This special issue is concerned with increasing the understanding of the challenges and opportunities involved in governing environmental issues that are cross-jurisdictional and multi-scalar in nature. Our geographical focus is on Southeast Asia, a resource-rich but land scarce region with a long history of porous borders around informal resource regimes, mixed use landscapes and economic connectivity forged through trade regionalisation. The contributors to this collection are concerned with transboundary commons problems that cannot be addressed by individual groups of resource users, sectors or administrations. Common environmental goods, such as biodiversity, regional food security and carbon sequestration, can only be maintained through multi-sited activities such as sharing knowledge about species quotas and channelling funding, technologies and expertise into coordinated programmes to protect habitats within designated areas. Transgressive environmental effects that are generated by cumulative development pressures similarly require a politics of collective action. Yet negative transboundary impacts such as air and water pollution, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and climate displacement can also create new opportunities to exploit borders in progressive ways by mobilising cross-border networks around the coordination of more informed, effective and inclusive mitigation responses within and among nation-states.
From ARI Conference on “Sustainable Transboundary Governance of the Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia”, 1-2 November 2018.
