FASS Staff Profile

DR W. NATHAN GREEN

DEPARTMENT of GEOGRAPHY

Appointment:
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
Office:
AS2/03-18
Email:
geowng@nus.edu.sg
Tel:
6516-7818
Fax:
Homepage:
http://profile.nus.edu.sg/fass/geowng/
Tabs

Brief Introduction

Research

In my research, I study how development finance transforms environments and people’s lives in Southeast Asia, and how people in turn contest these processes. Based on ethnographic and qualitative methods, my work sits at the intersection of political ecology, economic geography, development studies, and critical agrarian studies. Empirically, I have studied the social-environmental ramifications of the for-profit microfinance industry in Cambodia as well as large-scale water infrastructure in the Lower Mekong Basin. Through this work, my key intellectual contribution has been developing the concept of agrarian finance, which explains how changes in agrarian political economy, environment, and social life are driven by processes of financialization.

More broadly, I have advanced theoretical debates about agrarian change, debt, dispossession, nature’s commodification, and climate finance within geography and allied fields. I am currently leading a project to critically investigate impact investment for sustainable development in Southeast Asia. Combining insights from political ecology and economic geography, this project will advance theories about the relationship between so-called sustainable finance, uneven development, and social-environmental injustice.

Over the past decade, I have led or co-led research projects funded by multiple research and scientific agencies, including the Fulbright Student Program, Mellon Foundation, and NASA. My latest project is supported by a Tier 1 academic research grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. Furthermore, I have an established record of publishing my research findings in leading geography and interdisciplinary journals, such as Progress in Human Geography, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Antipode, Development and Change, and The Journal of Peasant Studies. This work has been recognized for its contributions to geography, having received paper awards from the Cultural & Political Ecology and Development Geographies specialty groups of the American Association of Geographers.

Teaching

In my teaching, I aim for students to connect global environmental and socio-economic challenges to their personal lives, thereby fostering direct engagement with these issues. Through thoughtful design and use of pedagogical approaches, my students interrogate topics ranging from regional resource extractivism to global climate change. They do so through active and participatory learning methods, such as in-class discussion, fieldwork, and peer-reviewing. I also focus on providing students with the research skills required to critically engage with these issues within and beyond the classroom. Students in my courses engage in the full range of research practice: hands-on fieldwork, individual writing exercises, peer-group discussion, and research presentations. By drawing on this teaching philosophy, I have helped students at NUS find sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems and have received two teaching awards: the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2022 and the highly competitive, university-wide Annual Teaching Excellence Award in 2023.

Education

  • PhD, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014-2019)
  • MA, Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2012-2014)
  • BA, Department of Geography, University of Washington (2003-2008)
  • BA, Comparative History of Ideas, University of Washington (2003-2008)

Online Profiles

 


Teaching Areas

My undergraduate teaching focuses on political ecology, development studies, Southeast Asian studies, and methods in human geogrpahy. I teach the following modules in the Department of Geography here at National University of Singapore:

GE2101 - Methods and Practices in Geography (co-taught with Dr. Gretchen Coffman)

GE3251 - Southeast Asia

GE4219 - Development and Environment in Southeast Asia

GE4232 - Global Political Ecology


Current Research

Impact Investment for Sustainable Development in Southeast Asia

I have just launched this new project, which is funded with a Tier 1 academic research grant from Singapore’s Ministry of Education. This three-year project has three interrelated goals: First, to map out the impact investment market in Cambodia in relation to global networks of sustainability finance. Second, to 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. Third, to analyze the social and environmental outcomes of impact investment into three sectors in Cambodia: microfinance, conservation, and renewable energy. Through this research, I aim to advance theoretical work on sustainability, financialization, and uneven development within political ecology, economic geography, and related fields.

The Financialization of Agrarian Landscapes in Cambodia

I am also currently finishing this project funded by a faculty start-up grant at the National University of Singapore. This research advances geographic and interdisciplinary theory about agrarian financial capitalism. It examines how state and financial institutions at multiple scales have integrated Cambodia’s rural banking system into a financially-based regime of accumulation. This builds on my prior doctoral work, where I analyzed microfinance, precarity, and land dispossession in rural Cambodia to explain the role of debt in agrarian change under conditions of neoliberal financialization.


Research Interests

  • Political ecology
  • Financial geography
  • Critical agrarian studies
  • Critical development studies
  • Southeast Asian Studies

Publications

ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

  • Green, W. Nathan. 2024. “The Anti-Politics of Impact Investment: Financial Self-regulation, Market Competition, and Over-indebtedness in Cambodia.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. Forthcoming.
  • Green, W. Nathan and Ian G. Baird. 2024. “Financialization and Rural Development: Comparing Credit Systems in Thailand and Cambodia.” South East Asia Review. Forthcoming.
  • Green, W. Nathan and Rosa Yi. 2023. "Chinese Infrastructure as Spatial Fix? A Political Ecology of Development Finance and Irrigation in Cambodia." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 0 (0): 1–23 (online 4 December 2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12523.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2023. “Agrarian Financial Ecologies: Centering Land and Labor in Geographies of Debt.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 0 (0): 1-17 (online 21 December 2023). https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12664.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2023. “Financial Inclusion or Subordination? The Monetary Politics of Debt in Cambodia.” Antipode 55 (4): 1172–92. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12920.
  • Guermond, Vincent, Dalia Iskander, Sébastien Michiels, Katherine Brickell, Gráinne Fay, Long Ly Vouch, Nithya Natarajan, Laurie Parsons, Fiorella Picchioni, and W. Nathan Green. 2023. “Depleted by Debt: ‘Green’ Microfinance, Over-Indebtedness, and Social Reproduction in Climate-Vulnerable Cambodia.” Antipode online early view: 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12969.
  • Green, W. Nathan, Theavy Chhom, Reach Mony, and Jennifer Estes. 2023. “The Underside of Microfinance: Performance Indicators and Informal Debt in Cambodia.” Development and Change 0 (0): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12778.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2023. “Duplicitous Debtscapes: Unveiling Social Impact Investment for Microfinance.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 55 (3): 583–601. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221136135.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2022. “Financial Landscapes of Agrarian Change in Cambodia.” Geoforum 137 (December): 185–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.02.001.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2022. “Placing Cambodia’s Agrarian Transition in an Emerging Chinese Food Regime.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 49 (6): 1249–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2021.1923007.
  • Green, W. Nathan and Jennifer Estes. 2022. "Translocal Precarity: Labor and Social Reproduction in Cambodia." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 112 (6): 1726-1740. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2021.2015280.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2022. "Financing Agrarian Change: Geographies of Credit and Debt in the Global South." Progress in Human Geography 6 (3): 849-869. DOI: 10.1177/03091325221083211.
  • Green, W. Nathan, and Maryann Bylander. 2021. “The Exclusionary Power of Microfinance: Over-Indebtedness and Land Dispossession in Cambodia.” Sociology of Development 7 (2): 202–29. https://doi.org/10.1525/sod.2021.7.2.202.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2020. “Regulating Over-Indebtedness: Local State Power in Cambodia’s Microfinance Market.” Development and Change 51 (6): 1429–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12620.
  • Baird, Ian G. and W. Nathan Green. 2020. “The Clean Development Mechanism and Large Dam Development: Contradictions Associated with Climate Financing in Cambodia.” Climatic Change 161: 365-383. DOI: 10.1007/s10584-019-02621-4
  • Green, W. Nathan and Ian G. Baird. 2020. “The Contentious Politics of Hydropower Dam Impact Assessments in the Mekong River Basin.” Political Geography 83. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102272
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2019. “From Rice Fields to Financial Assets: Valuing Land for Microfinance in Cambodia.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44 (4): 749-762. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12310
  • Green, W. Nathan and Jennifer Estes. 2019. “Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia.” Antipode 51 (1): 129-147. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12413
  • Green, W. Nathan and Ian G. Baird. 2016. “Capitalizing on Compensation: Hydropower Resettlement and the Commodification and Decommodification of Nature–Society Relations in Southern Laos.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 106 (4): 853–73. DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2016.1146570

CHAPTERS IN BOOKS

  • McMorran, Chris and W. Nathan Green. 2023. “Participant Observation.” In Key Methods in Geography, edited by Nicholas Clifford, Meghan Cope, Thomas W. Gillespie, and Shaun French, 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2019. “Remembering Lost Landscapes in Cambodia.” In Water and Power: Environmental Governance and Strategies for Sustainability in the Lower Mekong Basin, edited by Mart A. Stewart and Peter A. Coclanis. Advances in Global Change Research. New York: Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-90400-9_4

BOOK REVIEWS

  • Green, W. Nathan. 2021. “Review of Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine. Christopher Harker. Duke University Press, Durham, 2020. ISBN: 9781478009900 (hardcover); ISBN: 9781478010968 (paperback); ISBN: 9781478012474 (ebook).” Antipode.
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2020. “Review of: Sabina Lawreniuk & Laurie Parsons, Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.” ASEAS(UK), December 15. https://aseasuk.org/2020/12/15/review-of-sabina-lawreniuk-laurie-parsons-going-nowhere-fast-mobile-inequality-in-the-age-of-translocality-oxford-uk-oxford-university-press-2020-2/
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2020. “Review of The Violent Technologies of Extraction: Political Ecology, Critical Agrarian Studies and the Capitalist Worldeater. Alexander Dunlap and Jostein Jakobsen. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, Switzerland, 2020, Pp. Xiii + 164. ISBN 978-3-030-26851-0.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12353
  • Green, W. Nathan. 2015. “Review of The River of Life: Changing Ecosystems of the Mekong Region, by Yos Santasmobat.” Journal of Asian Studies 74 (2): 525-526. DOI: 10.1017/S0021911815000510

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