This talk draws upon five years of work studying climate change interventions in Cambodia – which is considered an important space for experiments in climate change programming. Utilizing over 100 interviews, ethnographic work and surveys it attempts to give a broad outline of how climate change adaptation has become a key discursive aim of development in Cambodia. After giving a brief outline of trends in climate finance, climate projects and the expansion of a climate bureaucracy all in Cambodia, the talk will focus on three rationales that arguably give cohesion to the vast array of projects conducted under the banner of climate change and which provide guidance to the billions of dollars of climate finance flowing into Cambodia. These are firstly, risk reduction, where future climate change threats become delimited, quantifiable and enframed within broader climate change accounting procedures. Secondly, in a distinctly neoliberal manner, attempts are made to securitise these risks and open them up to financialisation or employ new market based experiments to ameliorate these risks. Thirdly, climate change interventions are discursively aimed at very particular types of subjects (the vulnerable subject) whose basic biological relations to the climate, natural resources and the economy are seen to be in need of careful work (to be made resilient). Arguably these three rationales provide coherency to the thousands of climate change adaption projects that have been implemented in Cambodia. The talk then concludes with a consideration of the politics of this orientation of climate assemblages. It focuses less on the disjuncture between the logic of programming and the worlds that poor vulnerable farmers actually live within (although they are markedly different), than the differentiated effects of climate change programming on those involved in the assemblage and those who are merely the targets of its programs.

Climate change impacts affect countries disproportionally. The Pacific region is experiencing extensive negative impacts of climate change, including droughts, flooding and sea level rise, due to varying levels of exposure, adaptive capacity and overall vulnerability. The allocation of climate aid aims to assist the Pacific region in building adaptive capacity and developing local climate change adaptation and mitigation initiatives. While climate aid to the Pacific region has increased since 2000, very little is known about how actors working in this area – donors, recipient governments and non-governmental sector – define, interpret and shape understandings of climate aid. In contributing to extant climate aid literature, this research presents a discursive analysis of semi-structured interviews and secondary sources to present an exploration of climate aid meanings held by climate aid actors in the Pacific region. The results explore these meanings in relation to climate aid modalities, purpose and underlining assumptions/motives. By exploring discursive meanings of climate aid, power relations between donors, recipients and NGOs are highlighted.

The intersections of gender and indigeneity are especially palpable for scholars who position themselves as feminist or indigenous or post-colonial development scholars of the Pacific. To what extent then do substantive debates addressing enduring inequalities, pressing poverty and inhuman injustices but which skip over these intersecting issues constitute ‘unethical’ knowledge making? This paper digs deeper into feminist, indigenous and post-colonial literatures on the politics of knowledge, unethical behavior and activism to examine the resonances and dissonances within them. Focusing on recent research on the affective assemblages of market places in the Pacific, the paper asks to what extent is it possible to speak of 'feminist-indigenous' (or 'indigenous-feminist') ethics in/of geographical research?

Provisions for participatory governance in development decision making is commonly cited as ensuring targeted interventions that lead to equitable distribution of benefits to communities. However, current research into implementation of transnationally disseminated neoliberal democratic governance in the developing world reveals these processes can merely manipulate consensus to legitimise central government development agendas. In China, this trend is unfolding in rural development policy such as Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) in which participation is voluntary and decision making on various aspects of migration and reconstruction of villages is undertaken by consensus of households. Therefore, this paper challenges neoliberal concepts of choice and participation by embedding governance in the local historical-geographic context to reveal local processes of identity making. Two case study villages were explored in the catchment of the middle reach of the Yellow River, Shanxi Province. Results reveal that while neoliberal subjectivities incur choice purely in terms of homo-economicus, villagers can resist in a double movement and configure hybrid subjectivities derived from multiple political cultures. Chinese democratic governance therefore should be reconceptualised to reflect this agency in constructing multiple subjectivities from hybrid combinations of neoliberal and historical identities, social relations and livelihood practices.