Natural Resource Governance in Asia: From Collective Action to Resilience Thinking identifies key leverage points where interventions can be made surrounding current and future impacts of ongoing environmental and sociopolitical challenges. The book utilizes case studies from Asia, a key demographic for natural resource management, that can be applied globally in understanding solutions and the current state of knowledge in natural resource dynamics. Users will find valuable sections on community forestry and socioecological systems, community irrigation, competing water demand, robustness issues, climate change, and natural resource dynamics and challenges. This interdisciplinary tome on the topic is invaluable to researchers and policymakers alike. - Combines collective action and resilience thinking to help readers understand complex issues and challenges in natural resource management - Presents methods and case studies to validate theory in practice - Includes up-to-date research applied to current issues to address both current and future risks and uncertainties

This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management, with a focus on Asia. It explores the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment and natural resource management, especially where gender is understood as a political, negotiated and contested element of social relationships. It offers a critical feminist perspective on gender relations and natural resource management in the context of contemporary policy concerns: decentralized governance, the elimination of poverty and themainstreaming of gender. Through a combination of strong conceptual argument and empirical material from a variety of political economic and ecological contexts (including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam), the book examines gender-environment linkages within shifting configurations of resource access and control. The book will serve as a core resource for students of gender studies and natural resource management, and as supplementary reading for a wide range of disciplines including geography, environmental studies, sociology and development. It also provides a stimulating collection of ideas for professionals looking to incorporate gender issues within their practice in sustainable development. Published with IDRC.

The economies located in East, South and Southeast Asia have witnessed an interesting growth-sustainability trade-off over the last decades. While growth considerations have paved ways for deepened ties with growing trade-investment waves and increasing population pressure necessitated exploitation of hitherto unutilized natural resources, focus on environmental sustainability has been a recent consideration. The growth impetus still playing a key role in these economies, it becomes imperative that the countries effectively address the key sustainability concerns, e.g. air and water pollution, land degradation, loss of biodiversity, climate change issues like CO2 emissions etc. But how prepared is the governance mechanism of these countries, covering not only the legislative and administrative framework but also involvement of the judiciary, presence of spirited civil society and active engagement of stakeholders in policy-framing dialogues, to rise up to these challenges? The book seeks an answer to this question through the environmental governance mechanism and natural resource conservation policies in three vibrant regions within Asia. A holistic development dimension of sustainable development path emerges, through discussion of policies adopted by developed (Japan, South Korea), upper-middle (China, Malaysia), developing (India, Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand) and least developed countries (Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal).

The political economy of natural resource wealth poses two interrelated challenges for American foreign policy, both involving governance issues in countries that are abundantly endowed with natural resources. The potentially negative impact of natural resources on development is captured in the phrase "the resource curse". The implications are the greatest for the commodity producers themselves, ranging from complications for macroeconomic management to political authoritarianism and, in the extreme, the precipitation of violent civil conflict. For US policy, the resource curse presents challenges with respect to coping with state failure and associated transborder phenomena. The issues extend to broader geopolitics. Resource abundance confers financial and political power on producers. China's emergence as a major importer and investor in extraction, willing to accommodate authoritarian producers, exacerbates the challenge, potentially undercutting international efforts to encourage greater transparency and improved management of natural resource wealth. This issue is of particular importance for US policy toward Africa

This book analyses the key political challenges to regional energy cooperation in South Asia. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of energy security and geopolitics, natural resource governance and South Asian politics.

Conservation as a tool of colonialism in early twentieth-century Korea Japanese colonial rule in Korea (1905–1945) ushered in natural resource management programs that profoundly altered access to and ownership of the peninsula’s extensive mountains and forests. Under the banner of “forest love,” the colonial government set out to restructure the rhythms and routines of agrarian life, targeting everything from home heating to food preparation. Timber industrialists, meanwhile, channeled Korea’s forest resources into supply chains that grew in tandem with Japan’s imperial sphere. These mechanisms of resource control were only fortified after 1937, when the peninsula and its forests were mobilized for total war. In this wide-ranging study David Fedman explores Japanese imperialism through the lens of forest conservation in colonial Korea—a project of environmental rule that outlived the empire itself. Holding up for scrutiny the notion of conservation, Seeds of Control examines the roots of Japanese ideas about the Korean landscape, as well as the consequences and aftermath of Japanese approaches to Korea’s “greenification.” Drawing from sources in Japanese and Korean, Fedman writes colonized lands into Japanese environmental history, revealing a largely untold story of green imperialism in Asia.

This atlas brings together a wealth of information related to living and nonliving natural resources in the five countries of Central Asia---Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. It contains an array of maps based on geographic information systems and remote sensing images, numerous photographs, tabulations of important data, and extensive descriptive text that together illustrate and describe the region's bountiful natural resources, its diversity of peoples, and their progress toward sustainable development. Highlights include geographic and climatic features; environmental, economic, and social profiles; energy, minerals, and water resources; ecoregions and ecosystems; major fauna and flora; agriculture and fisheries; peoples and cultural traditions; and economic and social statistics.

The challenges in using and managing natural resources in Indonesia are immense. They include ensuring that resource utilisation benefits most Indonesians. Examines this and other related issues from a political, socio-economic, and environmental standpoint.

In the past two decades, research on environmental issues in East and Southeast Asian countries has mainly focused on existing institutional mechanisms of environmental management, the establishment of new environmental management structures, the introduction of incentives to improve natural capital and foster environmental protection, and the culture of environmental or "green" groups. Virtually no rigorous research has been directed into the nature and significance of the existing relationship between government and civil society in individual country studies, with specific reference to the environmental policy sector, or into how this relationship may be evolving. This book explores this connection in Singapore, and what causes it to evolve, through three case narratives. Its rationale is to address this gap in the literature from a "governance theory" perspective that focuses on state adaptation to the external environment and new forms of coordination and collaboration between government and civil society to tackle new societal problems. The application of the "governance theory" approach to specific case studies is itself a topic that deserves much greater study than what it has so far received.

Drawing upon recent progress in development economics and political science, the book provides fresh analysis of the Caucasus and Central Asia (CCA) countries transition to a market economy by tracing the impact of natural resource endowment. The book examines the synergies between energy-rich and energy-poor states and highlights the practical consequences of both well-managed and poorly-managed deployment of energy. Featuring contributions from prominent specialists on resource-driven economies, the book argues that unless CCA elites change the way in which they deploy natural resource, revenues regional development will fall short of its potential with possible disastrous consequences. The contributors apply the experience of the developing market economies to demonstrate that the region still holds considerable potential to become an important, stable supplier of raw materials and a source of industrial demand to the global economy. However, the CCA is equally likely to become a threat to the global economy as a consequence of the misuse of energy revenues to promote the interests of predatory political elites.