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W Nathan Green

Biographic Data

ID122158
NAMEW Nathan Green
GIVEN NAMESW Nathan
FAMILY NAMEGreen
SIGNATUREGREEN W N
AFFILIATIONSNational University of Singapore
ORCID0000-0002-0498-5623
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS25
TOTAL CITATIONS230
AUTHOR COUNT25
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2016
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX10
  • Agrarian financial ecologies

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2026

    Credit–debt relations have long been central to critical agrarian studies, yet their sociospatial production and uneven outcomes remain under-theorized. This essay further develops the agrarian financial ecologies concept by synthesizing financial ecologies scholarship in economic geography with Marxist theories of money and finance applied in an agrarian context. The concept explains how distinctive arrangements of money and finance are mutually…

  • Remittances as translocal collateral: How microfinance profitably sustains precarity in Cambodia

    Open Access•Vincent Guermond, Sabina Lawreniuk et al.•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2026

    In this paper, we explore how commercialised microfinance institutions and banks leverage remittance-related information to assess and provide microfinance loans to households in Cambodia. We argue that (microfinance) debt regimes profitably sustain precarity in the Cambodian translocal context. Building from five studies undertaken between 2014 and 2022, we illustrate our argument through a two-pronged approach. First, we critically unpack the e…

  • Intensifying translocal precarity: The impact of Covid‐19 on smallholder farmers' commodity production and social reproduction in Cambodia

    Open Access•Rosa Yi, W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Area•2026•Cited by: 4•References: 38

    Against a backdrop of agrarian transformation, COVID‐19 intensified translocal precarity among smallholder farmers worldwide. As scholars of economic geography and agrarian studies have shown, smallholder households increasingly struggle to reproduce themselves through agrarian livelihoods alone, with many households compelled to migrate to urban centres, both domestic and foreign, to find employment. Consequently, smallholder farmers now experie…

  • Fleeing the Homeland, Clearing the Forest: Debt-driven Migration and Deforestation on the Agricultural Frontier

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Long Ly Vouch•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2026•References: 20

  • Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over‐Indebtedness , and Social Reproduction in Climate‐Vulnerable Cambodia

    Open Access•Vincent Guermond, Dalia Iskander et al.•ARTICLE•Antipode•2025•Cited by: 13•References: 49

    The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow‐onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together orig…

  • Sustainability capitalism: Investing in climate transitions

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Miles Kenney-Lazar•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2025•References: 37

    Private finance has become the dominant monetary response to climate change, growing nearly twice as fast as public finance between 2018 and 2023 and surpassing $1 trillion annually. This introduction to the theme issue "Sustainability Capitalism: Investing in Climate Transitions" situates this expansion within the longer trajectory of sustainability capitalism, defined as the subsumption of sustainability principles under capitalist logics. We a…

  • Maximizing Finance for Sustainable Development? Microfinance, Debt-Driven Deforestation, and the Self-Regulation of Environmental Harm

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2025•Cited by: 1•References: 55

    A global consensus has emerged that private finance capital is required to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Critical scholars within geography have argued that this consensus is driven by the financialization of development, and that it is based on self-regulatory market mechanisms that fail to mitigate environmental harm. Building on this scholarship, I present findings from qualitative research about the social-env…

  • The persistence of the moneylender: How informal debt deepens financialization in the Cambodian countryside

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 56

  • Chinese infrastructure as spatial fix? A political ecology of development finance and irrigation in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Rosa Yi•ARTICLE•Singapore Journal of Tropical…•2024

    China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by constructing large‐scale irrigation systems. Funded with Chinese development finance, such infrastructure projects have been interpreted as a ‘spatial fix’ for capital accumulation in China, which helps explain the shifting balance of power within the region's political economy. However, we argue that explaining the local outcomes of these projects requ…

  • Financialization and rural development: Comparing credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•South East Asia Research•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 16

    This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies on financialization and rural development in South East Asia. In Thailand, the state remains a large provider of credit to farmers. In Cambodia, most farmers access credit from a globalized, private microfinance industry. Based on qualitative research carried out in 2021 and 2022, we argue that farmer debt has led to divergent outcomes in Thailand and …

  • The anti-politics of impact investment: Financial self-regulation, market competition and over-indebtedness in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 40

    Social impact investors claim to promote sustainable development by mobilizing private finance capital to solve pressing global challenges like poverty alleviation. In this paper, I interrogate this claim through an examination of microfinance in Cambodia, a major destination for impact investment. In the past decade, Cambodia has received nearly 10% of global investments from microfinance-specific funds. It now has the largest microfinance-debt …

  • Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Antipode•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 47

    Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Build…

  • Agrarian financial ecologies: Centring land and labour in geographies of debt

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2023•Cited by: 4•References: 66

    There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I…

  • Duplicitous debtscapes: Unveiling social impact investment for microfinance

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2023•Cited by: 6•References: 48

    Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other …

  • The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Theavy Chhom et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2023•Cited by: 13•References: 36

    Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its hi…

  • Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 58

    This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financia…

  • Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2022•Cited by: 26•References: 63

    Many people in the Global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. Although geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work t…

  • Placing Cambodia's agrarian transition in an emerging Chinese food regime

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 42

    Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state su…

  • The Exclusionary Power of Microfinance

    W Nathan Green, Maryann Bylander•ARTICLE•Sociology of Development•2021

    In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have created new markets for capital accumulation by rapidly expanding the commercial microfinance industry in the global South. In Cambodia, which has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world, the typical loan amount now exceeds the average annual household income and requires land-based collateral. Cambodian borrowers are increasingly over-ind…

  • Financial landscapes of agrarian change in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2020•Cited by: 21•References: 16

  • The contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in the Mekong River basin

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Political Geography•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 30

  • Regulating Over-indebtedness: Local State Power in Cambodia's Microfinance Market

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 13•References: 40

    Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 years, the Cambodian government has implemented financial reforms that have commercialized the microfinance sector and promoted industry self-regulation. Echoing long-standing concerns about neoliberal microfinance, critics maintain that these reforms have hollowed out the Cambodian state's ability to regulate a highly competitive market, thereby exace…

  • Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Antipode•2019•Cited by: 29•References: 49

    This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even…

  • From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2019•Cited by: 30•References: 56

    This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry…

  • Capitalizing on Compensation: Hydropower Resettlement and the Commodification and Decommodification of Nature-Society Relations in Southern Laos

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2016•Cited by: 11•References: 53

    Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transforma…

  • From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2019•Cited by: 30•References: 56

    This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry…

  • Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Antipode•2019•Cited by: 29•References: 49

    This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even…

  • Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2022•Cited by: 26•References: 63

    Many people in the Global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. Although geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work t…

  • Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 58

    This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financia…

  • Placing Cambodia's agrarian transition in an emerging Chinese food regime

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 42

    Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state su…

  • Financial landscapes of agrarian change in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2020•Cited by: 21•References: 16

  • Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over‐Indebtedness , and Social Reproduction in Climate‐Vulnerable Cambodia

    Open Access•Vincent Guermond, Dalia Iskander et al.•ARTICLE•Antipode•2025•Cited by: 13•References: 49

    The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow‐onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together orig…

  • The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Theavy Chhom et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2023•Cited by: 13•References: 36

    Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its hi…

  • Regulating Over-indebtedness: Local State Power in Cambodia's Microfinance Market

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 13•References: 40

    Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 years, the Cambodian government has implemented financial reforms that have commercialized the microfinance sector and promoted industry self-regulation. Echoing long-standing concerns about neoliberal microfinance, critics maintain that these reforms have hollowed out the Cambodian state's ability to regulate a highly competitive market, thereby exace…

  • Capitalizing on Compensation: Hydropower Resettlement and the Commodification and Decommodification of Nature-Society Relations in Southern Laos

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2016•Cited by: 11•References: 53

    Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transforma…

  • The contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in the Mekong River basin

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Political Geography•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 30

  • Duplicitous debtscapes: Unveiling social impact investment for microfinance

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2023•Cited by: 6•References: 48

    Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other …

  • Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Antipode•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 47

    Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Build…

  • Intensifying translocal precarity: The impact of Covid‐19 on smallholder farmers' commodity production and social reproduction in Cambodia

    Open Access•Rosa Yi, W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Area•2026•Cited by: 4•References: 38

    Against a backdrop of agrarian transformation, COVID‐19 intensified translocal precarity among smallholder farmers worldwide. As scholars of economic geography and agrarian studies have shown, smallholder households increasingly struggle to reproduce themselves through agrarian livelihoods alone, with many households compelled to migrate to urban centres, both domestic and foreign, to find employment. Consequently, smallholder farmers now experie…

  • Agrarian financial ecologies: Centring land and labour in geographies of debt

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2023•Cited by: 4•References: 66

    There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I…

  • The persistence of the moneylender: How informal debt deepens financialization in the Cambodian countryside

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 56

  • Maximizing Finance for Sustainable Development? Microfinance, Debt-Driven Deforestation, and the Self-Regulation of Environmental Harm

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2025•Cited by: 1•References: 55

    A global consensus has emerged that private finance capital is required to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Critical scholars within geography have argued that this consensus is driven by the financialization of development, and that it is based on self-regulatory market mechanisms that fail to mitigate environmental harm. Building on this scholarship, I present findings from qualitative research about the social-env…

  • Financialization and rural development: Comparing credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•South East Asia Research•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 16

    This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies on financialization and rural development in South East Asia. In Thailand, the state remains a large provider of credit to farmers. In Cambodia, most farmers access credit from a globalized, private microfinance industry. Based on qualitative research carried out in 2021 and 2022, we argue that farmer debt has led to divergent outcomes in Thailand and …

  • The anti-politics of impact investment: Financial self-regulation, market competition and over-indebtedness in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 40

    Social impact investors claim to promote sustainable development by mobilizing private finance capital to solve pressing global challenges like poverty alleviation. In this paper, I interrogate this claim through an examination of microfinance in Cambodia, a major destination for impact investment. In the past decade, Cambodia has received nearly 10% of global investments from microfinance-specific funds. It now has the largest microfinance-debt …

  • Capitalizing on Compensation: Hydropower Resettlement and the Commodification and Decommodification of Nature-Society Relations in Southern Laos

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2016•Cited by: 11•References: 53

    Compensation programs for hydropower dam resettlement have far-reaching effects, including restructuring nature–society relations in support of capital accumulation. Although critical scholarship has shown the structural limitations of compensation programs for reducing poverty after resettlement, here we draw on the specific case of the Xepian-Xenamnoy hydroelectric dam project in the Xekong River Basin in southern Laos to explore the transforma…

  • Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Antipode•2019•Cited by: 29•References: 49

    This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even…

  • From rice fields to financial assets: Valuing land for microfinance in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2019•Cited by: 30•References: 56

    This paper explores how rural land in Cambodia has been incorporated into global networks of finance capital through the technical and political processes of turning land into a financial asset. Since the 1990s, the Cambodian government and international development institutions have issued land titles to people to formalise land ownership and increase people's access to formal credit. At the same time, Cambodia's commercial microfinance industry…

  • Financial landscapes of agrarian change in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2020•Cited by: 21•References: 16

  • The contentious politics of hydropower dam impact assessments in the Mekong River basin

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•Political Geography•2020•Cited by: 8•References: 30

  • Regulating Over-indebtedness: Local State Power in Cambodia's Microfinance Market

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2020•Cited by: 13•References: 40

    Cambodian microfinance borrowers are suffering from an over-indebtedness crisis. In the past 20 years, the Cambodian government has implemented financial reforms that have commercialized the microfinance sector and promoted industry self-regulation. Echoing long-standing concerns about neoliberal microfinance, critics maintain that these reforms have hollowed out the Cambodian state's ability to regulate a highly competitive market, thereby exace…

  • The Exclusionary Power of Microfinance

    W Nathan Green, Maryann Bylander•ARTICLE•Sociology of Development•2021

    In recent years, international banks, investment agencies, and development institutions have created new markets for capital accumulation by rapidly expanding the commercial microfinance industry in the global South. In Cambodia, which has one of the largest microfinance industries in the world, the typical loan amount now exceeds the average annual household income and requires land-based collateral. Cambodian borrowers are increasingly over-ind…

  • Financing agrarian change: Geographies of credit and debt in the global south

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Progress in Human Geography•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 58

    This article critically analyzes agrarian finance in terms of household credit and debt in the global south. I introduce interdisciplinary concepts about agrarian finance before reviewing how political ecologists and development geographers have studied this topic in relation to agricultural production, social reproduction, and farm mortgages and dispossession. To advance this research, I engage with financial geography scholarship about financia…

  • Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Jennifer Estes•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2022•Cited by: 26•References: 63

    Many people in the Global South have left behind rural homes in search of employment in urban and transnational labor markets often defined by precarious work. Employment is insecure, uncertain, and temporary, and for transnational migrants, there is the constant risk of deportation. Although geographers have studied such migrant precarity, there is an increasing interest in its translocal dimensions, particularly related to how precarious work t…

  • Placing Cambodia's agrarian transition in an emerging Chinese food regime

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2022•Cited by: 21•References: 42

    Based on research about Cambodia's rice sector, this article explains how an emerging Chinese food regime contributes to local agrarian transitions. It argues that Chinese-Cambodian trade deals for jasmine rice, alongside Chinese investment in rice mills and irrigation, have intersected with pre-existing relations of production to make farmers' dependence on export commodity markets more precarious. In turn, farmers have received minimal state su…

  • Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Antipode•2023•Cited by: 5•References: 47

    Financial inclusion is a leading driver of household debt across the global South. Although critical geographers have analysed this debt through the lens of financialisation, few have examined it in terms of monetary politics. This is a salient issue, because poorer nations often have limited control over their monetary policy due to their dependence on foreign currencies, which can adversely affect the structure of their financial markets. Build…

  • Agrarian financial ecologies: Centring land and labour in geographies of debt

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Transactions of the Institute of…•2023•Cited by: 4•References: 66

    There is a growing interest in exploring contemporary financialisation in terms of the geographies of debt. Many economic geographers have adopted a financial ecologies approach to explain these geographies. While this approach provides analytical benefits, it nonetheless analyses debt almost exclusively in terms of consumer finance, thereby overlooking the relations of production in which many indebted households engage. To address this issue, I…

  • Duplicitous debtscapes: Unveiling social impact investment for microfinance

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2023•Cited by: 6•References: 48

    Social impact investment for microfinance has become a dominant form of poverty regulation in the global south. These investments aim to alleviate poverty by extending financial services like credit to the world's poor, particularly smallholder farmers. The International Finance Corporation is a major player in this effort. It has channeled finance capital to microfinance institutions around the world through its Social Bond Program, among other …

  • The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Theavy Chhom et al.•ARTICLE•Development and Change•2023•Cited by: 13•References: 36

    Microfinance is a dominant strategy used to promote rural development around the world. Rather than directly track its impact on borrowers, however, microfinance institutions rely on indicators of financial performance adopted from commercial banking as proxies for positive social impact. Yet, as critical research has shown, the industry depends on coercive peer pressure, social shaming and various forms of gendered exploitation to achieve its hi…

  • Chinese infrastructure as spatial fix? A political ecology of development finance and irrigation in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Rosa Yi•ARTICLE•Singapore Journal of Tropical…•2024

    China has recently become an agent of intensified agricultural production in Southeast Asia by constructing large‐scale irrigation systems. Funded with Chinese development finance, such infrastructure projects have been interpreted as a ‘spatial fix’ for capital accumulation in China, which helps explain the shifting balance of power within the region's political economy. However, we argue that explaining the local outcomes of these projects requ…

  • Financialization and rural development: Comparing credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia

    W Nathan Green, Ian G Baird•ARTICLE•South East Asia Research•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 16

    This article compares rural credit systems in Thailand and Cambodia in order to advance studies on financialization and rural development in South East Asia. In Thailand, the state remains a large provider of credit to farmers. In Cambodia, most farmers access credit from a globalized, private microfinance industry. Based on qualitative research carried out in 2021 and 2022, we argue that farmer debt has led to divergent outcomes in Thailand and …

  • The anti-politics of impact investment: Financial self-regulation, market competition and over-indebtedness in Cambodia

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2024•Cited by: 1•References: 40

    Social impact investors claim to promote sustainable development by mobilizing private finance capital to solve pressing global challenges like poverty alleviation. In this paper, I interrogate this claim through an examination of microfinance in Cambodia, a major destination for impact investment. In the past decade, Cambodia has received nearly 10% of global investments from microfinance-specific funds. It now has the largest microfinance-debt …

  • Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over‐Indebtedness , and Social Reproduction in Climate‐Vulnerable Cambodia

    Open Access•Vincent Guermond, Dalia Iskander et al.•ARTICLE•Antipode•2025•Cited by: 13•References: 49

    The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow‐onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together orig…

  • Sustainability capitalism: Investing in climate transitions

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Miles Kenney-Lazar•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2025•References: 37

    Private finance has become the dominant monetary response to climate change, growing nearly twice as fast as public finance between 2018 and 2023 and surpassing $1 trillion annually. This introduction to the theme issue "Sustainability Capitalism: Investing in Climate Transitions" situates this expansion within the longer trajectory of sustainability capitalism, defined as the subsumption of sustainability principles under capitalist logics. We a…

  • Maximizing Finance for Sustainable Development? Microfinance, Debt-Driven Deforestation, and the Self-Regulation of Environmental Harm

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Annals of the American…•2025•Cited by: 1•References: 55

    A global consensus has emerged that private finance capital is required to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Critical scholars within geography have argued that this consensus is driven by the financialization of development, and that it is based on self-regulatory market mechanisms that fail to mitigate environmental harm. Building on this scholarship, I present findings from qualitative research about the social-env…

  • The persistence of the moneylender: How informal debt deepens financialization in the Cambodian countryside

    W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 56

  • Agrarian financial ecologies

    Open Access•W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•The Journal of Peasant Studies•2026

    Credit–debt relations have long been central to critical agrarian studies, yet their sociospatial production and uneven outcomes remain under-theorized. This essay further develops the agrarian financial ecologies concept by synthesizing financial ecologies scholarship in economic geography with Marxist theories of money and finance applied in an agrarian context. The concept explains how distinctive arrangements of money and finance are mutually…

  • Remittances as translocal collateral: How microfinance profitably sustains precarity in Cambodia

    Open Access•Vincent Guermond, Sabina Lawreniuk et al.•ARTICLE•Environment and Planning A…•2026

    In this paper, we explore how commercialised microfinance institutions and banks leverage remittance-related information to assess and provide microfinance loans to households in Cambodia. We argue that (microfinance) debt regimes profitably sustain precarity in the Cambodian translocal context. Building from five studies undertaken between 2014 and 2022, we illustrate our argument through a two-pronged approach. First, we critically unpack the e…

  • Intensifying translocal precarity: The impact of Covid‐19 on smallholder farmers' commodity production and social reproduction in Cambodia

    Open Access•Rosa Yi, W Nathan Green•ARTICLE•Area•2026•Cited by: 4•References: 38

    Against a backdrop of agrarian transformation, COVID‐19 intensified translocal precarity among smallholder farmers worldwide. As scholars of economic geography and agrarian studies have shown, smallholder households increasingly struggle to reproduce themselves through agrarian livelihoods alone, with many households compelled to migrate to urban centres, both domestic and foreign, to find employment. Consequently, smallholder farmers now experie…

  • Fleeing the Homeland, Clearing the Forest: Debt-driven Migration and Deforestation on the Agricultural Frontier

    Open Access•W Nathan Green, Long Ly Vouch•ARTICLE•Geoforum•2026•References: 20

Economics (18 works) · Economic growth (13 works) · Finance (13 works) · Political science (13 works) · Agriculture (12 works) · Cambodian History and Society (12 works) · Debt (11 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Market economy (9 works)

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