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Urges readers of 'Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography,' to submit research papers on natural resources, economic development and political change in South America. Impact of the adoption of neoliberal economic policies on forest exploitation; Link between rural and urban communities in natural resource use.

Discusses the adoption of neoliberal economic models by Latin American countries as they emerged from military dictatorships into democracies. South American countries' exploitation of natural resources and its relation to their economy; Occurrence in the shift in economic policies of most South American governments in parallel with the forces of political change.

In the early part of the twentieth century, South African cities were segregated in accordance with British city planning concepts that embodied the belief that social order can be manipulated through the urban form. This paper surveys the history of South African planning practices to understand the spread of segregation policies and practices. Whereas scholars tend to agree that the apartheid city (post−1948) is a more highly organized and structured version of the colonial city (pre−1910), the literature lacks consensus on the development of the segregated city (1910−1948) within South Africa. How did concepts of segregation circulate and why was it implemented with such consistency? Accordingly, this paper employs concepts of policy mobilities to trace historical configurations in South Africa to international influences. The focus on the circuits of knowledge explains how concepts and designs transplanted from elsewhere helped create the form of South African cities today. Understanding the movement of planning ideas through policy mobilities furthers geographical understandings of historical circulation processes, the role of the local actors, and policy mobilities failure. This history of learning also challenges the assumption that South African cities are unique and in so doing opens the doors for knowledge sharing between postcolonial cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever‐changing spatial divisions of labour have led to an altered integration of many developing countries into global production networks (GPNs), leading to new spaces of territorial development in these countries. Against this background, this paper examines the role of local institutional actors in co‐shaping territorial development driven by global industrial relocation. Drawing on the case of Bekasi District, Indonesia, this paper nuances the notion of 'strategic coupling' in specific national and local settings of developing countries. Drawing on empirical material obtained through a series of in‐depth interviews conducted between 2012 and 2016, our analysis reveals that although local institutional actors have participated in Bekasi District's territorial development processes they sometimes exhibit a hesitant and less‐than‐creative attitude in this participation. Meanwhile, non‐local actors, most notably private developers and central government agencies, tend to have a more significant leverage in these development processes at the local level, suggesting complex institutional arrangements in tying Bekasi District's assets with GPNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in two provinces of southern Thailand, Nakhon Si Thammarat and Phatthalung in 2015 and 2016, this paper engages with literature on the politics of scale to consider the relationships among the practice of growing rubber and regional belonging. In many ways decoupling low rubber prices (at the time of writing) from a larger story of substantial, multinational increases in rubber cultivation and production since the early 2000s, a common calculus in southern Thailand among smallholder rubber farmers, or chao suan yang in Thai, of current price woes points in large measure to past policy moves by the Thai government, and especially under the administration of Thaksin Shinawatra in the mid‐2000s, to promote rubber cultivation into northern and northeastern provinces. I contend that emphasis given to such a regional‐national, in other words Thai, story of declines in rubber prices entails noteworthy moments of translation whereby rubber's scales are reconstru(ct)ed through appeals to regional legacies and perceptions of a transmission of ‘southern Thai rubber’ outside of the south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One major aim of the Greater Mekong Subregion ( GMS) integration programme, supported by the Asian Development Bank ( ADB), is to foster regional 'community' for sharing resources, people and financial flows. This 'community' is the target of both economic growth and poverty reduction. The emphasis on 'community' in the ADB's mushrooming quantity of documents raises important questions about what kinds of people are included, in what roles and with what kinds of support and protection. This paper explores these questions in relation to the political economy of regulating ethnic migrants from Myanmar working in Thailand. This paper argues that extra-legal relations between migrants and state/para-state agents constitute a crucial part of regulation. In transferring the regulation of migration to the national scale, the ADB inadvertently reinforces national differences between Thais and cross-border people. Additionally, the complicated and fluctuating implementation of national regulations in both countries leaves migrants subject to violence and extortion from state and quasi-state agents in Thailand. This paper shows that the dynamics of global capitalism require 'deportable labour' supplied by ethnic migrants who are included in the GMS community as the most invisible, vulnerable and exploited members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2013, it was announced that Timor-Leste's Oecussi enclave would become the site of a special economic zone. Arid, and inhabited mostly by semi-subsistence farmers from West Timor's Meto ethno-linguistic group, the plan entails remaking the enclave as an industrial, transport and tourism hub. To facilitate this, in mid-2015 the authorities began the process of clearing hundreds of indigenous gardens and homes from land slated for mega-projects intended to make the region attractive to foreign investors. In this paper, I describe how, for many Meto, land tends to be experienced as a spiritually mediated 'geography of affect' (Lea & Woodward, 2010) in which questions of place, belonging, spirituality and personal fortune cannot easily be divided, a reality that raises questions about the suitability of the plan's vision of globalized and investment driven 'development'. Drawing on Scott, I argue that in Oecussi, spirits associated with the land are not apolitical, but are sometimes perceived as acting to protect locals against powerful outsiders - a characteristically Meto 'weapon of the weak' that is in keeping with their previous encounters with colonial regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-border tourism is often proposed by governments as an incentive for economic growth, but critics have suggested that its impacts are, in fact, overplayed. This paper presents research in the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT). It examines the broad economic impacts of Singaporean cross-border tourism on local host communities in two locations: Kukup, a traditional Malaysian fishing village in Johor, southern Peninsular Malaysia, and Bintan in Riau Islands Province in western Indonesia. The study found that cross-border tourism generated income, employment and some local economic linkages. In Kukup clear economic benefits with increased income and employment were unevenly distributed between ethnic groups. The Bintan enclave development had some linkages to the island economy but was reliant on immigrant labour. Cross-border ethnic ties, particularly Chinese, also played an important role in the growth of tourism in the IMS-GT. The paper shows that cross-border tourism can be a useful addition to more conventional forms of international tourism within national tourism planning and could lead to significant economic benefits for local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outcomes and forms of urbanization and modernization in China following the reform and opening of the late 1970s have attracted extensive attention and competing interpretations in scholarly documentation. This paper focuses on Hainan Island, established in 1988 as the biggest special economic zone in China. Since then, considerable inflows of human as well as speculative capital have led to rapid real estate, in particular tourism-related, development. While urban expansion and improvements have been encouraged, the ongoing over-building, unregulated conversion of land use and degradation of the urban environment present serious social and economic problems. This paper summarizes the trajectory, causal factors and outcomes of this urban growth and consequent planning problems that make the island an atypical case in China’s urbanization experience. We argue that the establishment of a practical framework combining socioeconomic planning, land use planning, and the management of both, is crucial to achieve sustainable growth for this transitional economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widespread agreement exists on the broad outlines of the concept of sustainable development for developing countries. This calls for a development model capable of meeting basic needs without depleting natural resources at a rate that robs future generations of their use. In this regard, citizen participation is also considered key to legitimise such policy choices. However, there is considerable disagreement over the substance and meaning of the major components of the concept and the relationship between them. This paper argues that positions in policy disputes over the sustainable development of the forest cluster in two distinct approaches: market-friendly initiatives and grassroots development. Since market economies prevail almost everywhere, the question that is posed concerns the conditions under which the grassroots development approach is included as a significant complement to market-friendly initiatives. This is a political question, requiring an examination of actors, interests and power resources. The paper thus applies a political economy framework to a paired comparison of Mexico, where grassroots development approaches (community forestry) had notable successes, and Chile, where market-friendly forest policy crowded out alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how existing migration policies affect individual migrant women's choices, in particular, with the advancement, or consolidation, of a migrants' rights perspective. The focus is thereby on those migrants classified as unskilled, who constitute the largest and most vulnerable category among migrants. The analysis of migration policies has conventionally been approached from a state/government-centred viewpoint that sees states as the key actors. This paper, however, emphasises a larger number of actors - governmental and non-governmental - as well as the power relations among them to argue that protection through “legal regulation” in the absence of actual implementation is an incomplete solution to alleviate unfair labour conditions that migrants in general, and migrant women specifically, experience. Measures designed to “protect” migrants must be accompanied by measures that empower them, a role that has largely been taken on by existing migrant worker non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Focussing on intra-Asian migration flows in which Southeast Asia is the main labour sender and East Asia the receiver of Southeast Asian migrants, the paper explores the nexus between law and civic activism in the specific subject area of international labour migration and its gender implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades, cities and city regions have become the core of the global economy. Regional governments are increasingly drafting city development policies and implementing them through various visioning documents with the aim of making cities more global, networked and competitive. Welfarist governments especially in the global South are becoming increasingly entrepreneurial, and in the process poor citizens are getting pushed to the margins, evicted from their land and relocated to city fringes. Hyderabad in India provides an interesting illustration of neoliberal development trends in which poor local farmers are forced off their land to make way for a 'world-class' knowledge enclave, popularly known as Cyberabad. This paper examines the policies and processes by which the regional government has sought to brand Hyderabad as a world-class information technology destination and to restructure and reimagine it as a key node in a network of 'globally connected cities' of the world. It also considers the making of Cyberabad in terms of splintering urbanism, which is often understood as a defining feature of contemporary neoliberal urban processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outsourcing and offshoring of services to developing countries has created new opportunities for economic development for countries in the global South. This paper looks at the scope for agency of local institutional actors in the investment attraction of business process outsourcing companies. Drawing on empirical work from the Philippines, an analysis of the process of integrating lower-tier cities into global service production networks is presented. Specifically, the roles of local institutional actors in facilitating FDI attraction and strategically coupling local assets with the needs of multinational service corporations are discussed. Two contrasting cases, the cities of Baguio and Bacolod, show that considerable scope for intervention rests with local institutional actors. The findings have implications for policymaking and research concerned with the newest phase of outsourcing and offshoring in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built environment of Panama City, Panama, has undergone a transformative change over the past decade. Hundreds of high-rise residential towers have sprung up in and around its central business district, eliciting comparisons with Singapore, New York and Dubai insofar as journalists, real estate boosters and politicians have associated the increase in tall buildings with a commensurate increase in global status. Concurrently, on the urban periphery, scores of uniform housing estates have been erected to house an upwardly mobile middle class. Triggered by the handover of the Panama Canal and the surrounding Canal Zone in 1999, the city's pronounced building boom has corresponded with the highest rates of economic growth in Latin America. This paper examines the complex factors behind the recent transformation of Panama City from a historical-morphological perspective. While the drivers of demand for real property were primarily global, the determinants of supply have been highly localized, suggesting that the interface between the global and the local is a fundamental catalyst of changes in the urban landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal and spatial information on land use/cover is a prerequisite for effective planning decisions in the context of social and economic development. Satellite remote sensing data have become increasingly important in the study of land use/cover changes. This paper uses multitemporal satellite data to measure and spatially characterize land use/cover changes in the Jaffna Peninsula, northern Sri Lanka over the two decades from 1984 to early 2004 in terms of potential drivers. Over this period, the Jaffna Peninsula has been impacted severely by armed conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. A postclassification method is used to compare land use/cover classes from satellite images using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the spatial pattern of land use/cover changes over the study period. Results indicate that the land use/cover pattern has been very dynamic since early the 1980s, showing a remarkable decrease in agricultural land use and concomitant increase in non-agricultural land uses. The ethnic conflict and its consequences, particularly large-scale population migrations, have been the main driving forces for such land use/cover changes in the Jaffna Peninsula. The results of this study are not only important in aiding efforts to reconstruct this area after decades of physical and socioeconomic devastation, but should also prompt similarly urgent studies in other inaccessible war-torn areas of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local Economic Development is (LED) an activity of increasing importance in the developing world as globalisation produces new roles for local governments. As compared to a growing number of urban initiatives for LED, rural LED initiatives are relatively undeveloped. In this paper, the focus is upon South Africa, where the post-apartheid government has sought to encourage both urban and rural LED initiatives. Programmes of land reform and restitution in South Africa result in the resettlement or return to the land of communities formerly dispossessed under apartheid. A critical element of planning for successful resettlement is the implementation of LED programmes. Schmidtsdrift in Northern Cape is examined as an example of participatory LED in a developing rural context. Rural LED in South Africa is distinguished by its focus upon poverty alleviation in the context of addressing the legacies of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]