In a crisis, aid providers deliver humanitarian relief across a hierarchy of organisations where influence and capacity map to their scale of operations (Fouksman, 2016; Mercer & Green, 2015). On the front lines of crises, 'citizen aid' is what small, local and informal groups offer to fellow citizens. These citizen aid groups are well-networked in place and tend to work through longstanding personal relationships (Fechter, in press; Sanchez et al., 2016). In the Philippines, citizen aid groups frequently support their activities by documenting their work with photos of beneficiaries to solicit donations from within the country and around the world across social media platforms (Bonacker et al, 2017.) This paper builds on recent debates on brokerage (Lindquist, 2015) to examine a case of citizen aid in the relief effort after Typhoon Haiyan (2013-2017). We demonstrate how social media has produced new forms of brokerage shaped by circulating images online. This kind of brokerage produced a layered network of brokers that both shaped citizen aid efforts and created new channels for localising aid, enhancing the control of citizen groups in the global Southern over humanitarian aid.

Material things always make statements about people's identities. For indigenous Filipino men, making baskets asserts identities rich in culture and in non-market values. This article examines basketry backpacks that were part of the pre-colonial material culture of ethnic groups known as Igorot. When made from rattan, these baskets are recognized as tribal art or heritage items. When made from plastic by contemporary artisans, they are problematic objects that subvert dominant constructs of masculinity. Featuring bright colours-pink, red and yellow-from the detritus of goldmining, these basketry forms point to the plasticity of masculinity itself. By working in plastic, their makers appropriate the cultural history of plastic to subvert the constructions of authenticity, class, ethnicity and gender, suggesting how masculinity could be otherwise. Here, plastic has a cultural potency of its own, with important implications for initiatives to manage or recycle waste materials or create innovative design. Because plastic carries its problematic history and malleability into the objects made from it in ways that reshape categories of meaning and subjectivities, plastic is never just a neutral substrate for artisans' self-expression but the active co-producer of dynamic distinctions between sacred and profane, global and indigenous, that fold back in on each other.

‘You mean to say we’re not the only people in the world with the problem of a national park?’ This question was raised during a focus group discussion held with an indigenous community whose ancestral domain overlaps entirely with a national park in the Philippine Cordillera. The question encapsulates an experience shared across the Philippines, particularly in spaces where both the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act and the National Integrated Protected Areas System are implemented. This paper examines recent developments in indigenous leaders’ participation in, and critique of, the implementation of these two laws and the development of environmental policies. It follows an emerging, multi-sectoral movement calling for the recognition of Indigenous Communities Conserved Areas and Territories (ICCAs), which has led to the crafting of a draft law. The ICCA bill is envisioned as a law that will resolve indigenous peoples’ problems with national parks, while meeting biodiversity conservation targets. The authors direct attention to how indigenous leaders campaigning for the ICCA bill are asserting their right to delineate space and make decisions in the contexts of policy-making and implementation. It is argued here that their articulations are registers of indigenous critique. Taking these critiques seriously has the potential to drive conservation policy-making past the stewardship stalemate, where conservation goals are pursued at the cost of indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and indigenous peoples are expected to perform harmony with nature.

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