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This article explores the trajectory of three rural, precarious Cambodian women as they deploy land as a means of undertaking survival work in Cambodia. Using a gendered lens vis‐à‐vis the concept of autonomy, this article rethinks distress sales of land and collateralized land for microfinance borrowing as forms of everyday autonomy. By highlighting women's central role in undertaking social reproductive labour to reproduce the rural household, these acts of distress land sale and debt‐taking are understood as forms of 'survival work', acts that ensure the day‐to‐day survival of the household and form the basis for broader projects of autonomy. Although we remain ambivalent about the long‐term prospects for resistance through credit‐taking in particular, we ultimately highlight the need for greater attention to variegated oppositional agency in the path to autonomy to understand the gendered labour of everyday survival in rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Over the past two decades, the global issue of modern slavery has become increasingly prominent within development thinking and practice. Efforts to address it largely focus on criminal prosecutions of immediate 'perpetrators', for instance those who are direct employers or middlemen. This article adds to a growing call from critical scholars to look to the structural drivers of such highly exploitative labour relations. Drawing on an unfree labour approach that views debt bondage as embedded in and reproduced by capitalist accumulation, this analysis explores the diffuse drivers of unfree labour through the experiences of indebted farmers who have migrated from rural areas to work in and around Phnom Penh as debt‐bonded brick‐kiln labourers. The study demonstrates how debt discipline in the context of unregulated microfinance lending in rural Cambodia creates the conditions for unfree labour to emerge. Evidencing links between risky lending practices and unfree labour, the article strengthens calls to understand modern slavery as unfree labour and, in doing so, highlights the failures of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 8 and other similar policies to make these crucial connections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural – urban divide is due to their precarity. In doing so, this article draws on a conceptualisation of precarity which recognises it as emerging from the specific political economy of Cambodia, and as something that is neither new, nor confined to conditions of labour alone. As such, in looking to precarity as a means of conceptualising the relations of power which shape impacts of climate change, we advance a 'climate precarity' lens as a means of understanding how adaptation to climate change is an issue of power, rooted in a specific geographical context, and mobile over the rural–urban divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Reliance on microfinance for everyday survival will be deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic. • The majority of microfinance borrowers globally are women. • Servicing microfinance loans will heighten burdens of (un)-paid work that women undertake as part of social reproduction. • Over-indebtedness leads to women's bodily and emotional 'depletion'. • The global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development. The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when microfinance is at its historical peak, with an estimated 139 million microfinance customers globally. Cambodia's microfinance sector is one of the fastest growing, and like others in the Global South has moved from offering entrepreneurial capital to everyday liquidity, and even disaster relief. In this Viewpoint, however, we argue that the promotion of microfinance as market-based relief and recovery from the pandemic should be a source of concern, not comfort. We firstly suggest that as a result of the health and economic impacts associated with COVID-19, credit-taking is likely to escalate further in terms of the number of borrowers and loan amounts. Second, we contend that a growing reliance on MFIs will leave households undernourished, and further vulnerable to its disciplining and extractive impulses. Third, we argue that the interplay between over-indebtedness, pre-existing malnutrition challenges, and the global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development. Coordination between the Cambodian government, microfinance lenders, international investors, and development partners is vital to offer debt relief. Furthermore, to reverse the reliance of so many households on the microfinance industry for survival, inclusive socio-economic policies and public welfare services must be prioritised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]