Project Documents
Journal Articles and Policy Briefs
Briefing Notes and Fact Sheets
Presentations
Project Documents
Year: 2023
Title: SSS/2019/138 Annual Project Report
Authors: Caitlin Finlayson, Brian Cook
Year: 2022
Title: SSS/2019/138 Annual Project Report
Authors: Caitlin Finlayson & Brian Cook
Year: 2022
Title: Report 3: Experiences and perceptions amongst groups of farmers
Author: Brian Cook
Year: 2020-2021
Title: 2020-21 Annual Report: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia (ASEM/2013/003)
Author: Brian Cook
Year: 2020
Title: Reports 1&2: Establish a baseline survey for farmers in the 12 villages, emphasising agricultural crops, practices, and household characteristics
Author: Brian Cook
Year: 2019-2020
Title: 2019-20 Annual Report: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia (ASEM/2013/003)
Author: Brian Cook
Year: 2018
Title: 2018 Annual Project Report: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia (ASEM/2013/003) (Khmer)
Authors: Sokunthea Noun & Sophanara Phan
Year: 2018-2019
Title: 2018-19 Annual Report: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia (ASEM/2013/003)
Author: Brian Cook
Year: 2017-2018
Title: 2017-18 Annual Report: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia (ASEM/2013/003)
Author: Brian Cook
Journal Articles and Policy Briefs
Title: From Theatre to Transformation: Learning, Action, and Diffusion for SDG2 in Cambodia
Authors: Brian Cook, Nicholas Harrigan, Van Touch, Kirt Hainzer, Angelo Imperiale, Tsend-Ayush Ganbaatar & Boony Coombe
Year: 2025
Journal: Sustainable Development
This paper provides rare, rigorous evidence of how Forum Theatre fosters learning, behaviour change, and diffusion. Following 13 performances and year-later interviews, the study shows that learning predicts behavioural shifts and that these shifts then drive spillover effects to non-attendees. The innovation is its bridging of qualitative depth with quantitative impact tracing, reframing participatory theatre as a viable pathway for SDG2 when it promotes agency rather than awareness.
Title: Bridging extreme climate risks, financial precarity, and adaptation gaps: Advancing inclusive adaptation in rainfed agricultural systems
Authors: Van Touch, Ariane Utomo, De Li Liu, Nicholas Harrigan, Le-Anne Bannan, Panhaleak Chay, Caitlin Finlayson, Kirt Hainzer, Andrew McGregor, Katharine McKinnon, Lita Mom, Sophanara Phan, Pherom Song, Daniel K.Y. Tan, Thong Anh Tran, Saroeut Yong & Brian Cook
Year: 2025
Journal: Global Environmental Change
This study integrates climate modelling, household census data, and socioeconomic analysis to show how extreme rainfall variability and financial precarity jointly constrain adaptation. Farmers recognise rising risk, yet debt, limited savings, and structural constraints block any meaningful response. Its innovation is a systems-level diagnosis that shifts responsibility away from awareness and toward the financial environments that determine what households can actually do.
Title: Smallholder decision-making and its misalignment with sustainable development goal 2 (Zero Hunger)
Authors: Brian Cook, Van Touch, Caitlin Finlayson, Thong Anh Tran, Nicholas Harrigan, Nick Read, Le-Anne Bannan & Kirt Hainzer
Year: 2025
Journal: Agriculture and Human Values
This article reframes SDG2 by centring how smallholders navigate risk rather than how global agendas imagine intensification. Extensive engagements with cassava farmers uncover a ‘ngeay sruol’ approach to agrarian decision-making: a low-cost, low-risk logic that shapes livelihood decisions in ways that make top-down intensification unrealistic. The innovation in this analysis is its demonstration that smallholders reject risk, not productivity, and that extension fails when it assumes awareness can override structural uncertainty. By grounding the analysis in farmer agency, the analysis exposes why global ambitions repeatedly collide with locally rational strategies.
Title: Reshaping agricultural production systems: Trade-offs and implications for sustainable intensification and environment management
Authors: Van Touch, Ariane Utomo, Nicholas Harrigan, Caitlin Finlayson, Andrew McGregor, Katharine McKinnon, Thong Anh Tran, Le-Anne Bannan, Daniel K.Y. Tan, Phan Sophanara, Panhaleak Chay, Sophea Yous, Kirt Hainzer & Brian Cook
Year: 2025
Journal: Agricultural Systems
Title: Settlement, inequality and wellbeing: Settled social structures and the creation of inequality and low life satisfaction in Northwest Cambodia
Authors: Jie Zhuo, Nicholas Harrigan, Ariane Utomo, Van Touch, Caitlin Finlayson, Andrew McGregor, Katharine McKinnon & Brian Cook
Year: 2025
Journal: World Development
This study explains how settlement processes have produced long-term inequality and uneven wellbeing across Northwest Cambodia. Its innovation lies in connecting historical land and migration patterns with contemporary social and economic divides. It shows that inequality is embedded structurally and spatially, shaping aspirations and life satisfaction.
Title: Team photo-diaries: Making places, people, and power more visible
Authors: Ariane Utomo, Andrew McGregor, Bunnarath Som, Caitlin Finlayson, Chariya Korn, Katharine McKinnon, Lita Mom, Nicholas Harrigan, Panhaleak Chay, Pao Srean, Pherom Song, Sao Chen, Saroeut Yong, Sinuon Chhun, Sophanara Phan, Sophea Yous, Thong Tran, Van Touch & Brian Cook
Year: 2025
Journal: Geographical Research
This paper analyses the use of team photo-diaries as a methodological and relational tool. Originally introduced as a reflexivity exercise for Cambodian research associates conducting a household census, the method evolved into a collaborative space for sense-making across the Next-Gen research team. It enabled the team to better understand field contexts, interpret emerging patterns, and surface issues that quantitative instruments alone could not capture. Its innovation lies in showing how team photo-diaries can enhance mixed-methods research by making field conditions, researcher experiences, and persistent North-South power relations more visible.
Title: Agricultural extension institutions in rural Cambodia: Unpacking extension agent-farmer relations and interactions
Authors: Thong Anh Tran, Brian Cook & Van Touch
Year: 2025
Journal: Journal of Rural Studies
This paper explains why extension continues to struggle by mapping the institutional boundaries that shape agent–farmer relationships. It identifies how formal institutions impose rules and hierarchies while informal norms create space for trust, flexibility, and co-learning. The innovation lies in conceptualising the shared relational boundary where real interaction occurs, reframing extension as a socially embedded process rather than a technical delivery mechanism.
Title: The Dual Employment Destinations for RuralCambodians: Skills, Distance and Non‐Monetary Returns on Migration
Authors: Caitlin Finlayson, Nicholas Harrigan, Ariane Utomo, Van Touch, Andrew McGregor, Katharine McKinnon & Brian Cook
Year: 2025
Journal: Population, Space and Place
This paper maps how rural Cambodians navigate two dominant migration pathways: within Cambodia and to neighbouring Thailand. The innovation is its integration of mobility histories with labour and wellbeing analysis, showing that migration reflects complex trade-offs that extend beyond wages. It reframes migration as a strategy to stabilise precarious rural livelihoods rather than an escape from agriculture.
Title: How agricultural extension responds to amplified agrarian transitions in mainland Southeast Asia: experts’ reflections
Authors: Thong Anh Tran & Van Touch
Year: 2024
Journal: Agriculture and Human Values
This paper analyses how multiple drivers of agrarian transition in Cambodia, and neighbouring Laos and Vietnam, are reshaping agricultural extension. Drawing on expert interviews, it shows that these changes strain under-resourced extension systems while also motivating new, collaborative models. The study’s innovation lies in revealing how ‘champions’ catalyse pluralistic, co-produced extension approaches. It argues that business-as-usual models no longer meet farmers’ needs and highlights pathways to legitimise more participatory, learning-oriented practices.
Title: Smallholder farmers’ challenges and opportunities: Implications for agricultural production, environment and food security
Authors: Van Touch, Daniel K.Y. Tan, Brian Cook, De Li Liu, Rebecca Cross, Thong Anh Tran, Ariane Utomo, Sophea Yous, Clemens Grünbühell & Annette Cowie
Year: 2024
Journal: Journal of Environmental Management
Using mixed methods, this analysis shows how climate stress, soil decline, market volatility, and financial pressure compound to reduce resilience across rice systems. The innovation is its integration of climate projections, surveys, crop monitoring, and qualitative accounts into a coherent assessment of system-level vulnerability. It demonstrates that heterogeneous farming styles still converge on similar structural limits and that productivity-focused interventions overlook deeper constraints.
Title: Adaptation constraints and prospects for future research priorities in lowland rice-based farming systems: learning experiences from Northwest Cambodia
Authors: Van Touch, Rebecca Cross, Clemens Grünbühel, Floris Van Ogtorp, Peter Ampt, Try Yorn, Robert John Martin, Brian Cook & Daniel K.Y. Tan
Year: 2024
Journal: Environment, Development and Sustainability
This study provides a granular account of why lowland rice farmers struggle to adopt improved agricultural practices. Its innovation is the alignment of structural constraints—soil degradation, labour shortages, input credit, climate variability—with research priorities that treat farmers as co-creators rather than passive recipients. It demonstrates that adoption is constrained by systemic pressures that shape risk and decision-making.
Title: Historical Agrarian Change and its Connections to Contemporary Agricultural Extension in Northwest Cambodia
Authors: Brian Cook, Paula Satizábal, Van Touch, Andrew McGregor, Jean-Christophe Diepart, Ariane Utomo, Nicholas Harrigan, Katharine McKinnon, Pao Srean, Thong Anh Tran & Andrea Babon
Year: 2024
Journal: Critical Asian Studies
This paper shows how three decades of agrarian transformation in Northwest Cambodia shape what agricultural extension can realistically achieve today. The analysis demonstrates that these historical dynamics structure smallholder risk, opportunity, and agency in ways that limit the effectiveness of top-down, production focused extension models. The core contribution is a historically grounded explanation of why extension outcomes diverge from policy expectations. Rather than attributing limited adoption to farmer behaviour, the paper reframes extension as embedded within long standing political economic conditions that shape decision making far more than technical advice.
Title: From Sapphires to Cassava: The Politics of Debt in Northwestern Cambodia
Authors: Sabina Gyorvary and Vanessa Lamb
Year: 2021
Journal: ACME: an international E-journal for critical geographies
This paper provides an analysis of how microfinance, embedded in Cambodia’s history of resource extraction, shapes cassava farmers’ lives in Pailin. Drawing on interviews from a post-conflict region marked by elite control, the study shows that indebtedness predicts the erosion of solidarity and collective capacity, and that this erosion then reinforces broader patterns of disempowerment. The innovation is its bridging of political ecology with critical debt studies, reframing microfinance not as a pathway to empowerment but as an extension of extractive systems when it restricts agency rather than expanding it.
Title: Humanising agricultural extension: A review
Authors: Brian Cook, Paula Satizábal & Jayne Curnow
Year: April 2021
Journal: World Development (Volume 140)
This paper provides rare, rigorous evidence of how agricultural extension can evolve by confronting the socio-political dynamics it has long rendered technical. Reviewing dominant production-focused paradigms alongside critiques of their exclusions, the study shows how attention to power, place, and people reshapes extension’s learning and behavioural outcomes. Its innovation is to consolidate disparate critiques into a pathway toward “humanized extension,” reframing extension practice as more effective when it promotes farmers’ agency rather than technology transfer alone.
Title: The effect of planting on cassava yield and the risk of crop failure in Northwest Cambodia
Authors: Sophanara Phan, Sodchol Wonprasaid & Stephanie Montgomery
Year: 2021
Journal: Asian Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Safety (Vol. 2021, No. 1)
This paper provides evidence of how shifting cassava planting times can foster more reliable yields in Northwest Cambodia. Following multi-site, multi-year trials across planting months and tillage practices, the study shows that later planting—especially in May or June—consistently predicts higher yields and reduced crop-failure risk, and that these yield shifts then inform more resilient farmer decision-making. The innovation is its bridging of agronomic experimentation with risk-management implications, reframing planting-time adjustment as a viable pathway for climate-exposed smallholders when it promotes agency rather than adherence to traditional schedules.
Briefing Notes and Fact Sheets
Year: 2021
Title: Taking Care of Cassava: Easy ways to manage pest and disease. Interactive PDF Pamphlet in English/Khmer (6.1MB).
Authors: Tin Aye, Brian Cook & Andreas Alexandra
Year: 2020
Title: Next generation agricultural extension: social relations for practice change. Fact Sheet on Project SSS/2019/138.
Author: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)
Year: 2019
Title: Cassava Agronomy trials and transition to fruit trees
Authors: Stephanie Montgomery & Sophanara Phan
Year: 2013
Title: Uptake of agricultural technologies and best practices amongst farmers in Battambang and Pailin provinces, Cambodia. Fact Sheet on Project ASEM/2013/003.
Author: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR)
Presentations
Date: April 2022
Title: Agricultural Extension as Experienced
Location: ACIAR Brown Bag Lunch Session
Date: November 2021
Title: What factors drive behavioural changes amongst Cambodian cassava farmers?
Location: Online for Grow Asia
Date: March 2020
Title: The allure of micro-credit
Location: University of Melbourne Melbourne Microfinance Institution