Reconfiguring vulnerability: climate change adaptation in the Cambodian highlands

Abstract

Drawing on field research across four years, this article examines a climate change adaptation project in the Cambodian highlands. It examines the logic and rationality of making vulnerable groups resilient in the context of climate change. It shows how adaption projects tend to understand vulnerability as the result of a series of external threats that arise due to global climate change and are expressed primarily as lost income. Using the example of Knaing village in Mondolkiri province this article shows that when it comes to vulnerability, it is often unhelpful to separate between capitalist relations, state territorialization and climate change. Economic, political, and cultural relations that people in the village find themselves imbedded in are co-produced through the interaction of climatic forces, the expansion of capitalist relations and state territorialization. This article thus tries to sketch out a conception of vulnerability based on villager’s changing agricultural practices and livelihood trajectories in the context of the expansion of Economic Land Concessions, logging of surrounding forests, and settlement of adjacent lands and state conservation efforts.