The world might have become, for the first time in human history, a majority urban place, but there are clearly important seams of research to mine in the Southeast Asian countryside. These six books amply show why there is a continuing interest in rural areas and agrarian living in the region.

The biggest book, at least in terms of its coverage and the argument that it seeks to make, is Derek Hall, Philip Hirsch and Tania Murray Li's Powers of exclusion: Land dilemmas in Southeast Asia. This book is particularly valuable not just because three eminent scholars of the region have collaborated on a single book, but because they bring different disciplinary persuasions and geographical experiences to bear. Derek Hall is a political scientist whose interests span East and Southeast Asia; Philip Hirsch is a geographer who is best known for his work on mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand; while Tania Li is an anthropologist of Indonesia, with a long-standing interest in Sulawesi. They have not, furthermore, contributed different chapters but have co-written the book. This gives it a unity of argument which is usually absent in such collaborative projects.

Powers of exclusion examines the changing relationship between people and land in Southeast Asia. The authors are intent on outlining the powers at work in this transformation, the actors involved, the dilemmas that emerge and, not least, to identify the winners and losers of the processes at work. A strong explanatory framework guides the book and the argument. An examination of exclusion from land lies at its core. The four forces that underpin this are identified as regulation, force, the market, and legitimation. These forces are then seen to operate across six exclusion types, each of which is allocated a chapter, namely: licensed exclusions, ambient (or environmental) exclusions, volatile exclusions, post-agrarian exclusions, intimate exclusions, and counter-exclusions. To give just a flavour of the dense discussion, these chapters deal, respectively, with: land and forest allocation in the Lao PDR; community-based natural resource management in Cambodia; boom crops like coffee in Vietnam and oil palm in Malaysia; peri-urbanisation in Thailand and the Philippines; class formation in upland Sulawesi; and indigeneity in the Philippines and Indonesia. The authors do not claim that exclusions in themselves are ‘new’, but they do set out a convincing case for an irreversible reworking of people–land relationships.

The focus on exclusions in the book means that there is an emphasis on why, how and to what effect people are prevented from accessing land. Exclusion for Hall, Hirsch and Li is ‘double edged’, a term which they use time-and-again; it becomes the leitmotif of the book. Exclusion provides security for some and, in so doing, delivers insecurity for others. The richness of this book comes from the authors' combined field experience. No new primary research is introduced and those who have followed the authors' work will recognise their published scholarship in this volume. What they have done, however, is integrated their collective experience to reflect on a key debate in agrarian studies, and done so with care.

What, then, is their core message? Essentially — and some may find this unsatisfactory — that there are no easy answers. While they contend that the degree, depth and variety of exclusions that occur are often left unexplored by scholars and practitioners of a neo-liberal persuasion, the authors are far from being rural romantics. But, as they say: someone pays a price; eggs are broken — something that they repeatedly show in the core chapters. The difficulty is that who wins and loses, and why, is not obvious, except with hindsight. Different contexts at different historical moments reveal different lessons. The authors have the confidence to avoid providing yet another checklist of best practices to augment those that we already have. Instead they leave us with a puzzle and a challenge: to accept that dilemmas over land will continue to emerge, and that sometimes these will be intractable. This is an important book for what it says — and what it refuses to say.

Melissa Marschke's Life, fish and mangroves: Resource governance in coastal Cambodia provides just such an example to buttress and add further flesh to the conclusions of Powers of exclusion: her story has no easy answers, many losers, and has a temporality that defies each interpretation.

In Life, fish and mangroves, Marschke investigates the intersection between livelihoods and resource governance in one village — Koh Sralao — in coastal Cambodia's ‘Wild West’. She uses Koh Sralao as the geographical stage on which to explore the question of how state and non-state actors gain entry and intrude into frontier areas. In her book, Marschke skilfully blends the experiences and views of individual actors with wider questions. She is intent on seeing whether the characters in her story — in particular six key informants that she follows through successive visits — provide an insight into broader processes, and vice versa. Like Hall, Hirsch and Li, she comes to no simple conclusions; the village resource history and the livelihoods that emerge twist and turn in unexpected ways. Each time she returns to the settlement, another surprise awaits around the corner to mug her, just as one senses she thinks she has got to grips with her context and its actors. And along the way, competing world views and governance forms can never be neatly categorised. They may be knowable at any one point in time, but become unknowable when now becomes later. What is fairly clear in this otherwise messy picture, however, is that change occurs against a backdrop of resource — and especially fisheries — decline. Marschke's informants and their livelihoods faced multiple stresses through the period from the end of the 1990s to 2010: sand mining, a charcoal ban, over-fishing, lawlessness, competition from outsiders. This meant that ‘marginalization and immiseration is the norm’ in Koh Sralao (p. 75).

This, on the face of it, is not a happy story. But local people do agitate and organise themselves. They recognise the battles that are worth fighting, and those that are not. There are modest gains to be made. Or there were until sand mining began at the start of 2008, which ‘side-swiped’ the entire resource governance effort in the area (p. 120). As Marschke says, had she left Koh Sralao in 2007 her book would have been a different one. Instead of concluding with a quietly confident statement about the possibility of semi-effective resource governance in a country like Cambodia, it ends on a darker note, reflecting on just how difficult it is to support effective resource governance in a socio-political context like Cambodia's. She notes the paradox of extraction being ramped up at the same time as others in government are drafting and approving new resource governance legislation. But while there may be a policy–governance gap at the national level — which pressure groups such as Global Witness have highlighted so effectively — the population of Koh Sralao are implicated too. They have contributed to the resource decline that Marschke describes, victims at their own hands as well as at those of others.

Like Marschke, Yos Santasombat in The river of life is interested in how environmental change, and particularly aquatic environmental change, impacts on people and livelihoods. But while Marschke's is a micro-narrative of change among fewer than 1,900 inhabitants in one village in coastal Cambodia, Yos' unit of analysis is the whole Mekong basin and its 240 million inhabitants — although his conclusions are scaled up from a series of smaller-scale studies. Perhaps more importantly, while Marschke's position is one where she is open to the possibility of positive change, Yos begins from the premise that market integration, technological change and state governance are necessarily destructive, marginalising and immiserising. The double-edged theme of Powers of exclusion becomes a blade with a single edge in this volume. To provide a contextual grounding to the argument he pursues, Yos draws on riparian case studies from Yunnan (China), Luang Prabang (Lao PDR), and northern Thailand.

Yos' contention that it has been market and state connection and intrusion which have undermined otherwise sustainable communities is one he has pursued before, and one that some scholars have found problematic. ‘This book,’ he writes, ‘seeks to understand the impact of subregional growth and development on resource use, class differentiation, lifestyles, and cultures, and to identify serious health, economic, and environmental threats caused by unbalanced development within and across countries’ (p. 4). There is little possibility here of mixed fortunes, trade-offs and outcomes; this book sees market-based development not as the solution to the problem, or even as a part-solution, but as the problem.

Yos pursues his thesis with energy and shifts neatly from detailed case study evidence to wider assertions. He contends that local control is essential if the Mekong's environmental and developmental crisis is to be averted; he sees local knowledge as potent and relevant. The book provides a neat counterpoint to Marschke's volume, not because they are at odds in terms of their intellectual positions, but rather because of the inferences they draw. For Marschke, governance at all levels has failed in Cambodia and it is understanding the roles and intersections of governance which provides an insight into why this is so; for Yos, the cause lies in the marginalisation of local communities. He writes of the way in which development has objectified populations in rural Thailand, and stripped communities of power and control over their lives. Development is portrayed as a hegemonic process that has marginalised ‘an increasing proportion’ of rural people (p. 37). This is the general tenor of the discussion which then leads into a more focused analysis of the Mekong using three case studies from China, the Lao PDR and Thailand. The case studies are detailed accounts of village life and their dependence on aquatic resources. In each instance, however, the aquatic resource is being undermined and compromised by the sort of development that Yos decries. For example, for local fisherfolk in China, ‘the Lancang [Mekong] will no longer be a river of life’ (p. 82); in the Lao PDR, dams are causing ‘irretrievable changes to the Mekong and its tributaries’ (p. 110); and riparian communities in northern Thailand are facing ‘ecosystem poisoning’ (129) and a re-fashioned and ‘unnatural’ river that has ‘robbed’ local people of their traditional livelihood activities (p. 117).

Having set out the problem and the causes of the problem in this manner, Yos, in the final section of the book, proposes that the solution lies in ‘local knowledge and globalization from below’. Local knowledge, he suggests, provides the ‘deep understanding’ that is a prerequisite for balanced change. This will deliver the means to inform a development from below, in contrast with the development from above that has characterised the sub-region's experience to date. This, in Yos' view, not only privileges local knowledge but, in so doing, creates a development which is inclusive and participatory and which can tackle the ‘unequal political, social, and economic power structures in and between the countries involved’ (p. 146). While this position chimes with Yos' earlier work, some scholars will think that it problematically essentialises knowledge and action and ascribes to such approaches to development a certain scalar address. Into this broth he ends the book by adding transnational civil society, which can help to address the ‘challenge of shaping the globalization process so that it is more inclusive, more responsive, more equitable, and more ethical’ (pp. 155–6).

Of the books reviewed here, the only edited volume is Jean Michaud and Tim Forsyth's Moving mountains: ethnicity and livelihoods in highland China, Vietnam, and Laos. If there were a prize for the most beautiful book, this would win: the evocative and striking picture taken by Jean Michaud in southeastern Guizhou; a clever title design which subtly blends with the Chinese sky; and pleasingly off-white, 100 per cent post-consumer recycled, chlorine-and-acid-free, and ancient-forest-free paper. So I was feeling good about this volume before I had even started to read. And that feel-good factor largely stayed with me.

Both Michaud and Forsyth have made their marks as iconoclasts of highland change. True to form, then, this book is much more than a collection of individually interesting case study chapters. There is an argument that weaves its way through the text. After an intriguing foreword from Terry McGee where he connects his interest in urban change with the book's concern with highland change, there are eight core chapters bookended by a substantial introduction from the editors, and a rather briefer conclusion.

The book is not about culture; it is about the relationships between livelihoods and ethnicity in the Southeast Asian massif. As the editors write, the ‘aim of the book is to present locally grounded analyses of how ethnic minorities [in the Southeast Asian massif] fashion livelihoods and to question how ethnicity affects, and is influenced by, economic and political changes in relation to these livelihoods’ (p. 1). It is therefore about the co-production of ethnicity and livelihoods in the context of the socio-economic (and environmental) changes that are reverberating through the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. The standout chapters for me were Olivier Évrard's on livelihoods and migration among the (‘twice marginalized’) Khmu of northern Laos; Claire Tugault-Lafleur and Sarah Turner's on diversification in the Vietnam uplands, which they characterise as being simultaneously resisted and embraced; John McKinnon's on Hani agency on the China–Vietnam border; and Janet Sturgeon's analysis of rubber-based transformations in China's Xishuangbanna, in which farmers are shown to be more market aware than the extension agents who putatively guide them. All the chapters, however, have one thing in common: a desire to personalise economic and social transformations, and thus to disrobe ‘development’ of its technocratic clothing — to venacularise modernity (p. 215).

David Biggs' Quagmire: Nation building and nature in the Mekong Delta provides a rich, engrossing and continually questioning environmental history of the Mekong Delta. Tracking back to the early-nineteenth century, he shows how history, environment and society have intersected at the ‘water's edge’ in southern Vietnam. In many respects, Biggs' interest in telling the story of the opening up of the Mekong Delta is almost as old as the enterprise itself. The early-twentieth-century school of French ‘possibilist’ geography sought to understand how people and their environment are shaped in a reciprocal manner (in contrast to the determinism of Anglo-American geography at about the same time), and Quagmire does the same, but through a historical lens. What this book does — and which makes it a complement to the others reviewed here — is that it provides some temporal depth to the questions that are addressed by almost all the authors: What is the role of the state in shaping development outcomes? How does a modern development philosophy emerge and who are its authors? And who are the agents of change? Like Sturgeon's chapter in Moving mountains, for example, Biggs finds that conduits of knowledge and change often did not (and do not) work from the centre, down, but in the reverse direction. Writing of portable pumps which revolutionised water management in the delta in the 1970s, he says: ‘Often it was farmers rather than technical advisers who provided the practical experience necessary to make such [pumps] useful and profitable; in some cases they even retrained extension agents in techniques of operation’ (p. 209). My only small quibble with a book which is remarkable for its scholarship is why some of the photographs could not have been better reproduced — they are often dark and indistinct, barely worth including.

The final book reviewed here is Sarinda Singh's Natural potency and political power: Forests and state authority in contemporary Laos, a ‘patchwork ethnography’ of Nakai district in central Laos' Khammouane province. Like Marschke's book, this is a monograph about nature and natural resources, but while Marschke focuses on governance and livelihoods, Singh pays more attention, at least in the earlier chapters of the volume, to culture and identity. Both authors, however, are interested in the state and the ways in which the state enters marginal spaces, and with what effects. Singh uses debates over wildlife and conservation as the means to shed light on broader social and economic debates in the country: ‘In short, the key argument of this book is that people in Laos explore ideas about identity, aspirations, and authority through discussions of forest resources in the rural periphery — areas that are distant from historical and contemporary centers of power’ (pp. 4–5). She notes how the pa/muang (forest/civilised space) binary continues to be salient, but also shows how wildlife consumption is now less a part of village living than a consumption practice of rich urbanites. This highlights the paradox that wildlife consumption continues to be popular because it exemplifies village living, even as people seek to escape the undeveloped countryside.

The hardest-hitting sections of the book, however, are the final two core chapters which set out and then seek to explain forest decline in the Lao PDR. This is rather more standard in approach, but even so just as valuable in the sustained way that Singh shows how the Lao state has shaped the governance space that generates forest decline. Far from being managed in the interests of the nation, Singh constructs a convincing case that forest decline reflects elite capture by the few and against the interests of the many: rhetoric may say one thing but ‘practice sees a prioritization of the prosperity of elites clothed in the rhetoric of national development’ (p. 112).

I don't think it is too great a stretch to say that each of the six books reviewed here provides an insight into one key relational question concerning agrarian change. Powers of exclusion is about relations between people and land, ambitiously drawing its material from right across the Southeast Asian region; Life, fish and mangroves pays attention to understanding relations between livelihoods and resource governance in one village in coastal Cambodia; The river of life focuses on relations between aquatic environmental change and livelihoods across three countries in the upper Mekong, illuminating the deleterious social and environmental effects of processes of contemporary change; Moving mountains is a rich compendium of chapters dealing with livelihoods and ethnicity in the Southeast Asia massif; Quagmire is concerned to reveal and explain changing historical relations between people and their environment in the Mekong over the time frame of more than a century; while Natural potency and political power views the Lao state through the lens of forest decline and wildlife consumption in the Nakai district of Khammouane province. Taken together they afford us a better, and much fuller, understanding of why we are where we are, whether that it is in terms of rural livelihoods, natural resources, or trajectories of national ‘development’.