Using the notion of an emerging development problematique in Southeast Asia, this paper uses Thailand to argue that the development challenge is not being solved by economic growth, but reworked. Furthermore, while the policy aims of the early development era could be quite easily identified, measured and addressed, those that have emerged since the Millennium have proved to be more difficult to specify and less amenable to resolution. Drawing on village studies in northeast Thailand, this paper argues that the social adjustments and perturbations engendered by development have created second-order, often more intractable problems and challenges. In this way, the development traction of the early development decades has frequently turned into friction, with the state and its planning and development agencies increasingly struggling to meet both their own objectives and the aspirations of those for whom development was intended. It is also argued that Thailand's problematique is reflected in three emerging gaps: a development gap between what the Thai government is attempting to achieve and the willingness of the Thai population to join in that journey; a political gap reflected in Thailand's Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt conflict; and an aspirational gap between what has been achieved and what is aspired to.

As ‘emerging donors' push alternative paradigms of development cooperation ‘beyond aid' onto the global agenda, some scholars discuss those from Asia as presenting culturally specific approaches. These observations echo the claims that aid practitioners and policy makers themselves make about, for example, Japanese forms of development. In this article, I caution against scholars repeating these culturally essentialising arguments that promote certain political interests. Instead, I propose that we ‘take seriously' these aid actors’ instrumental culturalist views as ethnographic artefacts—that is, as logics and practices that our interlocutors use. By taking what I call instrumental culturalism as the object of study, rather than the analytical frame, this article shows that the work of comparisons plays a central role in producing culturalist worldviews. In short, culturalism is performative, creating that which it names. If we are to understand the “beyond aid” agenda, we need to attend to the ways that the production of culturalisms through the work of comparisons informs development actors’ understandings of social organisation and global interaction.

The article explores the process behind the construction of the Chao Phraya Dam, the first World Bank-funded water infrastructure project in Thailand, developed during the 1950s. Employing Andrew Pickering's ‘dance of agency’ concept in examining the process of turning financial and technical assistance into a workable project, I argue that development infrastructure, like the Chao Phraya Dam, provides a space to explore the dialectic operations – accommodation and resistance – of agency and the unstable associations among diverse actors, expertise, institutions, and materials, as well as practices. Recounting the history of the dam in the making, I explore a series of entanglements through different dances of agency, namely initiation, assessment, mobilisation, negotiation, adjustment, confrontation, and settlement. Such a multiplicity of dances inside and in the making of infrastructure reflects the techno-political entanglement encompassing the manifold negotiation and adjustment of conflicting goals, interests, recognition, and cooperation among different agencies. The dam, often portrayed as an engineering achievement of the state, is in fact the result of unanticipated relations and the responses to the temporal emerging forms of practices.

This paper examines how state and non-state actors govern through pursuing speculative conservation among resource-dependent people who must renegotiate altered livelihoods amidst extractivism in ruptured landscapes. As donor aid declines and changes form, bilaterals, state agencies, and civil society now pursue advocacy in overlapping spaces of intensifying extractivism and speculative governance in the ruptured frontiers of Southeast Asia. In these spaces, bilaterals and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) struggle to work with upland farmers who negotiate the contrasting expectations of the abstract, speculative nature of conservation initiatives and the lucrative nature of extractive labour in the face of dramatic transformations of agrarian livelihoods and landscapes. Through a case study of the Philippine uplands, we demonstrate that as speculative conservation unfolds and manifests within and beyond these landscapes, it endeavours to revalue nature monetarily in ways that help reorganise labour and capital in an effort to overcome the exhaustion of capital wrought by rupture. We propose that during moments of rupture speculative conservation coproduces value from ruin by renewing and preserving capital flows.

This article examines the geographies and politics of the global trade in orangutans in the name of science and entertainment in the first half of the twentieth century, along the background of the growing international nature protection movement. In doing so, it draws attention to historical processes that led to environmental conservation in northern Sumatra. It looks at some of the causes of the wildlife trade, linking animal-human engagement in northern Sumatra in the early twentieth century to large-scale agricultural development. During this period, wildlife traders brought shipments of orangutans from northern Sumatra to Europe and elsewhere around the world. The orangutan trade and the arrival of large numbers of apes in Europe broadly influenced material practices and decisions central to the colonial project. This included the tightening of borders and surveillance in the ports and on land, as well as the creation of wildlife protection laws and policies that regulated human relationships with the environment in colonial Indonesia.