Editorial: Tropical assemblages

Since 2013, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG) has awarded annual best paper prizes (each of whose authors receive USD 1000—shared in the case of co-authorship). Members of the journal's wider Editorial Board, who independently read papers short-listed by us, the editors, are consulted for the final selection of the winning papers. There are two prizes each year. One is for the best paper by a graduate student (specifically where the lead author is a graduate student at the time of first submission). The other prize is for the best overall paper. We are pleased to announce the winners (and runners up) of the 2024 awards are: Marine Spatial Planning and the loss of traditional power in Fiji and the Cook Islands Roxane de Waegh, Nathaniel Wilson and Lucas Watt The cooperation-infrastructure nexus: Translating the ‘China Model’ into Laos Tyler Harlan and Juliet Lu Snapshot of a crisis: food security and dietary diversity levels among disrupted conventional and long-term organic tea-smallholders in Sri Lanka Nethmi S. Perera Bathige and William G. Moseley Diasporic scholarship: racialization, coloniality and de-territorializing knowledge Kamna Patel and Romola Sanyal Hilly terrain and housing wellness: Geo-visualizing spatial dynamics of urban household quality in the Himalayan town of Darjeeling, India Subham Roy, Suranjan Majumder, Arghadeep Bose and Indrajit Roy Chowdhury Chinese infrastructure as spatial fix? A political ecology of development finance and irrigation in Cambodia W. Nathan Green and Rosa Yi The winner of the best graduate student paper by Roxane de Waegh, Nathaniel Wilson and Lucas Watt addresses intersections of indigeneity, planning, and sovereignty in the ‘seascapes’ around Fiji and the Cook Islands, tracing how the evolution of marine zoning and associated regimes of marine spatial management and planning articulate with wider power structures, thereby yielding appropriations and exclusions. The best overall paper (by Tyler Harlan and Juliet Lu), charts how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has yielded complex interactions between ‘hard’ infrastructures (such as roads and railways) with ‘soft’ cooperation (such as training and research). This study of the resulting ‘cooperation-infrastructure nexus’ in Laos has implications for studying BRI elsewhere. Their paper appeared in a special section on the effects of China's infrastructure development initiatives in Southeast Asia (see the editorial by the special section guest editors; Byler and Oakes, 2024). …that the journal remains equally receptive to physical and human geography submissions. We recognize wider scholarly trends whereby physical geographers increasingly target specialist interdisciplinary journals rather than more general disciplinary geography outlets…. Nonetheless, we believe that the SJTG remains a good ‘home’ for physical geography work especially on climate change, deforestation, droughts, flooding and hydrogeomorphic processes in low latitude regions, as well as for environmental and policy-related scholarship on tropical forests, mangroves and soils that extends across the human-physical geography ‘divide’ (Bunnell & Lu, 2016: 3). For some geographers, a journal on the ‘tropical world’ might seem like an outdated and irrelevant project, another manifestation of…the ‘colonial present’. There is no denying that the SJTG's ‘tropical’ orientation was symptomatic of colonial geographies given that the originally named Malayan Journal of Tropical Geography was initiated in 1953 when Singapore still formed part of the British empire. The early architects of the journal, Paul Wheatley (1921–1999) and E. H. G. Dobby (1906–1981), were very much regionalists whose academic work reflected a broad geographical vision and understanding of global historical processes, human–environmental relationships and practical experiences of the tropical world. They saw the need for a wide spatial canvas to reflect interventions concerning diverse colonial experiences and state developmental projects in the tropical world (Bunnell et al., 2011: 1). …I did not look kindly on the fundamentally colonial relationship which characterized the system, whereby Western PhD students did fieldwork in developing countries but completed their degrees in their home countries. So, I enquired about universities in Southeast Asia and was told that the best in the region was (already) the University of Singapore. I then wrote up a research project to compare labour policies among rubber and burgeoning oil palm plantations in Johor state and applied both to the University and to the Canada Council for a scholarship. I was lucky with both applications and, as soon as I had publicly defended my MA thesis, I headed for Singapore, making several stopovers in Europe, the Middle East, India, Burma and Thailand…taking six weeks to reach the City-State (De Koninck, 2025: 1). Rodolphe went on to receive the first ever PhD (as cited in his paper, along with a sample of his subsequent work during a distinguished career) from the Department of Geography at the University of Singapore (which became the National University of Singapore in 1980, following a merger with the private, Chinese language Nanyang University). We are delighted to publish Rodolphe's paper, which richly supplements other biographical and/or autobiographical accounts of the trajectories of tropical geography (and alternatives) published in the SJTG (Akatiff, 2022, Bunnell et al., 2013, Bunnell et al., 2011; O'Keefe, 2021; Savage, 2003). We invite further submissions on the pasts, presents and futures of tropical geography.

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