Economic offshoring and the formation of global commodity chains (GCCs) have interconnected and transformed humanity-in-nature relations across East Asia. In this paper, we examine how disasters have disrupted GCCs, and propose that practices of ‘environmental offshoring’ operate alongside economic offshoring to manage these risks. We define environmental offshoring as transnational practices of environmental governance and disaster governance that are animated by the tension between ‘nature as a resource’ and ‘nature as a hazard’. Drawing on a World-Ecology reading of Thailand-Japan relations, and empirical research in Ayutthaya Province, Thailand, we examine how entwinned processes of economic and environmental offshoring shaped Thailand’s ‘2011 Great Flood’ and post-flood response. We argue for an analytical shift in understanding economic offshoring to recognize processes of environmental offshoring through a relational analysis of transnational state-state and state-capital interactions that govern GCCs and rework humanity-in-nature relations at the economic nodes that they interconnect.
Ito et al. (Thu,) studied this question.