Expanding transboundary environmental governance: A mobile political ecology of sand and shifting resource-based livelihoods in Southeast Asia

Environmental change and governance operate across multiple, interconnected scales. In Southeast Asia, there are calls to broaden the study of transboundary environmental governance to address the range of scales, actors, and flows in analysis. In response, we propose a framework to move beyond statist framings of 'transboundary' in the region by drawing on van Schendel's proposal for flow studies on the one hand, to overcome the 'geographies of ignorance' that stem from fixed studies of nation-states, and mobile political ecology on the other, to emphasise the role of resource users and their mobilities in environmental governance. We focus on transboundary sand and sediments in rivers, the rise in sand mining in the region, and its impacts on livelihoods and cross-border flows. Research was conducted from 2015 to 2019 along the transboundary Salween River in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. This research shows that sand extraction not only impacts existing sand-based livelihoods, like riverbank gardening, but also intersects with migration patterns. Migration here is being exacerbated by sand mining alongside processes of environmental and political-economic change, but these intersections would be overlooked in a fixed or statist approach. We illustrate these complex changes by presenting two 'sand stories' that emerge from our research. This primary research combined with a novel conceptual framing expands our analysis of transboundary by revealing and highlighting the linkages between mobilities and transboundary resource flows. In doing so, our analysis brings people, livelihoods and mobilities to the centre of transboundary environment governance and opens scholarly and practice-based discussions to the range of actors, scales and resource regimes involved.