ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the long history of civil society environmentalism in Southeast Asia. Colonial plunder of the region created patterns of contestation around land, forests, and mining that continue up to the present day. Environmental justice was part and parcel of national liberation struggles that sought to transform colonial social relations of nature. After independence, however, the dominance of the military in many Southeast Asian countries led to a development strategy based on the intensification of logging and extractivism. The wave of democracy movements that toppled military regimes in the 1980s and 1990s was in part fuelled by questions of access to land and resources, leading to the proliferation of civil society environmental activism. However, this took place within the broader framework of neoliberal globalisation and ‘Sustainable Development’ that emphasised partnership with business leaders. The chapter argues that this has led to a situation in which civil society environmentalism is polarised between a wing of professional, conservationist NGOs that are actively integrated into a hegemonic agenda of ‘green growth’ and more grassroots movements that are working towards a more radical social-ecological transformation of society. As the climate crisis impacts the region, these movements will need to cross frontiers of activism in order to forge innovative rural-urban alliances that can challenge the new authoritarian trend and push for a fundamental shift in the social relations of nature.
