This paper examines how the politics of water governance intersected with germ suppression during US colonial rule in the Philippines. Drawing on historical materials and policy documents, we critically trace two interrelated processes of hydroterritorialization through which cholera outbreaks in the early 1900s spurred the production of sanitary waters in the Philippines through dams, water supply networks, and irrigation systems. First, we show how differentiated access to water along the lines of race, class and region reproduced an uneven geography of disease through historical processes of exclusion from clean water. Second, we develop the concept of corporeal territorialization to explain how the cholera outbreak provided the political and economic rationale for expansive water infrastructure projects. We argue that racialized colonial rationalities around water and sanitation not only disciplined bodies but also reconfigured socioeconomic and political geographies through diverse infrastructural interventions. Our analysis contributes to geographical debates on the intersection of infrastructure politics, embodiment, and the spatial governance of water systems.

Across Southeast Asia, national imaginaries of progress and modernity have fuelled the construction of large dams, generating political conflict and social disruption in their wake. This article examines the political struggles surrounding the establishment of the San Roque Multi-Purpose Dam project in the Agno River Basin, Northern Philippines. Drawing on mix-methods fieldwork, we analyse the local 'repertoires of resistance'involving We interpret these strategies as a Gramscian 'war of position' showing how resistance mobilized indigeneity, counter-knowledge, memory and emotion to reshape state-society relations in changing democratic contexts.

Despite extensive research on the role of water infrastructure in consolidating power and political control in frontier regions, few studies have examined how colonial ideologies and water infrastructures have historically defined territories to control populations, labour, and land use over time. This article explores how Spain used the prenza system-a colonial water infrastructure-to establish, maintain and consolidate territorial control in the Philippines. Through the lens of hydrosocial territorialization, we show how the control of water became intertwined with the control of land and labour, extending territorial governance outward from Manila. We argue that the prenza system was more than just slabs of stone and concrete; it functioned as an instrument of power that facilitated political, economic, and ideological territorialization, contributing to a broader state-making project by creating zones of integration. However, we highlight the limitations of this hydro-colonial project by examining how the Ifugao people of the upland Cordillera resisted state territorialization through their rice terracing system, challenging the instruments of state-making imposed in the lowlands of Luzon. (c) 2025 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

This paper considers the relationship between authoritarian populism and extractivism by examining the violence against 'environmental defenders' in the Philippines. Since 2016, President Rodrigo Duterte's populist mandates have facilitated violence against opponents of the regime's agendas. We examine the relationship between violence and 'extractive enclosures' on Mindanao and Palawan - two resource-rich islands with contrasting histories of commodity booms and land struggles. We show how the routine assassinations of environmental defenders is entangled with expanding extractivism. We argue that Duterte's counterinsurgency tactics have intensified violence against opponents of palm oil and mining just as 'protective enclosures' are rezoned to facilitate extractivism.

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in south-east Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, practitioners, and experts focused on cultural fire management in the Victorian Loddon Mallee region. Using interviews and workshops, we facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. In this paper, we describe three practice-oriented principles to develop and maintain collaborations across Aboriginal groups, researchers, and government in the Indigenous-led revitalisation of fire on Country: relationships (creating reciprocity and trust), Country (working with place and people), and power (acknowledging structures and values). Collaborations based on these principles will be unique to each temporal, social, cultural, and geographic context. Considering our findings, we acknowledge the challenges that exist and the opportunities that emerge to constructively hold space to grow genuinely collaborative research that creates change. We suggest that the principles we identify can be applied by anyone wanting to form genuine collaborations around the world as the need for social-ecological justice grows.

This paper considers the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance and advocacy by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on heterogenous state responses to the 2018-2019 El Nino drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a violent vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: exhorting the devastating reality of climate change; denigrating multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; subverting indigenous peoples' land rights; and fostering the extrajudicial assassination of activists. Though Duterte's wider climate change policies are often viewed as a strategic distraction or the isolated product of an erratic populist, I argue that these recent responses to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial and nationalist sensibilities to confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of illiberal adaptation politics across Philippine history and the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge both universalist Western political rationalities and new directions in climate justice movement calling for ontological inclusivity. I highlight the need for a closer examination of the origins, practices and implications of violent adaptions.

Zoonotic disease emergence has become a core concern of biodiversity conservation amid the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Major international conservation groups now comprehensively center larger human-nature imbalances not only as problems of global public health but as a core challenge of the conservation movement, alongside habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change. There is, however, little consideration of how new biosecurity concerns might alter conservation practice with unexpected and potential harmful impacts on human communities, particularly in developing nations with significant human-wildlife interfaces. Reviewing emerging policy positions from key conservation organizations, this article argues that the proposed responses to the COVID-19 pandemic hold the potential to (a) amplify existing people-park conflicts, and (b) generate new tensions by integrating global systems of viral surveillance into biodiversity conservation. I conclude that the close integration of biosecurity concerns into conservation policies requires greater acknowledgment of the unique challenges for human communities.

Catastrophic and unprecedented wildfires have unfolded across fire-prone landscapes globally over the last three years, with highly publicized loss of human life, property destruction and ecological transformation. Indigenous peoples within many nations have persuasively argued that traditional fire management can enhance existing wildfire mitigation strategies. However, there are considerable barriers to the further incorporation of Indigenous practices into existing wildfire policy. This paper explores the potential of Indigenous fire management to achieve broader institutionalization, emphasizing the social labour involved producing and sustaining intercultural collaboration in bureaucratic contexts. Our focus is southern Australia where Indigenous peoples' fire management, often termed 'cultural burning', has been facilitated by an Indigenous-led social movement and growing state support. We draw on interviews conducted with Aboriginal and white land and hazard management practitioners actively engaged in intercultural fire management collaborations largely occurring on public lands. In the absence of institutional clarity, established networks and accreted experience these practitioners work to generate enthusiasm, stabilise Aboriginal peoples' environmental authority and nullify pervasive societal fears surrounding the risk of fire. The case study demonstrates the significance of interpersonal factors in the emergence and maintenance of fraught intercultural collaborations. Despite global optimism, such insights highlight how the revival of Indigenous fire management in nations such as Australia is highly contingent and depends upon routine persuasive labour and fragile intercultural diplomacy.

Contemporary social theory has forcefully argued for a 'loving' postenvironmentalism based on intimate care and making kin with the non-human world. These arguments are a central part of an influential and cross-disciplinary scholarly discourse, increasingly adopted by environmental anthropologists, that envisions a universal moral ecology of 'care, love and kinship' as the solution to the near-apocalyptic social and environmental conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ethnographic work in the Philippines, I explore how this narrowed affective repertoire maps awkwardly onto indigenous Pala'wan explanations of their relationship with the non-human world where reciprocity and respect are held in tension with fear, violence and death. I focus, in particular, on the Palawan bearded pig (Sus ahoenobarbus), an endemic species that has become an emblematic conservation species while also being extensively hunted by indigenous peoples across the Island.

The forests of Southeast Asia are represented as increasingly 'at-risk' to fire, constituting a regional fire politics concerned with the management and organisation of environmental blame. State governments often place culpability for this increasing flammability on histories of deforestation that disproportionately blame Indigenous peoples who now face a correspondingly large burden in conservation schemes. By tracing the history of fire management from the colonial period to the 1980s, this paper explores how the management of forests and fire in the Philippines has been shaped over time with imperatives to govern and economically exploit upland spaces. While these histories clearly point to a political economy of knowledge production, they also show how forest governance in the Philippines has worked to construct ethnic difference through policies and practices that naturalise livelihoods, spaces and qualities to essentialised 'tribal' uplanders. To understand the contemporary geography of blame that surrounds forest fires and deforestation in the Philippines and Southeast Asia more broadly, we argue for a more nuanced examination of 'the uplands' as a post-colonial geography co-constituted with the historical production of indigeneity and environmental knowledge. We conclude by emphasising the historical role of colonial forest and land management institutions in fashioning lasting socio-spatial differences.

Geographical ResearchVolume 58, Issue 4 p. 429-431 BOOK REVIEW Alliances in the Anthropocene. Christine Eriksen and Susan Ballard Palgrave Pivot, 2020. XVII + 136 pp, ISBN 978-981-15-2532-2 (Hardcover), $84.99 (AUD). Will Smith, Corresponding Author Will Smith will.smith@deakin.edu.au orcid.org/0000-0003-1913-6963 Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia Correspondence Will Smith, Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia. Email: will.smith@deakin.edu.auSearch for more papers by this author Will Smith, Corresponding Author Will Smith will.smith@deakin.edu.au orcid.org/0000-0003-1913-6963 Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria, Australia Correspondence Will Smith, Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, Victoria 3125, Australia. Email: will.smith@deakin.edu.auSearch for more papers by this author First published: 11 August 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1745-5871.12438Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume58, Issue4November 2020Pages 429-431 RelatedInformation

In Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. In particular, the palpable visibility of shifting (swidden) agriculturalists 'slashing and burning' forests has fuelled centuries-old political agendas to criminalise swidden farmers for supposedly destroying swaths of forests valued for timber, biodiversity and now ecosystem services. Swidden farmers who regularly clear and burn forests, have endured a disproportionate burden of blame for investing in and maintaining an old livelihood practice into the 21st Century. Drawing on Hall's politics of representation, we examine the contrasting political frames, management and practices of clearing and burning forests among upland farmers, state and non-state actors who govern forests on Palawan Island, the Philippines. We describe the social, economic, and biophysical character of swidden clearing and burning among the indigenous Tagbanua of central Palawan, whose livelihoods and landscapes are impacted by green governance and enclosures. Informed by several years of ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how and why Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn forest despite state and nonstate actors criminalising these practices for decades. We argue that, despite sustained vilification and reduced fallows arising from governance policies and enclosures, Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn knowing well that, despite the practices being illegal, levels of tolerance and leniency toward swidden is the local norm, rather than exception-highlighting the importance of what we call 'atmospheres of consent'. Ethnoecological understandings of clearing and burning in the uplands, we argue, are crucial to recalibrating the burden of blame placed on poor farmers whose agriculture is deemed destructive by the region's burgeoning sustainability discourse.

Forest dependent communities are increasingly at the centre of intensifying global aspirations to alleviate both climate change vulnerability and environmental degradation. In Southeast Asia in particular, varied forms of conservation practice fuse concern for biodiversity outcomes with the desire to support ‘resilience’ and build ‘capacity’ in the face of environmental change. Drawing on Foucault's notion of biopolitics, this article explores the consequences of efforts to govern both forest decline and human vulnerability. Through this framing, we consider indigenous experiences with the 1997/8 El Niño event in the southern Philippines where conservation efforts have produced unintended outcomes for upland households negotiating the impacts of extreme drought. We demonstrate that efforts to comprehensively reform indigenous life as part of a twinned concern for environmental decline and human vulnerability have produced acute food insecurity during El Niño events by diminishing swiddening practices and related lifeways that buffer against extreme drought – some of the very environmental changes that forest management efforts had hoped to buffer indigenous households against. These insights offer a bridge between contemporary Foucauldian treatments of ‘vulnerability’ as a potent discursive construct and work within political ecology that aims to empirically understand uneven experiences of environmental change.

An introduction to An Elemental Anthropocene.

Examination of the levels of Indigenous employment in southern Australia reveals that most agencies do not adequately record the proportion of staff who are Indigenous. Recent initiatives to improve Indigenous staffing levels need to provide consistent and detailed data on employment.

Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’.

Indigenous peoples' understandings of climate change are often interpreted through an instrumental prism that privileges the ecologically adaptive nature of belief and practice. This paper explores the limits of this perspective by considering the environmental narratives of self‐blame among households in the uplands of Palawan Island, the Philippines. In the south of the island, indigenous Pala'wan widely suggest that cyclical El Niño Southern Oscillation driven variation in rainfall and related food insecurity is the product of a linear change in climatic patterns occurring over the past several decades. This perceived climate change is explained in reference to the popularity of incestuous relationships and a decline in ritualised executions. Through an ethnographic focus on the politics of climate knowledge, I argue that Pala'wan narratives of self‐blame speak as much to ongoing struggles between indigenous people and the Philippine state over control of the forested uplands as it does to the grounded and empirical qualities of indigenous environmental knowledge.

The apparent vulnerability and demise of older agriculture and lifeways looms large in frontier Southeast Asia. As upland settings are impacted by ever-intensifying agrarian change-with its pace and character transforming rapidly-poor farmers renegotiate swidden agriculture as an assemblage of practices that contends with major landscape changes. Partly countering agricultural trends (and interpretations) that suggest swidden is in inevitable demise, upland farmers pursue swidden as a varied and contingent socio-material practice that contends with intensifying environmental governance and dramatic land use changes, often in the same spaces. Drawing on assemblage theory, we provide a counter-narrative to swidden decline (as part of 'deagrarianization') by offering ethnographic cases from across Palawan Island, the 'Philippines to show how the vital nature of swidden assemblages-a complex of human and non-human relations-involves socio-material properties with agentive and productive capacity. We show specifically how indigenous farmers engage the productive capacity of swidden assemblages as the means by which to negotiate the pressures of upland transformations in the Philippines.