When the Lakes Are Gone: The Political Ecology of Urban Resilience in Phnom Penh

Abstract

This dissertation examines how simultaneous social-ecological transformations including environmental change, climate uncertainty and urbanization affect low income residents in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Low income residents often reside in informal settlements which themselves inhabit marginal spaces in the city including roof tops, riverbanks, and land on the urban periphery. In Phnom Penh, many communities in the peri-urban zone depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Yet, this way of life is being compromised by changes to weather patterns, water quality and most pressingly urban expansion, as the wetlands they use to farm are being filled with sand to create new land on which to build luxury condos and expansive shopping malls. This thesis focuses on how low income residents, in particular urban farmers on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, live with and influence the ongoing social-ecological transformations that are shaping the city. I employ a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, including interviews, focus groups and a household survey to examine how patterns of urbanization in the past 25 years have created situations of both social and ecological marginalization in Phnom Penh. I show how the changing legal framework of land ownership has influenced access to land and housing while analysing how urban farmers have responded to these changes. The following research questions underpinned the study: 1. How are low-income residents of Phnom Penh affected by the process of environmental change (including climate change)? How do other forms of socio-economic marginalization influence this? 2. What are the historical conditions that have shaped the present reality for low-income residents of Phnom Penh in terms of their vulnerability to environmental change? 3. How are low-income residents responding, individually and collectively, to the changes they are experiencing as a result of urbanization and environmental change? What are the outcomes of these actions? 4. How is the concept of ‘resilience’ being employed as a policy objective in Cambodia? Does the presence of a resilience agenda improve conditions for low-income residents facing challenges related to environmental change in urban areas?

I combined the theoretical fields of resilience and political ecology, to take advantage of their complementary understandings of the interaction between humans and nature. This theoretical combination highlights the importance of scale, focusing on the loss of agricultural livelihoods at the village level while also acknowledging the role of national policy and politics in shaping the priorities of urban development. My use of political ecology focuses on issues of agency to show how farmers are actively employing strategies to sustain their failing crops, such as increasing the use of chemical inputs, which tragically further undermines their precarious finances as well as the ecosystem they depend on. Farmers deploy short term strategies in an effort to retain a foothold in the city in the hopes that their children will be able to leverage their education to pursue opportunities outside of farming. I further draw on discourse analysis to show how the term resilience is employed in policy and by government officials at the national level to frame climate change as a managerial problem which can be solved with technical solutions and external funding. I argue this obscures how problematic decisions such as the in-filling of urban lakes are caused, not by failures of capacity but by political priorities, aligned to the interests of wealth creation for a small elite. While resilience has been embraced as a policy priority in Cambodia, it has not translated into practices which protect urban ecosystems or lessen social inequalities.