ABSTRACT
Facing adverse natural calamity or a hostile policy environment, people at the margin – those who have little voice in the macropolicy environment, such as indigenous people, microentrepreneurs, unorganized workers and labourers – develop their own coping strategies for survival and to improve well-being. Their choice of strategies is determined by their coping capacity – what resources they are able to manage in order to safeguard their life and livelihoods. This chapter is inspired by the work of Ragnhild Lund on the coping capacity of the Veddhas in Sri Lanka (Lund 2000, 2003). I will take the case of small-scale border fish traders in Cambodia to illustrate how a policy of opening the border affected them and showed their ingenuity in coping with the change. At the same time, I argue that their limited coping capacity restricted their opportunity to take advantage of the change and pushed them into a further marginalized state.
