Papers

• Understanding Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation, and Mobility in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta: Introducing a Political Ecology Framework Mucahid Mustafa Bayrak National Taiwan Normal University

  The global climate crisis poses serious challenges for coastal and deltaic communities worldwide. Many of these vulnerable communities, already contending with multiple stressors, shocks, and long-standing social inequalities, must find ways to cope and adapt. In many mainstream academic and policy discourses, out-migration, particularly from rural to urban areas, is portrayed either as a failure to adapt or as an adaptation strategy in itself. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) and critically examines how climate change, adaptation, and human mobility intersect in the lives of smallholder farmers and migrants. As the drivers of environmental and social change in the VMD are multiple and not all directly linked to climate change, I argue that a meaningful way to understand the impacts of climate change on adaptation and mobility is not to seek simple causal relationships but to embrace complexity. This approach connects the lived experiences of rural and urban households with broader processes of change, including intensified drought, salinization, severe land subsidence, sea- level rise, erosion, rapid urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and transboundary challenges such as upstream hydropower development, illegal mining, and the political economy of agricultural value chains. Dominant discourses on climate change adaptation further shape how Vietnamese smallholders navigate these intertwined challenges. This paper presents a conceptual framework, situated in the context of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, for analyzing climate change impacts, adaptation, and mobility through a political ecology lens.

• Elite-Captured Transitions: Hegemony, Hydropower, and Transboundary Energy Injustice in Thailand Danny Marks Dublin City University

  Thailand possesses significant solar potential and faces growing pressure to decarbonise, yet its energy transition remains contested and unjust. This article investigates the political-economic drivers behind this paradox, arguing that technological or market-based explanations are insufficient. Drawing on 16 semistructured interviews, document analysis, and industry reports, I apply a neo-Gramscian framework to examine the role of hegemony, historical blocs, and
  trasformismo in shaping Thailand’s energy system. I show that a historical bloc of energy corporations, state-owned enterprises, military actors, and political elites maintains dominance through material, institutional, and discursive power. Gulf Energy’s rapid rise exemplifies this consolidation: the company has leveraged elite networks to capture regulatory processes and shape national energy planning. Incumbents selectively incorporate renewable energy discourses and limited solar procurement while preserving centralised fossil fuel dependence and take-or-pay power purchase agreements, thereby accommodating pressure for change without ceding control or profit. Hydropower imports from Laos allow the bloc to externalise environmental and social harms, shifting costs onto Mekong communities while insulating Thai corporate interests from scrutiny. Discourses framing gas and hydropower as clean and necessary for energy security further marginalise
  alternatives and silence dissent. Counter-hegemonic forces, including civil society organisations, opposition politicians, and industry associations, have pressed for reform but achieved only marginal gains against entrenched material and institutional power. These practices have resulted in systematic injustices across procedural, distributional, and recognition dimensions. By integrating neo-Gramscian theory and energy justice, I contribute granular empirical evidence of elite capture stalling low- carbon transitions in Southeast Asia.

• The Production of Chronic Floods and the Floodable Subjects in Bang Ban, Ayutthaya, Thailand Sauvanithi Yupho Rutgers Univeristy

  Flooding in Thailand is widely understood as a part of monsoon hydrology, low-lying topography, and climate change. This article challenges that assumption by developing the concept of chronic floods — state- orchestrated, controlled inundation at severe levels sustained over long durations — through which particular populations, ecologies, and territories are systematically enrolled into the metabolic project of protecting the economic core. Drawing on McElwee’s (2016) Environmental Rule framework and urban metabolism, the article examines flood governance in Bang Ban district, Ayutthaya Province. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with 114 participants across six institutional tiers, document analysis of national flood management plans, digital ethnography, and participant observation at flood-preparation meetings between 2023 and 2025, the article traces how seasonal inundation was reframed from a way of life into an economic threat, how the state’s insular knowledge system monopolizes flood truth, how infrastructure physically redirects water onto designated communities, how residents are transformed into “floodable subjects” whose coping capacity justifies their continued inundation, and how governance rationalities circulate through expanding networks of maps, discharge data, compensation payments, and digital platforms. The discussion identifies three dynamics that distinguish chronic floods from existing conceptualizations of environmental harm: infrastructural enrollment, through which residents and landscapes are redefined as functional components of flood-control infrastructure; the co-production of inevitability between state and subjects under deeply asymmetric conditions; and recursive knowledge production that traps governing institutions within an ideology incapable of imagining alternatives. The article argues that chronic floods occupy a distinct middle ground between severe enough to restructure daily life yet normalized to the point of appearing inevitable. The findings reveal how the metabolic production of urban safety depends on the active enrollment of peripheral lives and ecologies into the state’s hydraulic plan.

• Livelihoods, community resilience and living with multi-hazards in coastal northern Vietnam Christine Lucy Bonnin University College Dublin

  Households and communities in northern Vietnam’s Red River Delta are increasingly living in a context of multi-hazards generated through a combination of interrelated and compounding environmental, socio-economic, and political factors. In agrarian areas, these are significantly disrupting planned harvests and livelihoods practiced for generations and amplifying already-existing vulnerabilities. This paper draws on a case study of Giao An commune, located in Vietnam’s coastal province of Nam Định, to explore how political ecology provides an apt lens for engaging with the complexity of multi-hazards being faced by communities whose livelihoods strongly depend on natural resources. Giao An sits in the buffer zone between Vietnam’s first Ramsar site, Xuân Thủy National Park, and land further inland with fewer environmental protections. The community faces challenges to agriculture and aquaculture as an agrarian coastal province vulnerable to climate change. Increasing soil salinity makes rice farming more difficult and aquaculture faces declining product yield and supply chain issues; additionally, there are planned large-scale heavy industry projects that are predicted to pollute the water supply. Residents rely on community solidarity and the few tools of resistance at their disposal to navigate intensifying environmental vulnerabilities and anticipated social and economic disruption to traditional livelihoods.

Abstract

Keywords

• Adaptation
• Ayutthaya
• Climate Change
• Coastal Vulnerability
• Energy Injustice
• Hydropower
• Political Ecology
• Thailand
• Transboundary
• Vietnamese Mekong Delta
• coastal northern Vietnam
• community resilience
• floodable subjects
• floods
• hegemony
• livelihoods
• mobility
• multi-hazards
• transitions