Issues in Southeast Asian Geography

In an essentialist sense, geography is at the heart of many emerging issues in Southeast Asia. Long concerned with relationships between people and environment, society and nature, geographers should be positioned centrally within debates over sustainable development in this region of rapid economic growth and even more rapid ecological decline. The very essence of Southeast Asia as a region in its various constructions is inherently geographical, as are the processes of regionalisation and globalisation that construct and redefine spatial relations within and beyond Southeast Asia. Regional inequality is another doggedly geographical theme, and configurations of power based on territorialisation similarly suggest geography as an issue-oriented discipline. Yet in the sense of disciplinary practice, geographers within Southeast Asia are hardly visible in debates on these and other issues, and geography – with notable exceptions – remains a discipline oriented more toward description and problem solving rather than critical scholarship. Thus, in discussing emerging issues in Southeast Asian geography, we need to look a bit more closely at what we mean by an issue-based geography and what we mean by Southeast Asian geography.

Southeast Asian geography can be taken to mean one or more of a number of things. The geography of Southeast Asia refers to the application of descriptive and analytical geographical tools and concepts to understanding the human, environmental, and physical geography of a world region whose geographical scope and coherence is itself an issue. Geography as practised in Southeast Asia refers to the approach of teachers and researchers in academic geography departments in the ten countries, now all associated formally in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), that are commonly – but not unproblematically – taken to constitute this world region. Much of the internationally produced geographical scholarship on Southeast Asia has been generated outside the region in question. Recent collaborative initiatives have increasingly broken down the local/non-local divide in Southeast Asian geography, but in a way that leaves open the question of where an issue-based approach to geography fits in.

What do we mean by an issue-based approach? At a basic level, issues are sometimes understood simply as topics. Emerging issues under such an interpretation would be traced by examining the main subject areas covered by geographers in their research, teaching, and publication, for example by a keywords analysis. More often, however, issues deal with areas of controversy, conflict, alternative policy options and dilemmas, aspects of development and change that impact on different places and social groups unequally, questions of sustainability, contested meanings of region, place and identity, and so on. Critical social science deals with issues by application of key concepts, marking it out from straight journalism, employing class, gender, ethnicity, sustainability, and the more specifically geographical framing concepts of space, place, and scale to interpret and analyse issues as diverse as state formation, urban bias in development, impacts of large resource projects on society and the environment, globalisation, and so on. Geography extends the conceptual basis for issue analysis into the natural sciences in an era in which environment and climate change have moved centre-stage.

Critical geographies have been associated not just with particular conceptual tools but also with larger bodies of theory. Some of these remain quite diffuse, for example political ecology. As geography has moved from an idiographic tradition, through the quantitative revolution, to engage more centrally with critical social science, so it has combined with other disciplines. Applied to Southeast Asia, critical geographies have dealt with issues in environment, uneven development, regional economic integration, and globalisation. Each of these areas is subject to considerable debate within and beyond academia, and also across disciplines. Indeed, geographers from outside Southeast Asia have tended to collaborate as much or more with non-geographers as with fellow geographers within the region, a point that I return to later on.

As geography has engaged more broadly, it has sometimes even been associated with a disciplinary position on particular issues. An interesting recent example is the 2009 World Development Report, in which the World Bank took economic geography as its defining theme (World Bank 2009). However, the economists' approach to reshaping economic geography is based in analysis fundamentally different from that of many economic geographers, and as a result their abstracted analysis misses some of the key contextual questions that geographers would normally ask (Rigg et al. Reference Rigg, Bebbington, Gough, Bryceson, Agergaard, Fold and Tacoli2009). A consequence is that whereas geographers look for spatial difference at multiple scales and hence see Southeast Asia – from Singapore to Laos – as a highly variegated region, the World Bank economists look for connectivity and hence proximity as a uniting influence in economic fortunes, leading to homogenising regional analysis at the global scale.

Published Scholarship on Southeast Asia

To identify emerging issues in Southeast Asian geography, five geographical journals were reviewed over the past three decades to examine trends in the location of scholarship and issues covered in Southeast Asian geography. The selection is, of course, far from complete. It was based on a spread between journals with a specific regional locus or focus, international journals with particular leanings toward the developing world or the Asia-Pacific hemisphere, and a top international journal in the discipline. The journals thus selected are the key international geographical journal based in Southeast Asia (Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography – SJTG), the key international journal focusing on the wider Asia-Pacific region and based in New Zealand (Asia Pacific Viewpoint [formerly Pacific Viewpoint] – APV), one of the two key Australian journals in a country that has become increasingly enmeshed in and aware of the region (Geographical Research [formerly Australian Geographical Studies] – GR), one of the international geography journals most closely associated with developing world issues, based in the United Kingdom (Geographical Journal – GJ), and a top discipline journal based in the United States (Annals of the Association of American Geographers – AAAG). Figures 1 and 2 show the number and percentage of articles respectively on Southeast Asia in these journals, using running means to even out year-to-year fluctuations. Inevitably, a different selection of journals would produce somewhat different distributions.

Figure 1.

Numbers of articles on Southeast Asia (APV [PV]: Asia Pacific Viewpoint [Pacific Viewpoint to 1995]; SJTG: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography; GJ: Geographical Journal; GR [AGS]: Geographical Research [Australian Geographical Studies to 2004]; AAAG: Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Source: review of five geography journals 1980–2009).

Figure 2.

Percentage of articles on Southeast Asia, running means. (Source: review of five geography journals 1980–2009).

Clearly there is an upward trend in the extent to which Southeast Asia appears in these journals overall. A good deal of this trend is accounted for by the shift in focus of APV, but the increasing prominence and reputation of SJTG has also significantly increased the volume and quality of published geographical scholarship on Southeast Asia. GJ and GR have seen steady but more modest rises, at a much lower level, while Southeast Asia remains only a blip on the North American geography radar screen.

The subject matter of publications on Southeast Asian geography has moved from quite descriptive work to more critical issues. Decadal samplesFootnote ¹ give an indication of the trends, and need to be seen in light of the changing economic development, political, and environmental contexts of the times. In 1980, six out of ten articles on Southeast Asia published in these five journals were on straight physical geography, with subjects ranging from limestone landscape description (Ley Reference Ley1980; Osman 1980; Waltham and Brook Reference Waltham and Brook1980) to water chemistry (Laverty Reference Laverty1980). None of the articles addressed their subject matter in an issue-oriented way, for example in terms of environmental impact. The human geography themes were somewhat more issue-oriented, ranging from rural geography of population pressure and land use change in Kalimantan (Seavoy Reference Seavoy1980) to issues of housing policy in Southeast Asian cities (Pryor Reference Pryor1980).

A decade later, after the rapid economic growth and ‘Southeast Asian take-off’ of the 1980s associated with rapid increase in foreign direct investment from East Asia and geopolitical change in the region, but also with a growing environmental concern at the pace and nature of development, there was a distinctive issue-orientation emergent in published scholarship. In 1990, all five of the articles published were issue-oriented. Three were on aspects of ethnicity in Southeast Asia, Brunei and Malaysia respectively (May Reference May1990; Neville Reference Neville1990; Ong Reference Ong1990), one was on land tenure and forest issues, and the other on remittances to the Philippines associated with labour migration and overseas settlement (Jackson Reference Jackson1990).

By 2000, even though the region had gone through the ‘bubble economy’ and the burst of the financial crisis, geographers were publishing on quite similar topics to those of a decade earlier. However, many of these were treated with a more critical and theorised edge. For example, adaptation to environmental change was examined through concepts of risk and in the specific economic context of post-socialist transition (Adger Reference Adger2000). Economic geography was seen beyond a descriptive locational account of economic activity, in the context of globalisation and the restructured role of state and capital (Dixon Reference Dixon2000). A special issue of APV brought together a range of perspectives on agricultural land settlement in the Central Highlands of Vietnam and its socio-environmental impacts (De Koninck Reference De Koninck2000; Déry Reference Déry2000; Hardy Reference Hardy2000; Michaud and Turner Reference Michaud and Turner2000; Scott Reference Scott2000; Tan Reference Tan2000).

In 2009, borders (Eilenberg and Wadley Reference Eilenberg and Wadley2009; Klanarong Reference Klanarong2009; Potter Reference Potter2009; Smeltzer Reference Smeltzer2009) and frontiers (Agergaard et al. Reference Agergaard, Niels and Gough2009; Barney Reference Barney2009; Fold and Hirsch Reference Hirsch2009; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2009; McCarthy and Cramb Reference McCarthy and Cramb2009) dominated publication through special issues in Asia Pacific Viewpoint and Geographical Journal respectively. A key feature of these articles is their rethinking of the meaning of space and boundary zones in a trans-national regional context, perhaps reflecting Southeast Asia as a more ‘open regional system’.

A keyword search of 226 articles published 1980–2009 using Scopus identifies a number of issues that has progressively come to dominate issue-oriented geographical publications. Figures 3 and 4 show the trends in the appearance of a range of keywords, using five year running means. Figure 3 shows the country focus of geography articles on Southeast Asia, indicating a rapid increase in geographic writing on Indonesia, but with little input by Indonesian geographers. Vietnam also featured from the mid-1990s onward, after no scholarship in these international geography journals. Thailand and Singapore, which have been the focus of attention for geographers over a longer period of time, featured more modest increases.

Figure 3.

Keywords by country, running means. (Source: Scopus search of keywords in five geography journals).

Figure 4.

Running means of five keywords in geographical journals between 1982 and 2010. (Source: Scopus search of keywords in five geography journals).

Figure 4 shows that early on in the period under discussion, migration issues tended to dominate the geographic scholarship on Southeast Asia. After a lull during 1990s, migration has come back into discussion, but in a different developmental and international context. Meanwhile, environment has exploded as an issue of discussion since the early 1990s. Globalisation also featured heavily from the late 1990s, but appear to have declined as an object of attention in geographic writing on Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, ethnicity and land have emerged as steadily growing areas of attention from the late 1980s to the present.

Geography in Southeast Asia at Regional Universities

The practice of geography at Southeast Asian universities has been more teaching- than research- and practice-oriented. In part this is due to the orientation of geography teaching to the training of school teachers. In part, and related to this, is the role of geography, along with history, in nation-building and the establishment of official doctrine on national space, resources for development, and other creations of national imaginaries.

To the extent that geography has been research- and practice-oriented, it has tended to occur outside geography academia. In Indonesia, for example, geography has largely reverted to Regional Science, and there are very few departments of geography at university level. Gadjah Mada is the outstanding exception, with geography established since 1963. In Vietnam, until the 1990s, the Institute of Geography was part of the National Academy of Science and Technology, disassociated from university teaching. The teaching of university geography, for example at the Hanoi National University of Education, has been heavily oriented to teacher training. Geography has a very weak tradition in the Philippines, in part due to the provenance of higher education in the United States system, where geography has been thought of as a high school rather than higher education subject. Thailand has a well-established Geographical Association, and several – although far from all – mainstream universities have departments of geography. Historically, Malaysian geography's connection with UK-based higher education placed it in a prominent position, and the first international journal in the region was the Malaysian Journal of Tropical Geography, but in recent years Malaysian geography has lost its prominence. In a contrary trend, Singapore has emerged as the outstanding regional leader in university geography, both in terms of the strength of the departments at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the National Institute of Education (Nanyang University), and through its hosting of a journal that has emerged into the ranks of top international journals in geography, for example ranking (at 30) above Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (at 33).Footnote ² In 1985 the overall rankings were put at 55 and 6 respectively (Lee and Evans Reference Lee and Evans1985: Table 4).

To what extent has the patchy presence of university geography in Southeast Asia been engaged with key issues? Geography in Southeast Asia has largely followed the idiographic tradition. At Gadjah Mada, for example, human geography as established in 1985 was spread between population and labour force, and settlement and resources, with teaching oriented to descriptive cataloguing of spatial distributions in these key fields. In Thailand, similarly, geography has remained relatively disengaged from key environmental and socio-political issues associated with the country's rapid development, but with some notable exceptions. At Chiang Mai University, for example, interest in political ecology has engaged some geographers with other departments in the Faculty of Social Sciences and with broader civil society groups. In Vietnam, human geography has been influenced by the socialist economic tradition of spatial planning under a centrally planned economic framework. More recently, some Vietnamese geographers have engaged more critically with environmental issues in the context of the country's rapid economic development and restructuring toward a market economy. In the Philippines, geography has remained largely a high school subject, but a small group of geographers at the University of the Philippines has been engaged with critical issues around impacts of globalisation, labour exploitation, impacts of urban growth, and environmental degradation. Ironically, given the conservatism of the academic establishment within the political constraints of Singapore, it is probably at NUS that geographers have engaged critically with issues of development and its impacts more than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, but within that country's limits of critical discussion when applied to domestic issues. It is fair to say that critical geographies continue to have a tenuous place in Southeast Asia, and therefore that the framing of geography as an issue-oriented discipline remains relatively marginal.

On the other hand, a number of emerging trends point toward a greater issue-engagement. First, and perhaps most encouragingly, the Southeast Asian Geography Association (SEAGA) has moved from a relatively small and low-profile academic association to one whose biennial conferences have attracted larger numbers from within the region, a greatly enhanced presence of international geographers with interests in Southeast Asia, and panels that engage with issues in a more direct way than previously. For example, the 2008 conference held in Manila went under the theme of, ‘Transformations and embodiments in Southeast Asian (and other) geographies: changing environments, people and cultural groups, institutions and landscapes’. The 2004 conference in Thailand was on ‘Development and change in an era of globalisation’, although it might be noted that it was hosted by a university (Khon Kaen) without a Department of Geography. While the 2006 conference in Singapore went under the less critical rubric of ‘Sustainability and Southeast Asia’, the large participation and dynamic engagement with policy makers as well as a number of critical geographies panels marked a significant step toward an issue-oriented geography in the city-state.

The emphasis on training geography teachers is not only a question of devoting energies primarily to the pedagogy of geography. It also has implications for the epistemology of geography as a descriptive and hegemonic versus an analytical and critical body of knowledge about place, space, and environment. Just as official historiography determines the received version of history in schools, so geography in national curricula and state-approved textbooks is presented in an uncritical mode and is bound up in official nation-building discourses of national space, conflations of ethnicity and nationality, natural resources as objects of national development, wealth creation, and so on.

Tables 1 and 2 show the number of articles by country of affiliation and by individual author (including joint authorship). A content analysis of the five international journals shows a relatively minor contribution of Southeast Asian scholars to the publication output on the geography of Southeast Asia. Singaporean scholars dominate the field, with two (if counted by Singaporean nationality) or four (if counted by affiliation) of the top ten published scholars, followed by Vietnamese geographers. Of course this list is very partial, and coloured by the selection of only five journals. Some prominent geographers of Southeast Asia (notably Philip Kelly, Rodolphe de Koninck, Michael Parnwell) do not appear in the list as they publish elsewhere, and other top published geographers in Southeast Asia (notable Henry Yeung and Brenda Yeoh) do not feature in part because their research and writing ambit is global rather than regional.

Table 1.

Country of affiliation and authorship of geography journal articles on Southeast Asia 1980–2009.

Table 2.

Authors with three or more publications in geography journals on Southeast Asia 1980–2009.

Geography of Southeast Asia at International Universities

The geography of Southeast Asia as practiced and published by international scholars is overwhelmingly filtered through the lens of development. Until the 1980s, much geographical scholarship on Southeast Asia was in the mode of Third World studies, looking at issues of agricultural development, urbanisation, primate cities, and so on. From the 1980s onward, the dynamism of Southeast Asia as a region breaking out of the Three Worlds paradigm became dominant. From the early 1990s the sustainable development theme emerged, as evident in the number of articles on environmental issues referred to above. The topics covered under environment range from impacts of development, to rising environmentalism within Southeast Asia, to framing older topics such as land use change in new ways within the theme of environmental degradation. Globalisation also saw a spike in coverage, with articles ranging from Southeast Asia's place in the global system to more specific impacts of globalisation within the region. While the focus of interest in development has evolved with concerns of the time, a constant is that the ‘development gaze’ lends itself to issue-oriented geography.

The construction of Southeast Asia as a region has not been questioned a great deal by geographers within the region and its sub-regional concoctions, who usually take these for granted in their institutionally reified forms of ASEAN, Greater Mekong Sub-region (GMS), and so on. The same applies to the unproblematic naturalisation of national boundaries in often ahistorical ways. Ironically it is historians – notably the Thai historian, Thongchai Winichakul, now based at University of Wisconsin – and not geographers who have put the notion of ‘geobody’ under critical scrutiny (Winichakul Reference Winichakul1994), and political scientists such as Ben Anderson who have provided the most pervasive critical analysis of national space as constructed (Anderson Reference Anderson1991). The issue of region or nation as discourse and the problematisation of national space within a regionalised development agenda have become the subject of geographical critique by geographers from outside the region (Glassman Reference Glassman2004, Reference Glassman2005; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2001, Reference Hirsch2009). Each of the constructed regional geographies, including new ones such as Ayewaddy-Chaophraya-Mekong configuration of ACMECS has its own political meaning, in the latter case an important consideration being the placement of Thailand at centre-stage at a time when China has become increasingly dominant within the GMS framework.

The issue-based pedagogy that prevails in geography of Southeast Asia as taught in universities outside the region in question is thus in part based around the development-driven problematics of spatial inequality, society-nature relations, and socio-political construction of region. The ways in which development is presented may vary, but the debates, inequalities, and impacts associated with the development theme ensure that it remains issue-oriented.