Introduction

A key debate in the recent literature on Indonesian politics has centred on the extent to which everyday actors, including citizens from poor and lower–middle-class backgrounds and their allies in the NGO movement, have been able to participate effectively in the policy-making process since the fall of Suharto's authoritarian New Order regime in the late 1990s. On one side of this debate, scholars such as Vedi Hadiz, Richard Robison and Olle Tornquist have argued that policy making in the post–New Order period has remained just as exclusionary as it was under the New Order despite the fact that the country has become more democratic and decentralized (Hadiz 2003, 2010; Hadiz and Robison 2005; Robison and Hadiz 2004; Tornquist et al. 2004). Power relations, they have argued, have simply been reorganized rather than transformed: instead of fading from the scene, the politico-bureaucratic, business and criminal figures who dominated the New Order ‘have been able to reinvent themselves through new alliances and vehicles, much like they have, for example, in parts of Communist Eastern Europe/Central Asia’ (Hadiz 2003: 593). At the same time, they suggest, Suharto's rule left a powerful legacy in relation to the participation of everyday actors in policy making. The New Order's systematic pursuit of a policy of disorganizing civil society and repressing any form of political activity on the part of opposition groups, they suggest, has ‘effectively paralyz[ed] most independent capacity for self-organization among groups like the urban middle class and the working class’ (Hadiz and Robison 2005: 232).

On the other side of this debate, scholars such as Hans Antlov, Marcus Mietzner, Ed Aspinall and myself have argued that democratization and decentralization have opened up new opportunities for everyday actors to influence policy-making, resulting in a slightly more inclusive political system. For instance, in a paper co-authored with Kurnya Roesad and Donni Edwin (Rosser et al. 2005), I argued that the shift to a more democratic political regime has (i) removed key obstacles to organization by poor and disadvantaged groups and NGO activists, making it easier for them to engage in collective action aimed at achieving pro-poor change; and (ii) created an electoral incentive for politicians to promote policy changes that benefit these groups or at least appeal to them.

Introduction

Since gaining its independence from the United Kingdom in 1957, Malaysia has undergone rapid economic development. For Malaysian women, this development has also signified their large-scale entry into the formal labour force. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women in Malaysia entered waged employment, particularly within the manufacturing sector, in unprecedented numbers (Lim 1993). During these decades, female labour force participation rates increased dramatically (Noor 1999). However, despite the expansion of the economy, declining fertility rates (Razak 2011) and increased educational attainment of women (UN and Malaysia 2011), female labour force participation rates in Malaysia have never reached above 50 per cent (Fernandez 2011). In fact, World Bank data suggests that Malaysian women have the lowest participation rates in the entire Southeast Asian region.

A closer examination of Malaysian labour force data reveals a strong ‘one peaked pattern’ (Horton 1996) of female labour force participation. This suggests that women tend to be active in the formal labour market when they are younger, but around the average age of marriage and childbirth, their participation rates decline quite rapidly. As a result, over half of the women of working age in Malaysia (4.9 million out of 9.4 million women) are found ‘outside the labour force’, with over three million stating ‘housework’ as their main reason not to enter waged work (Malaysia 2012: 15–6, 21). It is, however, highly unlikely that such a large share of women in Malaysia are ‘housewives’ – with no other income-earning activities. Instead, a more likely explanation is the lack of recognition for (Loh-Ludher 2007) and inadequate coverage of women's informal work in labour data (Franck 2012). This expectation, that women ‘outside the labour force’ continue to work informally, is also put forward in several official documents (see, e.g., Malaysia 2006: 290, 2012: 16). While official labour force data is generally agreed to provide inadequate coverage of women's work (Benería 1999; Chen 2001), it can nonetheless provide some indications regarding women's informal work – notably through the labour reported as own account and contributing family work. In the Malaysian case, such data shows that women seem to move from formal to informal types of work over the life course. This chapter engages with the fairly straightforward question: Why?

Introduction: Vernacular Modernities and Directional Goals

This chapter explores, through the everyday lives of urban migrants in Vietnam and rural dwellers in Thailand, a puzzle when it comes to understanding the intersection between modernization as a project and modernization as a practice. It is evident that most of the populations of Southeast Asia subscribe, in broad terms, to modernization ends. Their personal sacrifices to achieve material prosperity are both remarkable and humbling. At the same time, detailed investigation shows that they embrace and orchestrate this process of social and economic transformation in ways that run counter to and sometimes against both state-led intentions and simplistic views as to the path that is followed. So, on the one hand, we see in the everyday actions of ordinary people an undoubted, irrepressible enthusiasm for modernization. But in the details of how they go about achieving this, we discern not a resistance to modernization but rather a resistance to the modernization project.

This illustrates a point highlighted by the political economist Dani Rodrik, who suggests that the ‘central economic paradox of our time is that “development” is working while “development policy” is not … [and] we are [therefore] faced with the confluence of two seemingly contradictory trends’ (2007: 85). To address this paradox, Rodrik makes a case for heterodoxy in understanding international development achievements and failure. This chapter will seek to address the paradox/puzzle in another way: by looking at the explanatory gap between development as policy as envisioned and orchestrated by states and development as practice as pursued and given meaning by people in their everyday actions.

To provide some structure to the empirical evidence and discussion that follows, a simplified two-by-two matrix provides a starting point (Table 2.1). This highlights two binaries: between directional history and vernacular modernities, on the one hand, and everyday practices and state intentionalities, on the other. The four resulting categories inevitably bleed into each other; they are not viewed as neat and tightly bordered but permeable. Indeed, it is at the margins – at the points of contact – where much of interest lies. The matrix serves a purpose in highlighting the intersections and tensions with which the chapter is concerned:

At its core, this volume has focused on everyday practices of economic engagement that have transformed – and are being transformed by – the Southeast Asian region's embrace of market-led developmentalism. To this end, the chapters in this volume have sought to illustrate the many and varied ways in which everyday actors and their practices of everyday life both constitute and operate within Southeast Asian political economies. Our contributors have considered the production of Southeast Asia's Everyday Political Economy (EPE) within distinct country contexts, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives and engaging a range of methodological and theoretical tools. Concluding a volume of this nature is no easy task. In this endeavour, the editors Elias and Rethel have been joined by John Hobson and Leonard Seabrooke, the authors of the influential 2007 book Everyday Politics of the World Economy, which, in setting out their Everyday International Political Economy (EIPE) approach, provided an important intellectual precursor to this volume. We use this as an opportunity to reflect about how this book project has sought to push the notion of everyday political economy in some quite distinctive directions to that originally put forward by Hobson and Seabrooke. Thus, in these concluding comments, we highlight the points of commonality and differences between the EIPE and EPE projects.

The argument in this chapter unfolds in two steps. We first sketch IPE's journey from a focus on what Hobson and Seabrooke (2007b) called ‘regulatory’ IPE (or RIPE) to a greater concern with the everyday. We then consider the chapters of this book against this background. One final point of note here is that the starting point of analysis of this book is distinct to that advanced in Hobson and Seabrooke's volume. There the authors were centrally interested in the relationship between everyday actor agency and its effect on the global political economy. The current book, however, tends to focus more on developments within particular national economies situated in the Southeast Asian region. This is not to say that the global political economy is ignored; but to the extent that it is discussed, it is mainly in the context of how international influences and pressures are negotiated, mediated and, in some cases, significantly transformed at the national/local level and the role that everyday actors (can) play in acquiescing, contesting or resisting them.

Introduction

There are currently over 320,000 full-time, live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Hong Kong, the vast majority of whom are from Southeast Asia. In recent years, women from the Philippines and Indonesia have constituted 48 per cent and 49 per cent, respectively, of the MDW population, with women from Thailand, Sri Lanka and Nepal making up most of the remainder (Immigration Department 2012). These women and previous generations of women from Southeast Asia account for a significant proportion of the intra-Asia migration of workers, being at the same time a part of the widely observed feminization of migration (see also Elias and Louth, this volume). In the social fabric of Hong Kong, their arrival in ever-increasing numbers, especially since the second half of the 1980s, also marked a sea change in which household chores, child and elder care were commoditized to the extent that in approximately one in eight Hong Kong households an MDW carries out or helps with these tasks.

The nature of domestic work, its private location and the dispersal of its workers, very often as single employees in a household, coalesce to produce a vulnerability that is, in many parts of Asia, worsened by live-in arrangements which may have an impact on access to unions or to help and advice. This vulnerability is why the International Labour Organization has identified women domestic workers as one of the three most vulnerable groups of migrant workers (ILO 2004) and why a Domestic Workers’ Convention has now been adopted (ILO number 189). This convention and the longer-standing UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990) have had some indirect impact in Hong Kong in terms of consciousness raising and lobbying. NGOs and migrant workers’ unions, which in Hong Kong are permitted the political space in which to establish themselves and pursue their activities, have invoked both conventions in their ongoing campaigns and, arguably, drawn legitimacy from them in fighting two recent major issues: the exclusion of MDWs from the right of abode (akin to permanent residency) (Vallejos and Domingo v Commissioner of Registration 2011) and the exclusion of domestic work from the minimum wage regulations.

Introduction

Southeast Asia is an increasingly interdependent, globalized and urbanized region of the world. The eleven countries that are generally understood as comprising modern-day Southeast Asia are now ever more closely linked together via flows of trade, investment and migration, in addition to traditional state-led processes of regional integration – most notably the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – as well as ever closer, and overlapping, bilateral economic and security ties. In the nearly two decades since Thailand floated the baht, an event commonly held to mark the outbreak of the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8, the region has become more closely integrated than ever before. The launch of the ASEAN Economic Community marks – at least rhetorically – the high point of a period of state-led economic development, market reform and regional integration. Indeed today, we see a region that while not unified is certainly deeply interconnected. In the shadow of Asia's two giants, India and China, the Southeast Asian region has been somewhat sidelined within debates about and discussions of the looming ‘Asian Century’.

Much analytical effort has been put into understanding the respective influences of state and market forces in driving the region's economic transformation. Nonetheless, Southeast Asia provides an important site for considering how processes of economic transformation are refashioning – and refashioned by – the lives and daily routines of ordinary people: their decisions to migrate across borders; their experiences of growing affluence as well as of inequality, poverty and associated forms of violence and destitution; their activities as activists, citizens and workers; and the ways in which economic and social relations, responsibilities and activities are being transformed. Southeast Asia is, and will remain, a heterogeneous region of the world. And yet, this very diversity of culture, politics, religion, society and economics – intersecting with divisions of race, class, gender and even age – provides important insights into how economic transformation takes shape. If we are entering an Asian Century, then we need to remain attentive to how this transformation is taking shape in the lives of Asia's people and their engagement in changing economic practices, with Southeast Asia providing an important terrain for initiating this focus.

Introduction

In 2009, the 15Malaysia project brought together fifteen Malaysian filmmakers to reflect on sociopolitical issues in Malaysia. The result is a series of fifteen short films that provide a snapshot of living in Malaysia during a period of rapid social and economic change. Some of these films are funny, some are serious; some are action-packed, some are more contemplative. They all share a commitment to shedding light on how ordinary citizens engage with Malaysia's ongoing transformation. A couple of these films are specifically targeted at drawing out some of the cultural misunderstandings that can occur in Malaysia's multiethnic society. One of them is on Islamic finance. In the short film Potong Saga, the Chinese boy Namewee tries to open an Islamic bank account. A group of friends tell him that he has to undergo circumcision to be eligible. He follows their advice. Yet, when he goes to open his account, the bank manager tells him that this procedure would not have been necessary. This is when he wakes up and realizes that it was all a dream.

The film provides a satirical commentary on interethnic relations in Malaysia and on what it is to become part of Malaysia's aspiring consumer society and increasingly financialized political economy. According to Namewee's friends, ‘Islamic banking is very stable’, ‘they are different from other banks’, ‘their interest [sic] rate is better also’, ‘Islamic bank is people power’, ‘your money is safe’, ‘globalization’ and ‘in order to have a better future sometimes you have to make sacrifices’. On the one hand, these statements closely echo elite discourses on Islamic finance. They could thus be seen as illustrative of the success of the development of Islamic finance as an elite project and its acceptance by ordinary Malaysian citizens. On the other hand, this humorous engagement with Islamic finance constitutes a cultural space for critical reflection about Islamic finance as positioned at the intersections of age, gender, race and class in Malaysia. As such, the film can serve as an entry point for thinking about the dynamics of Islamic finance in Malaysia more broadly. This chapter will focus on the tensions within Islamic finance as an elite project first aimed at modernizing the Malaysian economy and now also increasingly part of Malaysia's international competitiveness agenda and on how Islamic finance is engaged with, sustained and challenged by ordinary Malaysian citizens.

Introduction

On 1 May 2013, members of trade unions in Yangon openly celebrated International Workers’ Day for the first time in decades. In previous years, members of the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma (FTUB) had crossed the border from Thailand into Myanmar, accompanied by troops from the armed wing of the Karen National Union, to hold clandestine Mayday celebrations in Karen villages. Union organizers would give speeches and lead discussions about the core labour rights guaranteed by the International Labour Organization (ILO). In the villages they passed through, they would gather reports of forced labour and other abuses by military units commanded by the ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC). When five union activists attempted to hold a Mayday meeting in Yangon in 2007, they were arrested and sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

In 2013 it was different. Union activists, together with other political prisoners, had been released from prison. The union federation, renamed the Federation of Trade Unions of Myanmar (FTUM), held their annual celebration on a public stage in Myanmar's largest city, attended by hundreds of members of newly legalized trade unions along with the deputy labour minister and an official from the ILO liaison office in Yangon. The day before, at a Labour Organisations Conference sponsored by the ILO, union members elected delegates to the ILO conference in Geneva. Those delegates subsequently participated in the ILO's decision to lift sanctions previously imposed on Myanmar for non-compliance with international labour standards. Union activists had been instrumental in persuading ILO member-states to impose sanctions on Myanmar's military regime in 2000 and in working with the ILO to establish processes to monitor and combat forced labour. In 2013, unions were moving from the margins to the centre of Myanmar's national politics and preparing to take up the challenge of organizing a movement capable of transforming the conditions faced by ordinary workers.

In the following discussion of Myanmar's reforms and the evolving industrial relations regime, I highlight the agency of workers and union organizers as everyday actors in shaping the conditions of economic governance and the role of trade union organizations as emerging structures that are beginning to act as bridging mechanisms between everyday and elite politics.

Introduction

Southeast Asian elites seeking to manage complex processes of political and economic transition as part of the desire to build and sustain national economic competitiveness are increasingly preoccupied with the issue of talent. The cultivation and retention of skilled workers, innovative entrepreneurs and corporate protégés is considered essential for countries seeking to maximize their regional comparative advantage. Talented individuals are expected to use their metacognitive skills and influence to contribute to national development and, by extension, enhance the performance legitimacy of the regime in power. This chapter draws on evidence from Malaysia in order to examine the disjuncture between state efforts to cultivate and retain talent, and the ways in which people interpret and respond to heavily instrumentalist talent enhancement projects. The Everyday Political Economy approach adopted here looks beyond broad determinants of the brain drain, focusing instead on the critical nuances – specifically pertaining to identity politics − that help explain why individuals emigrate and how talent initiatives become enmeshed with politicized expressions of power.

The country's recent economic transformation plans have focused on the need to propel Malaysia towards high-income country status, creating a knowledge economy infused with entrepreneurial spirit and producing, no less, a new generation of geniuses and Nobel laureates. To this end, private as well as state-owned enterprises are said to be embroiled in a global ‘war for talent’ (EIU 2011). This now highly globalized narrative posits that the war can only be ‘won’ if companies and governments affirm the worth of each individual employee and citizen while at the same time investing differentially in them in order to maximize their potential (Thrift 2010: 199). Comprehensive policies designed to achieve this goal, such as the Tenth Malaysia Plan (2011–15) and the Economic Transformation Programme (2010) are at odds, however, with Malaysia's conservative and reactionary politics, where the language of ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy) has entered the mainstream and the politics of ethnoreligious insult has become routinized in order to preserve the ruling party status of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO). As a consequence, government efforts to retain and recapture Malaysian talent – considered so vital for economic transformation – are faltering.

The quote above vividly captures the recent conflicts on the role of mining and social development in the Philippines. Danny Arias, responsible for linking local communities to national campaigns against large-scale mining, contests the possibilities of transnational investments bringing long-term economic development to a country characterized by challenging geographies for mineral extraction, political violence and a history of socioenvironmental disasters. Importantly, his critique opens up an important intellectual space for academic research that places questions of rights, agency and political mobilization as key organizing concepts in understanding why the ‘logic of globalization’ is neither inevitable nor necessarily desirable. As the pace of neoliberal reforms intensifies in the region, ordinary people – especially those with limited material and political resources – make justice claims in very difficult circumstances, sometimes not always successfully, in order to alter the configuration of global and local power structures.

Danny Arias's position reflects two important countervailing ideas about neoliberalism and development in Southeast Asia, which we will develop in this chapter. First, Arias's critique reflects the contestation of a neoliberal model of mining management expressed specifically by local political actors sidelined in national political debates. Market reforms in the natural resources sector involved designing complex privatization and liberalization policies. The consolidation of a national anti-mining movement indicates the strength of resistance against foreign direct investment (FDI)-led, large-scale mining (as opposed to mining per se). The movement links the diverse efforts of activists, community leaders and the Catholic Church to think about alternative policy paradigms in the mining industry. Civil society actors question the promise of mining-led development, particularly the government's strategy of attracting transnational investments as a way of spurring growth and raising the contribution of mining to the country's exports, revenues and potential for technological development. In addition to the national movement, local communities and regional elites have also challenged the normative commitment of the government towards private capital participation through a nuanced critique of large-scale mining. These actors have come to constitute a somewhat unified political voice against neoliberalism as a development paradigm.