These two books explore the interaction of states, markets, and popular sectors—farmers, fishers, workers, miners—in Southeast Asia. Tania Murray Li, an anthropologist, analyzes two centuries of governmental and nongovernmental efforts to improve (i.e., to transform) the lives of Indonesian farmers in Java and central Sulawesi (an island east of Borneo). The 13 chapters in the volume focus on different modes of commodification or, in the words of Anna Tsing, the “contingent ways in which people become labor and nature becomes resources” (p. 27). Despite these differences, both volumes are preoccupied with neoliberalism. Both are interested in what Karl Polanyi called “countermovements”: defensive reactions of vulnerable groups to the growing role of the market. Both demonstrate the diversity and complexity of such reactions and the value, as well as limitations, of theoretically informed ethnography.
The Will to Improve, drawn from historical accounts, interviews, participant observation, and close readings of nongovernmental organization (NGO) and World Bank planning documents, is first of all interesting history. Following a theoretical introduction, Chapter 1 provides an overview of governmental interventions from the colonial period through Suharto's New Order (1800–2000). The next five chapters focus on resettlement, agricultural productivity, and forest protection undertaken by Indonesian governments and foreign NGOs. Chapter 7 shifts to a critical analysis of World Bank efforts to strengthen communities by building on preexisting social capital.
Li's insights will be useful to students of the political economy of development. First, she shows how interventions and institutions layer on each other and intersect with other processes to shape responses and outcomes. Theoretically, this resonates with insights from historical institutionalism. Methodologically, the causal complexity implied here suggests the value of comparative analysis and contingent generalizations. In terms of policy, it means that interventions presuming to operate from a sociopolitical clean slate will likely fail. Second, Li's close analysis of farmer resistance to NGO efforts at integrated conservation and development sheds light on the complexity and contradictions of such protests. And without minimizing the importance of community norms and traditions, she recognizes that “even in the most remote highland areas … the calculus villagers apply is market-based” (p. 281). The author also captures the discord within the NGO community. Some involved tensions within the “wish-laden ‘middle ground’ in which conservation, indigenous rights, and economic justice can all be achieved simultaneously” (p. 156). Also, activists supporting farmers against mining corporations were more ambivalent about farmers occupying land inside a conservation area, and indigenous rights advocates differed as to who was actually “indigenous.”
Li's most powerful insights concern the NGOs (the Nature Conservancy and CARE), as well as the international aid organizations (World Bank, Asian Development Bank), showing how these organizations systematically render everything technical by excising power from their programs. Although the Bank acknowledged resentment over social injustice due to (Bank-supported) investments in mining and plantations under the New Order, it proposed no policy “to transform the material roots of those feelings” (p. 263). Rather, it presumed that good governance, new investments, and clear land titling would replace frustration “with feelings of trust, cooperation, healthy competition, and empowerment” (p. 263). And despite the Nature Conservancy's commitment to a “collaborative management” program, the main function of villagers' input “was not to learn about villagers' aspirations or engage in debate but to reform their aspirations…. The intended outcome … (park preservation) … was determined in advance” (p. 209).
The volume's theoretical frames are useful. Following Michel Foucault, Li highlights the tensions between the technocratic cleanliness of governmental improvement schemes and the messiness of politics. Her Gramscian lens pushes her to understand how and why new identities emerge in the course of struggle, and her Marxian lens compels an appreciation of the market's power, its intersection with government institutions, and the ways in which displacement and impoverishment coexist with growth.
The Will to Improve also has some gaps. One is Li's ambivalence about market incentives. She disparages World Bank efforts not just because they ignore Indonesia's structural inequalities but also because they are designed to enhance market participation. Yet, as noted, Li recognizes villagers' fundamentally market-based calculus, acknowledging that antidevelopmentalist views often run up against farmers' desires for state-backed property rights and market participation (p. 279).
A related problem is a tendency to stretch neoliberalism as a concept. Li associates neoliberalism with 1) an emphasis on institutional attributes such as transparency and accountability rather than power relations, 2) the belief that change can be induced from outside “trustees,” and 3) the belief that the goal of such change is to help farmers create and benefit from market opportunities. Some of these dimensions are consistent with more leftist-inspired “schemes to improve the human condition” (e.g., Tanzania's compulsory “villagization”), described by James Scott in Seeing Like a State (1998).
Li herself seems to recognize this point when she extends her critique to “vanguard-activists” who seek to push the rank and file toward some combination of “autonomous, authentic, postdevelopment thinking that is anti-capitalist, anti-state, and grounded in local traditions and cultural diversity” (pp. 278–79). Her alternative seems to be embodied by a local NGO whose scholar-activists “do not expect to find heroes in the highlands” or “authentic communities” but instead confront messy realities with the democratic impulse of “asking questions, provoking debate, and conducting analysis” (pp. 278–79). This portrayal comes close to what Peter Evans describes as the building of “collective capabilities” in which communities, through deliberation, navigate their own market position (“Collective Capabilities, Culture, and Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom,” Studies in Comparative International Development 37(2) [June 2002]: 54–60).
A more systematic assessment of such strategies might have compelled Li to go beyond her definition of politics as provocation and contestation (pp. 11–12, 228). Stopping at this purely oppositional concept of politics lets her rest too comfortably in her “critical stance.” One of the great virtues of this book is Li's descriptions of the multiplicity of interests and claims inside as well as outside village communities. The daunting challenge of reconciling at least some of these interests suggests the necessity of understanding politics not just as provocation but even more crucially as efforts to solve collective action problems.
Finally, this book would have benefited from a broader, comparative perspective. The cases reviewed are in many ways “easy” ones with regard to the pathologies of unequal power between technical power and its contentious targets. What conditions allow for the scaled-up, democratic deliberation Li seems to espouse? Addressing this question requires controlled comparisons; that is, more positivist approaches can contribute to the “possibilist” “project underlying this valuable book.
Taking Southeast Asia to Market shares some of the strengths (and weaknesses) of Li's volume, while offering new insights. The chapters range widely: timber in Indonesia and Laos, fish in Indonesia, sugar and shrimp in Thailand, water in the Mekong, coffee in Java, natural resource-based biotechnology in Malaysia, conservation in Sulawesi, mushrooms in Oregon, women workers in Vietnam's textile industry, managers in Indonesia's state enterprises, and minerals in Burma. By drawing on Southeast Asia's great diversity of place and product, the authors provide solid support for the book's core contention, namely, that commodification and countermovements are not only socially constructed but also “dynamic, contingent, contradictory, and unpredictable” (p. 229).
This volume effectively illuminates the factors accounting for such contingency. Politics plays a more prominent role here than in Li's book. The impact of state interests emerges, for example, in Ken Maclean's account of how external and internal pressures pushed the Burmese generals to maintain sovereign control by linking military and commercial interests in “extractive enclaves.” Sandra Smeltzer shows how bureaucratic politics and federal–state differences weakened forces supporting conservation in Malaysia. By showing how post-1998 decentralization in Indonesia led to provincial and municipal manipulation of logging licenses, Paul Gellert demonstrates the “trap” of assuming that local control translates into more just and sustainable outcomes. Conversely, Angie Ngoc Tran shows how alliances between local state agencies and state-backed union branches supported Vietnamese women workers' resistance to factory discipline (required by flexible, small-batch garment production). Such resistance also drew on the state's own rhetoric of socialist ideals, as well as on kinship and gender networks.
Finally, several chapters address the editors' goal of bridging “the gaps between materialist and constructionist approaches” (p. 227). For example, Keith Barney's analysis of eucalyptus plantations in Laos to feed China's pulp and paper industry nicely combines political economy and cultural studies by showing how the state effectively enclosed land for plantations by recategorizing it as “degraded.” Daromir Rudnycky's description of Islamic-based “spiritual reform” in an Indonesian state-owned enterprise demonstrates how economic liberalization (after 1998) stimulated efforts to produce “a laboring subject who would integrate a certain interpretation of Islamic virtue into his or her work, family, and recreational lives” (p. 86). But this fascinating account is weakened by its inattention to the impact of such discourses on the actual efficiency of local producers.
Taking Southeast Asia to Market avoids simplistic portrayals of local populations, while going even further than Li in recognizing the benefits as well as costs of market opportunities. For example, Dorian Fougeres describes how market liberalization and new modes of transportation shifted control over live fish marketing from Hong Kong companies to exporters in Sulawesi (p. 171). Peter Vandergreest shows how expanded sugar production in a southern Thai village, encouraged by wartime shortages and national development strategies, “increased poor farmers' control of land, labor, and income” (p. 211). Vandergreest's view of shrimp farming is similarly nuanced. Without minimizing its environmental damages, he resists viewing shrimp farming as a “slash-and-burn industry” and highlights “the collective actions of local villagers or shrimp farmers who shared water infrastructure, as well as regulation by local government bodies” (p. 216).
Vandergreest's findings lead to conclusions that reflect the volume's lessons. First, he shows that different products “are … associated with very different kinds of politics” (p. 223): class politics in palm sugar and more ecological politics in shrimp farming. Second, he traces his shift from a more class-based, agrarian politics framework to one combining transnational networks and community-based collective action. The focus on networks allows him to avoid the trap of vaguely defined “neoliberalism” (a trap seriously afflicting several of the other chapters in this volume), while also encouraging clearer distinctions among market pressures. The focus on community alerts him to the importance of “place-based collective action that cannot easily be identified with class, ethnicity, and so on” (p. 208). It also, I think, pushes Vandergreest to a more useful understanding of countermovement than that used by the other authors. He is averse to framing all critical responses to marketization as “simple resistance” (p. 221). Opposition occurs, but it is not so much resistance to state development goals as it is, for example, shrimp farmers' efforts to get better deals from corporations or local efforts to contain the more destructive practices of shrimp farming. This view of countermovements as including community efforts to transform the terms of engagement with markets brings Vandergreest closer to a view of politics as collective action. Finally, he makes explicit the value of comparative work by asking whether his analysis of one community is in fact illustrative of more regional trends.
