This open access book focuses on the Salween River, shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand, that is increasingly at the heart of pressing regional development debates. The basin supports the livelihoods of over 10 million people, and within it there is great socio-economic, cultural and political diversity. The basin is witnessing intensifying dynamics of resource extraction, alongside large dam construction, conservation and development interven…
Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin
We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We fin…
Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: What the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia
2020). Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: what the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 95-115
Environmentalisms in Twenty-First Century Thailand: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Emerging Trajectories
How have Thailand's environmental politics changed across the last five decades? How have they remained the same? What role do environmental movements in Thailand play in the country's current moment of extended military-led rule and global environmental change? This article addresses these questions by presenting a critical genealogy of Thailand's environmental politics. It begins with a larger framing of environmental movements within the conte…
Perceptions and practices of investment: China’s hydropower investments in Vietnam and Myanmar
China is a major investor in hydropower in mainland Southeast Asia. These investments have triggered substantial public concern, with anti-Chinese attitudes intensifying across the region. Yet, Chinese involvement varies across the region. We examine the “practices and perceptions” of Chinese hydropower investment in Vietnam and Myanmar, attending to the framing of dominant explanations of these investments. We caution against reinforcing xenopho…
The fence ‘didn’t work’: The mundane engagements and material practices of state-led development in China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir
Central China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir supplies clean water to major cities as part of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). Fencing is presented as essential to establishing borders, controls, and authority over the water reservoir and surrounding areas that were previously settled lands. Drawing on Tania Li’s work, as well as work by geographers and anthropologists on the contested production of the state and the border through practic…
Nature Based Solutions for urban water management in Asian cities: Integrating vulnerability into sustainable design
Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for urban water management seek to harness natural processes and (re)connect diverse flows in the urban water cycle for increased ecological sustainability. Developed in Australia, the US and Europe, the application of these approaches for urban water management tends to focus primarily on improving the environmental sustainability of grey water infrastructure. In many Asian cities, where the coverage of existing grey…
Caring for the river‐border: Struggles and opportunities along the Salween River‐border
Geographers have shown how borders rely on the enactment of state power and violence to reinforce territorial integrity and sovereign authority, or even perpetuate the destruction of nature. Moving away from an emphasis on violence, in this paper, I take an approach to borders and bordering that emphasises the opportunities of the border when it is also a river to understand borders as a resource and site of engagement with the state by a range o…
Constructing the global sand crisis: Four reasons to interrogate crisis and scarcity in narrating extraction
Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics
For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged 'critical hydropolitics' as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on 'the state' as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we …
The imaginary of a modern city: Post-politics and Myanmar’s urban development
Theories of ‘post-politics’ provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this ‘age of post-politics’ are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the fut…
Rivers as borders? Navigating in‐between the tensions of water‐state‐society geographies
What is unique about bringing rivers and borders into conversation with one another, and what are the implications for geographical research? This article and Special Section charts new directions in the study of rivers as borders. By emphasising a river‐centric approach, we collectively challenge traditional terra‐centric views prevalent in border research and show that rivers as borders are much more than just convenient tools for territorial d…
A Political Ecology of Sovereignty in Practice and on the Map: The Technicalities of Law, Participatory Mapping, and Environmental Governance
This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in natural resource governance. We advance a ‘political ecology of sovereignty’, examining the participation of non-state actors in resource governance processes. We particularly argue that processes of integrating subaltern populations through mapping local ecological knowledge can modify effective governance practices while nonetheless reproducing the …
Making Governance "Good": The Production of Scale in the Environmental Impact Assessment and Governance of the Salween River
Environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are generally considered an important component of formal decision-making processes about development, serving to ensure that a project's environmental impacts are considered in decisions about whether and how it will proceed. Scale is an important part of the narrative built into the assessment. Building on a rich literature at the intersection of human geography and political ecology, I focus on the way t…
A Political Ecology of Sovereignty in Practice and on the Map: The Technicalities of Law, Participatory Mapping, and Environmental Governance
This article examines the relationships between representations and operations of sovereignty in natural resource governance. We advance a ‘political ecology of sovereignty’, examining the participation of non-state actors in resource governance processes. We particularly argue that processes of integrating subaltern populations through mapping local ecological knowledge can modify effective governance practices while nonetheless reproducing the …
Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law: Introduction
Environmental harm is of increasing concern to peoples and states all over the world, whether in relation to ensuring access to healthy air, water, food, and sustainable livelihoods, or coping with the diversity of challenges posed by changing climates and ecologies. While international lawyers have focused on crafting solutions to environmental problems, less attention is paid to the disciplinary role in fostering harmful and unsustainable behav…
"Where is the border?" Villagers, environmental consultants and the 'work' of the Thai-Burma border
Perceptions and practices of investment: China’s hydropower investments in Vietnam and Myanmar
China is a major investor in hydropower in mainland Southeast Asia. These investments have triggered substantial public concern, with anti-Chinese attitudes intensifying across the region. Yet, Chinese involvement varies across the region. We examine the “practices and perceptions” of Chinese hydropower investment in Vietnam and Myanmar, attending to the framing of dominant explanations of these investments. We caution against reinforcing xenopho…
Gendered eviction, protest and recovery: A feminist political ecology engagement with land grabbing in rural Cambodia
We examine what we argue has been overlooked in the Cambodian context: the roles and practices of women in relation to men and their complementary struggles to protest land grabbing and eviction, and subsequently rebuild community and state relations. We present research carried out in Cambodia in 2014–2015 in Kratie, the country's most concessioned province. Through a feminist political ecology lens, we examine how protest and post-eviction comm…
Who knows the river? Gender, expertise, and the politics of local ecological knowledge production of the Salween River, Thai-Myanmar border
This article examines how local knowledge about riverine ecologies influenced the production of expert, gendered, and ethnic identities, and interrogates how these identities and knowledges are ‘co-produced’. Drawing on work in feminist political ecology and science studies, I highlight the links between the production of knowledge and identity. Research was carried out through fieldwork in two villages along the Salween River, at the border betw…
Hydropower Politics and Conflict on the Salween River
This chapter examines the hydropower politicsHydropower politics of the Salween River, with a focus on the projects proposed in Myanmar and their connections with neighboring China and Thailand via electricity trade, investment, and regional geopolitics.
Salween: What’s in a Name?
In this short chapter, I walk the reader through the ways the river conventionally referred to as ‘Salween’ is called upon differently in distinct places by many people.
Introduction: Resources Politics and Knowing the Salween River
This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and concepts of the edited volume across three themes: resource politics, politics of making knowledge, and reconciling knowledge across divides.
A State of Knowledge of the Salween River: An Overview of Civil Society Research
This chapter presents an overview of civil society research on Salween, providing an overview of the existing knowledge of the basin and a start to identifying key knowledge gaps in support of more informed, inclusive, and accountable water governance in the basin.
Knowing the Salween River: Resource Politics of a Contested Transboundary River
This open access book focuses on the Salween River, shared by China, Myanmar, and Thailand, that is increasingly at the heart of pressing regional development debates. The basin supports the livelihoods of over 10 million people, and within it there is great socio-economic, cultural and political diversity. The basin is witnessing intensifying dynamics of resource extraction, alongside large dam construction, conservation and development interven…
Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: What the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia
2020). Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes: what the crackdown on emancipatory spaces means for rural social movements in Cambodia. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 95-115
Trading Sand, Undermining Lives: Omitted Livelihoods in the Global Trade in Sand
Sand is a scarce resource, extracted from rivers and coasts at rates that exceed its natural renewal. Yet, little is understood about the political economy of sand extraction, the livelihood vulnerabilities produced, or why sand grabbing is occurring at unprecedented rates in particular locations. Drawing together literature on global production network approaches in economic geography and debates on sustainable livelihoods in development geograp…
Dilemmas for advocacy organisations in Myanmar’s changing political landscape
In response, U Win Myo Thu
Hydrosocial practice in an urbanising floodplain: Local management and dilemmas of beneficial flooding
In Southeast Asia, how flooding is named or studied is not only a matter of fact, but distinctions of flooding as ‘beneficial’ or ‘disaster’ elicit specific reactions from city management, government and residents. This is particularly true in cities across Myanmar, which have been chronically under-resourced to deal with flooding. This paper investigates the overlooked informal work of residents to manage flooding in urbanising Hpa An, a seconda…
Asia’s changing cities: Water, climate and power in the transformation of urban spaces
This introduction to the special issue lays out the key themes and arguments across the five research papers and Viewpoint. Foremost, we highlight how by bringing this research across diverse Asian cities together into one special issue, the work reveals how water is foundational to the city. To illuminate how our work on water urbanisms in Asia has the potential to ‘rethink the way in which cities operate’ (Xiao, 2016, 3367), this special issue …
Nature Based Solutions for urban water management in Asian cities: Integrating vulnerability into sustainable design
Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for urban water management seek to harness natural processes and (re)connect diverse flows in the urban water cycle for increased ecological sustainability. Developed in Australia, the US and Europe, the application of these approaches for urban water management tends to focus primarily on improving the environmental sustainability of grey water infrastructure. In many Asian cities, where the coverage of existing grey…
Work and struggle of fishing livelihoods in the Delta: Development and ‘new’ change along the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River, Myanmar
Fishing constitutes a key source of income and food for rural communities worldwide. This is the case in predominantly rural Myanmar (World Fish, 2019), particularly in the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) River Delta. Fishing has long been a central livelihood strategy and valuable source of food security in the Delta, and now also generates a substantial contribution to the gross domestic product. However, the livelihood practices of the fishers, particu…
The fence ‘didn’t work’: The mundane engagements and material practices of state-led development in China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir
Central China’s Danjiangkou Reservoir supplies clean water to major cities as part of the South–North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). Fencing is presented as essential to establishing borders, controls, and authority over the water reservoir and surrounding areas that were previously settled lands. Drawing on Tania Li’s work, as well as work by geographers and anthropologists on the contested production of the state and the border through practic…
The imaginary of a modern city: Post-politics and Myanmar’s urban development
Theories of ‘post-politics’ provide a lens through which to analyse contemporary urban development. Yet empirical studies examining this ‘age of post-politics’ are few, especially outside of Europe and North America. This article examines the promise and limits of notions of post-politics through the case of planning for New Yangon City, a multi-billion dollar urban development in Myanmar (Burma). While the 2021 military coup has now made the fut…
Constructing the global sand crisis: Four reasons to interrogate crisis and scarcity in narrating extraction
Dams, Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin
We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal‐political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We fin…
Beyond state politics in Asia's transboundary rivers: Revisiting two decades of critical hydropolitics
For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged 'critical hydropolitics' as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on 'the state' as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we …
Environmentalisms in Twenty-First Century Thailand: Continuities, Discontinuities, and Emerging Trajectories
How have Thailand's environmental politics changed across the last five decades? How have they remained the same? What role do environmental movements in Thailand play in the country's current moment of extended military-led rule and global environmental change? This article addresses these questions by presenting a critical genealogy of Thailand's environmental politics. It begins with a larger framing of environmental movements within the conte…
Political science (26 works) · Geography (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography (15 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Economics (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Cambodian History and Society (10 works)