Using examples from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, the book considers what scholarship has defined as a village within the rapid changes taking place in rural Southeast Asia.

This definitive study of electoral politics and democratic decentralization in provincial Thailand investigates how democracy is unfolding in the context of emergent capitalism, exploring the relationships between the politics of the locality, the province and the nation from 1950.

More than the Soil focuses on the social, cultural, economic and technological processes that have transformed rural areas of Southeast Asia. The underlying premise is that rural lives and livelihoods in this region have undergone fundamental change. No longer can we assume that rural livelihoods are founded on agriculture; nor can we assume that people envisage their futures in terms of farming. The inter-penetration of the rural and urban, and the degree to which rural people migrate between rural and urban areas, and shift from agriculture to non-agriculture, raises fundamental questions about how we conceptualise the rural Southeast Asia and the households to be found there.

In recent years, first feminist considerations, and now concerns with HIV/Aids have led to new approaches to the study of sexuality. The experience of puberty, explorations with sexuality and courtship, and the pressure to reproduce are a few of the human tensions central to this volume.

Masina reassesses the last thirty years of economic development in East Asia in light of recent dramatic events, challenging scholars and policy makers to critically review development strategies.

It has increasingly been recognised that rural and urban areas are inextricably interlinked. This book adopts a fresh approach to the issue of rural-urban dynamics through a study of the changing nature of livelihoods, mobility and markets in ten study sites across four countries of Africa and Asia. Building on detailed fieldwork conducted in Ghana, Tanzania, Vietnam and Thailand, the authors explore how settlements and livelihoods are being transformed as long-term inhabitants and recent migrants embrace new economic activities many of which are linked to global markets. The book is structured around the concept of ‘frontier’ which is conceptualized as being a dynamic space where the forces of economic, demographic and social change are brought to bear. The study sites include agricultural frontiers (coffee, cocoa, pineapples and fresh fruit), handicraft and manufacturing frontiers, and mining frontiers (gold and diamonds). In all of the cases, global value chain dynamics have played a pivotal role in shaping local livelihoods. Some settlements are developing into new urban centres whilst others are suffering from a boom and bust experience due to the unreliability of export markets. The similarities and differences between the frontier settlements are drawn out by comparing frontiers of similar types and by highlighting the theoretical and policy implications of the findings from all the frontier types. The originality of the book lies in its combination of conceptual clarity, methodological coherence and empirical richness. By combining detailed empirical findings with theoretical insight from debates on livelihoods, global value chains, mobility patterns, settlement dynamics and rural-urban relations, the book sheds new light on these issues within an overall framework of development trajectories in Africa and Asia. Given scholars’ and international agencies’ current interest in the spatial dimensions of economic development, this contribution is particularly timely with its fresh geographical approach to development issues; this book is a pertinent and authoritative read for anyone researching or learning in the field of development.