MONEDA EXTRANJERA

The research methodology was designed, adapted and implemented according to the above concepts and areas of focus. Empirical research on the global climate assemblage was limited to a document analysis (of project documents, commentaries, evaluations, statistics, reports, personal accounts, websites and analyses) of major climate change programmes being carried out by governments, experts, multilateral institutions and NGOs. From this initial analysis a broad climate assemblage was mapped out which included the actors, institutions, discourses, rationalities and

51 flows of money that facilitated dominant programs and approaches to climate change (chapter 5). A similar process was carried out for the climate assemblage in Cambodia. This then led to interviews with available actors who were involved in the climate change assemblage. These two initial

processes led to the gradual focus on biopower, risk and neoliberalism and this increasingly became a focus of interviews and document reviews. In the case of the climate assemblage in Cambodia, there was a particular focus on Phnom Penh where attempts were made to map out relations between different actors, ideas, institutions and events through repeated interviews, surveys and ethnographic work. Recruitment of interviewees was done as I became more involved in the climate assemblage and identified people involved through meetings, workshops and from information gathered from other interviewees. All interviews were transcribed and translated (if done in Khmer) and cross analysed using NVIVO software for relevant key words and themes. Fluency in Khmer allowed all fieldwork in Oddar Meanchey and Mondolkiri (and half the interviews in Phnom Penh) to be conducted in Khmer without translation. This portion of work also involved discreet field trips to explore particular projects of the climate assemblage. A detailed methodology for this field work is given in chapter 4.

The two case studies that form chapters five and six were chosen based on both initial interviews with people involved in the climate assemblage in Phnom Penh, and a review of the relevant literature. They were not chosen due to being representative of every climate change project in Cambodia but due to them being iconic projects that could give valuable insights into two different forms of climate change interventions (one climate change mitigation and the other climate change adaptation). Over a four year period multiple trips were made to both study sites (more than ten different trips for between three days to three weeks for Odddar Meanchey and six separate trips ranging from one week to two weeks in Mondolkiri). In all cases the discrete methodology used in a particular place was based on the form of the climate assemblage itself (detailed in chapters four, five and six). Tracing financial flows for instance led to interviews with particular people in the Forestry Administration, in the local level bureaucracy and to community forestry members.

52 Attempts were also made to trace how project concepts were stretched over space – how they travelled from Phnom Penh to regional NGOs to village forest committees. In the case of Oddar Meanchey, a survey of participants was required to understand their position within the project in terms of financial flows and labour. So too mapping was identified as a useful tool to give a

quantitative account of important issues that were repeatedly raised in interviews (land conflict and militarisation). In the case of Mondolkiri more in-depth interviews and ethnographic work was required to focus on how villagers in the study site interacted with the project and better understand their broader livelihood struggles. Focusing on a grounded methodology based on tracing relations and listening to people talk about climate change projects in their own terms helped elucidate the nature of the assemblage and understand how virtual concepts and ideas were actualised in discrete places.

2.8 Conclusion

This chapter has provided a three-pronged approach to tackle the study of climate assemblages. Firstly it will examine the virtual component. The focus of the next chapter will be on biopolitical rationalities and how they have circulated within an emerging climate assemblage. Capital

accumulation both as a rationale that guides how finance, labour and knowledge flow through the climate assemblage, and economic crisis as an event, will also be considered. The fourth chapter will move to considering Cambodia and how the climate assemblage has been actualised there. Specific technologies that help to reproduce these rationalities, and the institutions they are embedded in, will be of particular concern. Interviews, government policies, NGO project documents and

ethnographic observations will be drawn upon to trace out how biopolitics and technopolitics given coherency to the climate assemblage in Cambodia.

The fifth and sixth chapters will examine two different climate change projects. A finer examination of how desire infuses the practice of particular actors in the climate assemblage will be considered through reference to interviews and ethnographic encounters. Throughout the analysis the role of

53 technology will also be considered. Figure 1.1 below attempts to summarise this chapter by

providing a schematic of an assemblage. This diagram attempts to give a sense of how the methodology was formulated based on the assemblage itself. Arrows show how technologies, discourses or finance tend to flow in a particular direction. As such the methodology was employed to trace these flows. Similarly, understanding relations between different actors (farmers, NGOs, consultants) required tracing flows of money, ideas and labour.

Figure 2.1 Schematic Example of an Assemblage

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