Uneven Frontiers: Exposing the Geopolitics of Myanmar’s Borderlands with Critical Remote Sensing

Selective border permeability: Governing complex environmental issues through and beyond COVID-19

COVID-19 has changed the permeability of borders in transboundary environmental governance regimes. While borders have always been selectively permeable, the pandemic has reconfigured the nature of cross-border flows of people, natural resources, finances and technologies. This has altered the availability of spaces for enacting sustainability initiatives within and between countries. In Southeast Asia, national governments and businesses seeking to expedite economic recovery from the pandemic-induced recession have selectively re-opened borders by accelerating production and revitalizing agro-export growth. Widening regional inequities have also contributed to increased cross-border flows of illicit commodities, such as trafficked wildlife. At the same time, border restrictions under the exigencies of controlling the pandemic have led to a rolling back and scaling down of transboundary environmental agreements, regulations and programs, with important implications for environmental democracy, socio-ecological justice and sustainability. Drawing on evidence from Southeast Asia, the article assesses the policy challenges and opportunities posed by the shifting permeability of borders for organising and operationalising environmental activities at different scales of transboundary governance.

Spatial Analysis of Inequality in Thailand: Applications of Satellite Data and Spatial Statistics/Econometrics

To formulate and monitor the progress of development policies, acquiring data with sufficient spatiotemporal details is inevitable. With the increasing availability of open remote-sensing data and open-source software packages, this research suggested the novelty integration of satellite data and spatial analytical methods, enabling a timely and costless framework for assessing the nationwide socioeconomic condition. Specifically, the spatial statistical and spatial econometrical methods were applied to geospatial data to identify the clustering patterns and the localized associations of inequality in Thailand. The spatial statistical results showed that Bangkok and its vicinity had been a cluster of high socioeconomic conditions, representing the spatial inequality of development. In addition, results of the spatial econometrical models showed that the satellite-based indicators could identify the socioeconomic condition (with p-value < 0.010 and R-squared ranging between 0.345 and 0.657). Inequality indicators (i.e., Gini, Thiel and Atkinson) were then constructed by using survey-based and satellite-based data, informing that spatial inequality has been slowly declining. These findings recommended the new establishment of polycentric growth poles that offer economic opportunities and reduce spatial inequality. In addition, in accordance with Sustainable Development Goal 10 (reduced inequalities), this analytical framework can be applied to country-specific implications along with the global scale extensions.

Integrating Pixels, People, and Political Economy to Understand the Role of Armed Conflict and Geopolitics in Driving Deforestation: The Case of Myanmar

Armed conflict and geopolitics are a driving force of Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC), but with considerable variation in deforestation trends between broader and finer scales of analysis. Remotely-sensed annual deforestation rates from 1989 to 2018 are presented at the national and (sub-) regional scales for Kachin State in the north of Myanmar and in Kayin State and Tanintharyi Region in the southeast. We pair our multiscaled remote sensing analysis with our multisited political ecology approach where we conducted field-based interviews in study sites between 2018 and 2020. Our integrated analysis identified three common periods of deforestation spikes at the national and state/region level, but with some notable disparities between regions as well as across and within townships and village tracts. We found the rate and geography of deforestation were most influenced by the territorial jurisdictions of armed authorities, national political economic reforms and timber regulations, and proximity to national borders and their respective geopolitical relations. The absence or presence of ceasefires in the north and southeast did not solely explain deforestation patterns. Rather than consider ceasefire or war as a singular explanatory variable effecting forest cover change, we demonstrate the need to analyze armed conflict as a dynamic multisited and diffuse phenomenon, which is simultaneously integrated into broader political economy and geopolitical forces.