ABSTRACT

One of the key challenges facing Myanmar is to exploit its natural resources in a way that results in equitable development, while protecting the country’s core ecosystems and promoting respect for its environment. ‘The environment’ is a social and political construct, the meaning of which is contested by competing interests within society. In Myanmar, as in many other parts of Southeast Asia, ‘the environment’ is often conflated with ‘natural resources’: a resource to be exploited with the benefits extracted by the privileged few while the resultant pollution, deforestation and other negative environmental externalities afflict the less powerful (Simpson 2018b). The environment in Myanmar is therefore inextricably linked to its turbulent and authoritarian political history and the associated issues of justice, inequality and social activism. As Hirsch (2017) notes in relation to Southeast Asia more broadly, ‘the environment is firmly embedded in the wider social, economic and political dynamics of the region as a whole and of its constituent countries’.