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Crossing Borders: Governing the Globalising Urban Matrix of Compound Disasters in Asia and the Pacific

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Abstract

The chapter conceptually situates our original contribution to scholarship in four key areas: (1) through our treatment of environmental disasters as compound events with multiple causalities and far-reaching consequences, (2) by adopting an inclusive multi-sector, multi-disciplinary and multi-scalar approach to disaster governance, (3) by framing the urban transition in the Asia-Pacific region within an urban-rural matrix that encompasses the ecological reach and demands of cities into remote and rural areas, and (4) by interrogating the border as a site that is selectively porous and bounded, depending on the nature of the flows of cross-border environmental harm at different junctures and according to the range of strategic interests at stake. The idea of the national border is explored in this chapter within the context of the particularities of the Asia-Pacific region, where urbanisation is realigning the possibilities for cross-border disaster governance, while at the same time raising new problems for socioeconomic resilience and stability at multiple scales. The chapter concludes with an overview of the structure of the volume, explicating the threads of connectivity between the theoretical essays and case studies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use the term Asia-Pacific in this volume to denote our geographical focus on East, South and Southeast Asia and Pacific island nation-states.

  2. 2.

    Sixty-four percent of Asia’s population is projected to be urban by 2050, meaning that the existing urban population of 1.6 billion is envisaged to almost double to 3.1 billion people (United Nations 2014, p. 1; Asia Development Bank 2011, p. 6).

  3. 3.

    Even in Thailand, where no formal colonisation took place, the borders of Siam, as Thailand was called until 1939, and from 1945 to 1949, were to shaped by the independence agreements between British and French colonial powers and the newly independent nation-states of neighbouring Malaysia, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Michelle Ann Miller & Michael Douglass

Authors
  1. Michelle Ann Miller
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  2. Michael Douglass
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Correspondence to Michelle Ann Miller .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Michelle Ann Miller

  2. Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Michael Douglass

  3. Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), United Nations University Bonn, Bonn, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Matthias Garschagen

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Miller, M.A., Douglass, M. (2018). Crossing Borders: Governing the Globalising Urban Matrix of Compound Disasters in Asia and the Pacific. In: Miller, M., Douglass, M., Garschagen, M. (eds) Crossing Borders. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6126-4_1

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