No abstract

Village communities are not homogeneous entities but a combination of complex networks of social relationships. Many factors such as ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and power relations determine one's access to information and resources. Development workers' inadequate understanding of local social networks, norms, and power relations may further the interests of better-off farmers and marginalize the poor. This paper explores how social networks function as assets for individuals and households in the rural areas of developing countries and influence access to information and benefits from research and development. A case study of such networks in Phieng Lieng village, in the northern mountains of Vietnam, provides evidence for the need for the efficient delivery of extension services and research and development interventions at the micro level.

This paper examines the influences of gender as an identity on an individual's ability to exercise agency in decision-making about internal migration in Vietnam. Women and men exert agency with reference to prevailing social norms in order to negotiate for or against their own migration and that of others. It has been well recognised that, beyond sex, their specific gender identity as mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, husbands or wives, etc. impacts on who can migrate for what kind of work. However, this study explores the more neglected ways in which gender structures migration. While my findings show that decision-making about migration was overwhelmingly consensual in nature, this did not necessarily mean that migration was equally in everyone's best interests. Women's agency around their own migration was in part constrained because they were forced to negotiate for their interests whilst trying to preserve family harmony. While social norms supported men's power to make unilateral decisions and while they resorted to powerful threats of divorce to get their own way, this did not prevent wives from resisting unwelcome decisions by 'passive' means. The paper deepens feminist insights into the ways in which migration is gendered.

Recent increases in the volume of labour migration from South-east Asia – and in particular the feminisation of these movements – suggest that millions of children are growing up in transnational families, separated from their migrant parents. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data collected in Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, the study seeks to elucidate care arrangements for left-behind children and to understand the ways in which children respond to shifts in intimate family relations brought about by (re)configurations of their care. Our findings emphasise that children, through strategies of resistance, resilience and reworking, are conscious social actors and agents of their own development, albeit within constrained situations resulting from their parents’ migration.