W. NATHAN GREEN

 Dr W. Nathan Green is an Assistant Professor at the NUS Department of Geography. He has published 20 articles in highly ranked academic journals, nine of which are among the top geography journals. His research background is in political ecology, development studies, and critical agrarian studies, particularly in Southeast Asia, and he has done extensive fieldwork in Cambodia. Dr Green has also contributed to policymaking in rural development in Cambodia by collaborating with civil society organisations such as the INGO (International Non-Governmental Organisation) Winrock International and publishing in non-academic media outlets.  

Dr Green investigates how funding for international development projects in Southeast Asia changes physical environments and the lives of their inhabitants, and how these stakeholders push back against the unwanted effects of these processes. Specifically, he examines Cambodia’s booming microfinance industry, and how it has caused and exacerbated poverty and unmanageable debt among rural smallholders, in many cases leading to land dispossession as farmers frequently mortgage their land to obtain high interest microfinance loans. Since microfinance has become the third largest sector for global impact investment (practiced across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe) and a key investment strategy in attaining the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, Dr Green’s findings on its widespread harmful effects on grassroots stakeholders are especially important in shaping international development policy.  

His current project ‘Impact Investment for Sustainable Development in Southeast Asia’, funded by a Tier 1 grant (for S$145,946) from Singapore’s Ministry of Education, runs from 2023 to 2026. It seeks to 1) map out the impact investment market in Cambodia in relation to global networks of sustainability finance; 2) critically deconstruct the discourses of impact investment—both its quantitative metrics and representational narratives—that have rendered investable new environments and livelihoods for finance capital; and 3) analyse the social and environmental outcomes of impact investment into three sectors in Cambodia: microfinance, conservation, and renewable energy. Dr Green sees the study as advancing theoretical work on sustainability, financialization, and uneven development within political ecology, economic geography, and related fields. 

Dr Green was recently granted the FASS Award for Promising Researcher (APR). This award is presented to researchers who have produced research that shows potential impact and promise. We congratulated Dr Green and spoke to him about his research work.

1. How did you initially become interested in exploring the effects of international development financing and how it exacerbates debt among farmers in Cambodia?

My interest in this topic began when I was a U.S. Peace Corps education volunteer in Cambodia from 2009 to 2011. I developed a strong interest in understanding issues of rural development while living and working in a farming community during that time. When I revisited that same community as part of a pre-dissertation research trip, I was surprised to learn that in just the few years that I had been gone, microfinance debt had become a major topic of concern among my former colleagues and friends. After looking into the issue further, it became apparent that this was a topic I wanted to dive into deeper through my doctoral research. Ten years later, and I haven’t stopped being interested in it.

 2. What challenges have you encountered when conducting qualitative research in rural areas of Battambang, Cambodia?

Surprisingly, I have encountered relatively few challenges conducting research in Battambang, Cambodia. When I started working in that province in 2019, I already had ten years of experience speaking Khmer, the national language, as well as building professional networks in the country. Finally, most areas of Battambang are not contentious, unlike other parts of Cambodia where large-scale development projects have displaced many people. Those projects are much more contentious to study and can present greater challenges than accessing farm communities in Battambang.

 3. To what extent the debt crisis among Cambodian smallholders comparable to those of other Southeast Asian nations? How unique is its situation?

Many other Southeast Asian nations also have issues with indebtedness, especially among poor and low-income farmers. For example, Thailand also has high levels of private debt—some of the highest in the world. However, what makes Cambodia unique is that most of the debt held by households is secured with land-based collateral, because people have to mortgage their homes or their farmland to access a microfinance loan. Moreover, there are almost no legally-binding regulations to protect consumers if they face difficulty repaying their loans. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, especially rural people and their families, have been compelled to sell their land in the past fifteen years to pay off their loans to the country’s for-profit microfinance and banking industry.

 4. How did Cambodia come to be the world’s most microfinance saturated country?

This is an interesting, and complicated, story. Broadly, Cambodia’s microfinance industry took off in the 1990s at a time when the country was reconnecting with the world economy following decades of civil war and mass violence. Foreign development partners and investors were eager to provide funds to Cambodia’s nascent microfinance institutions to help the country recover from those difficult years. Cambodia’s government also adopted many macroeconomic reforms to attract foreign investors—for example, it embraced very liberal policies towards foreign investment and its central bank made limiting inflation its most important priority. Unfortunately, these policies have limited the political will and fiscal capacity to build a robust state welfare system, which means many poorer households have borrowed private microloans to pay for basic needs like healthcare and food. Finally, Cambodia has passed numerous land reforms, including multiple land titling programs, since the early 1990s, which enabled people to use their property as collateral on loans. Since few people want to lose their land, borrowers often go to extreme measures to repay their loans. High repayment rates have in turn made the microfinance industry a low-risk, and very profitable, industry for foreign shareholders and investors.

 5. How can Cambodia benefit from an agrarian financial ecologies approach to sustainable development? What are some other countries that could benefit from this approach to sustainable development?

One of the primary strengths of this approach is that it explains how poor and low-income households’ financial lives are both very complex and deeply shaped by their livelihood strategies. This approach thus helps to move beyond simplistic debates about whether microfinance is “good” or “bad” for rural development and livelihoods. Rather, it helps to explain why some people are able to access and benefit from loans, whereas many others are not. This approach could benefit other countries in the region, where many people continue to rely closely on agriculture and other natural resources for their livelihoods, and who have also been targeted for financial inclusion in the name of sustainable development.

6. Your ongoing Tier 1 project, ‘Impact Investing for Sustainable Development in Southeast Asia’ involves field research in Cambodia, where you conducted multiple field studies, and Singapore, where you are now based. How does the environment and situation in the high-income, urbanized city-state contrast with that of the sites where you will be conducting qualitative research in Cambodia, and how does your novel research methodology address this?

At this stage in my research, I have yet to begin the Singapore-based part of my study. However, when I do, I don’t plan to compare Singapore with Cambodia. Rather, I intend to understand the development financing relationships between the two countries, given that Singapore is a global financial center and major investor around the region. For example, Singapore has both domestic and regional banks with equity and debt investments in Cambodia’s microfinance industry; there are also many private impact investors located in Singapore who are actively involved in funding development programs in Cambodia. As a financial geographer, I am interested in studying the flows of money between Singapore and Cambodia, as well as how that money is regulated and what its impacts are.

7. Do you have plans in the future to expand your field research sites to include additional countries within and/or beyond Southeast Asia? Which countries are you most interested in doing fieldwork in?

When I am finished with my current project, I intend to apply for a larger grant to fund a more comparative regional project about sustainable finance. I am particularly interested in the rise of green finance for conservation projects, such as the voluntary carbon market for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. I would like to examine several projects in different countries, including Cambodia, Thailand, and perhaps Indonesia, to better assess the role that local social-environmental context, as well as national regulatory regimes, play in shaping green finance investment decisions and their outcomes.

8. Who are your biggest research influences in the field of political ecology, development studies, and critical agrarian studies?

There are many different scholars who have influenced my research. I consistently return to Tania Li’s ethnographic work in Indonesia, where she has critically analyzed the failure of development projects as well as the bottom-up emergence of capitalist social relations in the countryside. The early work of James Scott and Michael Watts, which both focused on agrarian politics and indebtedness, has also been highly influential to me. Finally, more recently, I have found Gillian Hart’s global conjunctural analysis of development helpful for understanding the broad, historical relations of force that have shaped present day Cambodia.

9. Lastly, what are some of your most memorable teaching experiences at NUS?

A couple of years ago I asked my students in GE4219: Development and Environment in Southeast Asia to make five-minute videos about a pressing environmental issue in the region. I was a bit nervous when I gave them this assignment, because I was uncertain if they would know how to make videos. However, when we screened their films in the last two weeks of class, I was blown away at what amazing work they did. Not only were the videos visually impressive, but they conveyed powerful messages about social and environmental issues around Southeast Asia. I would like to do this project again, and perhaps screen students’ films publicly, because I think the wider community could learn a lot from students about how to tackle pressing social and environmental issues today.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer these questions, Dr Green, and congratulations again on being awarded Promising Researcher!