---

Recent years have seen the sad passing of leading lights in the study of Southeast Asia: James C. Scott in 2024, Anthony Reid in 2025, and now, most recently, Vicente – or Vince – Rafael in February 2026. Born in 1956 in the Philippines, Vince Rafael exemplified the onset of a long overdue shift in the intellectual centre of gravity in Southeast Asian Studies to new generations of scholars hailing from the region. Thus even as we mourn the terrible loss that comes with Vince’s passing, we should also commemorate and celebrate the huge contribution that he made to the study of the Philippines and of Southeast Asia and beyond.

Vince conducted his doctoral studies and received his PhD at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and he lived and taught in the United States – at the University of Hawai’i, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Washington – for the remaining years of his life. But he continued to focus his attention and his affections on the Philippines, without really committing himself to the field of Asian-American Studies despite its strong relevance and resonance among so many students in Honolulu, southern California, and Seattle. His research, his writings, his travels, his family, and, in due course, a deep romantic attachment brought him back to the Philippines over the long and very productive years of his life.

Vince first came to prominence – in the study of the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and beyond – with his brilliant first book, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, which was first published in 1988 by Ateneo de Manila University Press and again by Duke University Press in 1993. The book’s insights on the importance of language – and translation – in both colonialism and religious conversion were highly original, eye-opening, and illuminating, and it is no exaggeration to say that the book was, is, and will long remain one of the most interesting and important books ever written about Philippine history and about Southeast Asia more broadly.

In fact, Contracting Colonialism easily ranks among the most influential books ever written about colonialism in general, as is evident in bibliographies, footnotes, and reading lists with coverage extending far beyond Southeast Asia. To take one notable example, Edward G. Gray’s classic New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton University Press, 1999), treating linguistic encounters between Native Americans and European colonial settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries along the eastern seaboard of North America, cited Contracting Colonialism in its very first footnote, fulsomely acknowledging the author’s indebtedness to this earlier volume for inspiring him in the research and writing of the book.

Vince Rafael was exceptionally talented as a thinker and a writer, as a speaker and as a teacher and supervisor, as his many former students can attest. Working at the fertile intersection of history, anthropology, comparative literature, and social theory, his writings explored and extended the insights of his former teachers and mentors – Ben Anderson and James Siegel – to previously unexplored aspects of the history of the Philippines. His brilliant first book was followed by several subsequent highly original and interesting volumes, notably including White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Duke University Press, 2000), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke University Press, 2005), and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Duke University Press, 2016) bringing his account of Philippine history from the sixteenth century all the way up through the final years of Spanish colonial rule, the Revolution, and on onwards into the twentieth century, treating American colonial rule, and the Marcos and post-Marcos eras in highly original and illuminating ways.

Rafael complemented other historians’ analyses of economic and social change, and of the interplay of institutions and interests in the field of politics, through close attention to questions of nationalism, communication, and representation – and the limitations and failures of communication and representation – through language and beyond language. Moving beyond materialism and muckraking, his work was distinctive in its close attention to identity, ideology, and experience from a vantage point inspired by various strands of critical social theory rather than cultural essentialism.

Rafael’s last book, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, 2022), offered a characteristically original and eye-opening account of the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022). Building on the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, and drawing on recent research by his partner Lila Shahani, he coupled his close, careful analysis of the grotesque ‘necropolitics’ of Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ with a commensurately critical account of the seemingly more benign ‘biopolitics’ of the conditional cash transfer (CCT), education, health care, and other social welfare programs advanced and expanded under the Duterte administration.

A distinctly gendered divide between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor citizens of the country, Rafael suggested, was produced and reproduced in ways which served to discipline and divide the population. Under Duterte, good-for-nothing un(der)employed Filipinos susceptible to drinking and illegal drug consumption were pathologized and punished through arbitrary violence and incarceration, even as overworked – and often overseas – Filipinas were enlisted as primary caretakers and custodians of the production and reproduction of the family and the household as an economic and social unit.

The Sovereign Trickster thus showed how biopolitics, necropolitics, and widespread precarity combined to create what Nicole Curato termed a ‘politics of anxiety’, enabling Duterte’s election in 2016. Viewed from this perspective, Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ – and its earlier iterations dating back at least to the 1990s in the Philippines and much earlier elsewhere – represent not (only) the idiosyncratic obsession of a single (psychopathological) president, but (also) the deeper structural logics of neoliberal governance in the contemporary Philippines and elsewhere.

Vince Rafael’s long and highly productive scholarly career was thus quite literally ‘bookended’ by two highly original and important books, beginning with Contracting Colonialism and ending with The Sovereign Trickster. But over the intervening years and beyond, he also touched the lives of countless family members and friends, students and supervisees, colleagues, readers, and others whom he encountered on the way. He was effervescent if not positively electric in his enduring intellectual appetite, interest, and curiosity, highly inquisitive, eager to engage, to listen, and to learn about the world. He was extremely gifted and extremely generous, giving so much of himself to those who had the pleasure and privilege to know him in person and to those who knew him through his writings and teachings over the years. He led a rich and rewarding life. He was deeply loved, and he will be sorely missed.

---

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

*Banner photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash

The post Vicente L. Rafael (1956-2026) in Memoriam first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.

The Rio Times — Asia Pulse Covering: Japan · China · Qatar · LNG · South Korea · Nuclear Energy · Ceasefire · IMF · Oil · Capital Markets What Matters Today 1 Nikkei 225 Hits All-Time Record at 59,500+ — Surpassing the February 26 Pre-War Peak as Tech, Consumer Cyclicals, and M&A Drive the […]

The post Asia Intelligence Brief for Thursday, April 17, 2026 appeared first on The Rio Times.

Southeast Asia’s digital and green transitions are deeply intertwined, raising urgent questions about social and environmental justice. Drawing on regional research and collaborative discussions among researchers, journalists, and activists at a two-day workshop in Singapore, Birgit Bräuchler, Lukas Fort and Walker DePuy reflect on what these initiatives reveal about contemporary transformations in environmental governance. Rather than treating digital technologies as either solutions or threats, they argue that these technologies simultaneously enable environmental protection while redistributing environmental risk and inequality. 

---

In Southeast Asia, digital technologies promise greener futures and enable new forms of environmental monitoring and activism – yet they also redistribute environmental harm, reshape governance, and deepen social inequalities.  

Southeast Asia is home to some of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and rich cultural diversity. Yet it is also a region profoundly shaped by resource extraction, rapid urbanisation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. Floods, landslides, and forest fires are increasingly common across both maritime and mainland Southeast Asia. Far from being purely natural disasters, these events reflect cumulative pressures produced by deforestation, infrastructural expansion, and uneven development. These pressures now intensify alongside rapid digitalisation, placing the region at the centre of a profound digital-environmental transformation.  

Across Southeast Asia, governments, NGOs, and technology firms increasingly promote digital technologies as tools for environmental governance. Satellite monitoring tracks deforestation, sensors measure pollution and wildlife movement, and mobile platforms coordinate recycling and environmental reporting. Conservation initiatives use mapping technologies, while social media campaigns mobilise environmental participation and awareness. This narrative suggests that technological innovation can help to repair damaged environments. However, the region also reveals a more complicated reality: digital technologies are not only potential solutions to environmental problems. They are also material systems embedded in extractive supply chains, energy infrastructures, and waste streams, as well as governance tools that can re-entrench and even amplify power inequities and the political-economic structures that sustain them. 

The dilemma is therefore not whether digital technologies help or harm the environment, but how they do both simultaneously. The same infrastructures used to monitor environmental change depend on energy-intensive data centres, cooling water, and mineral extraction. Batteries require nickel and other rare earths mined across the region, especially in eastern Indonesia. These processes generate new sacrifice zones and reproduce inequalities, often far from the places where the benefits of digitalisation are most tangible. Digital environmental governance thus reorganises environmental harm rather than eliminating it.  

These dynamics were at the heart of the two-day workshop, ‘Bytes and Biomes: Navigating the Digital-Environment Nexus across Southeast Asia’, held at the National University of Singapore (NUS) on 16-17 October 2025. Organised by the authors of this piece in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and the Asia Research Institute at NUS, and supported by the DIGINEX project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the workshop brought together scholars from multiple disciplines, journalists, environmental activists, and policy practitioners working across Southeast Asia. The conversations highlighted a recurring tension: digital tools can empower communities, support environmental accountability, and open new spaces for resistance, while also intensifying surveillance, marginalising vulnerable groups, and legitimising extractive endeavours framed as sustainable development. The significance of the workshop lay not in the event itself but in what it revealed about broader transformations in environmental governance. 

One recurring theme across the workshop was the close entanglement of the digital-environment nexus with questions of social and environmental justice. In a session on Environmental Advocacy in the Digital Age, participants explored how digital media are used to raise awareness and mobilise action around climate change and biodiversity loss, including through social media campaigns and forms of constructive journalism calling for a more participatory and solution-oriented coverage of environmental issues. At the same time, the session highlighted how governments and business conglomerates deploy the very same digital platforms and technologies to promote narratives of national growth, green development, and job creation. These dynamics raise critical questions about who controls the platforms that shape environmental narratives, whose voices are amplified, and whose are systematically marginalised or silenced. 

These issues were pursued further in a session on Big Data, Small Data, and Digital Justice that examined the ethical, justice, and political implications of data science in environmental governance. While big data is frequently framed as essential tools for sustainability – whether in carbon accounting, land-use planning, or emission monitoring – their impacts on local communities are far from straightforward. In many Southeast Asian contexts, governments are often reluctant to acknowledge the impact of climate change, the extent of environmental degradation, and share environmental data openly. This has led researchers, journalists, and activists to search for other data sources, or generate their own, through satellite imagery, community mapping, and qualitative methods that challenge official narratives. A key issue here is not simply data availability, but data ownership, access, representation, and ethics: whose realities are rendered visible through data and whose remain excluded. Data can thus be used either to empower or to marginalize communities affected by environmental destruction. 

A third session focused on Sensing and Mapping the Environment, examining how digital technologies can variously be used to monitor ecosystems, track wildlife movement, support nature-based solutions, and resist environmental harm through participatory methods. Case studies ranged from urban environmental monitoring in Singapore to deforestation tracking in Malaysia and counter-mapping initiatives in Myanmar and Thailand. These discussions underscored that digital data and the technologies used to collect them are never neutral. Data interpretation, methodological choices, and the political contexts in which data are produced and deployed all shape their effects on the ground. Participants also raised concerns about the rise of large-scale projects reliant on predictive models and real-time sensing technologies, which increasingly treat ecological futures as computable and controllable and raise serious ethical questions around both individual privacy and collective sovereignties.  

The final session on Green Transitions and Circular Economies turned explicitly to questions of governance and policy. Here, participants examined how digital technologies are mobilised to support renewable energy adoption, waste management, circular economy initiatives, and sustainable urban development, while also addressing issues of inequality and rebound effects. Discussions highlighted that the digital infrastructures underpinning online platforms and data-driven governance rely on intensive mining, extensive water use, and energy-hungry data centres. As a result, the strong urban focus of green and digital policies has significant environmental consequences and can further marginalise peripheral communities, where resource extraction, energy production, and data storage typically take place. Digital technologies can also produce exclusionary effects within urban contexts themselves. Waste management provides a revealing example. Here, digital platforms promise efficient recycling systems, optimised collection routes, and measurable sustainability targets. Yet these innovations also exclude or displace informal waste workers and undermine longstanding urban practices of reuse.  

Across these sessions, one point became clear: Southeast Asia’s socio-environmental future will be shaped by how digital transformations affect the health and resilience of its ecologies as well as the lives, lifeways, and rights of its diverse communities. Looking ahead, the workshop placed a strong emphasis on collaboration, translation, and policy engagement. Participants highlighted the need for greater data transparency, improved access to reliable data, and approaches to data governance that prioritise community needs over political or corporate interests. It was repeatedly stressed that data cannot be separated from the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are generated and used. 

Media emerged as another critical actor in shaping the digital-environment nexus. Journalists play a key role in framing environmental issues, yet many operate under precarious conditions and economic pressures that constrain critical reporting. Participants also raised concerns that media coverage often prioritises issues over people’s stories, making environmental information less accessible. At the same time, news is frequently framed in predominantly negative terms, with limited attention to solutions or positive examples. In parallel, the widespread circulation of misinformation has contributed to a growing erosion of trust in media. In response, discussions pointed to closer collaborations between researchers, journalists, and communities as one possible way forward – an approach that foregrounds lived experiences, avoids sensationalism, and renders complex environmental issues more intelligible. 

Building on these discussions, participants identified the importance of meaningful multi-stakeholder partnerships in navigating the digital-environment nexus. Effective engagement must run across different sectors and disciplines, including between data producers and data users (to identify needs), researchers and journalists, and experts and affected communities. Across Southeast Asia, there are already promising examples of such collaborations, from community mapping initiatives combined with data science to partnerships between environmental NGOs, journalists, and local communities. At the same time, these efforts reveal persistent challenges: translation across different forms of expertise takes time and resources, digital interventions often privilege urban contexts over rural ones, and ethical questions around access, surveillance, and control remain unresolved. Addressing these tensions requires not only better technologies, but sustained attention to justice, inclusion, and the conditions under which digital tools are designed and deployed. 

For us as anthropologists and workshop organisers, one striking feature of the discussions was the recuring theme of ‘remoteness’ – not in the sense of physical distance or detachment, but as a methodological and ethical challenge to be considered and negotiated. Many presentations relied on remote sensing, satellite imagery, and large-scale data analysis, approaches that contrast with anthropology’s traditional emphasis on being in situ and relationally embedded. Yet the scale, speed, and complexity of digital-environmental transformations increasingly exceed what individual field-based research can capture and point to the need for new forms of engagement: participatory mapping, community-based data collection, camera traps, acoustic monitoring, and collaborative research designs that combine digital tools with grounded knowledge. No map is perfect – whether produced by satellites or our participants – but the challenge lies in using these tools reflexively and ethically.  

Overall, the questions posed at the intersection of bytes and biomes do not have easy answers, but they point to what is at stake. Southeast Asia shows that digital technologies can enable environmental protection while simultaneously generating new environmental harms and inequalities. Recognising this dual character does not require rejecting technology, but it does require moving beyond technological optimism to more clear-eyed, grounded, and socio-environmentally attentive engagements. The challenges ahead are substantial, but so are the opportunities. The region’s future will depend on how it navigates tensions between digital expansion and ecological limits, and between technological promise and people’s dignity and autonomy. Sustainable futures depend not only on devices and data, but on how digital systems are governed, who participates in their design, and whose interests they serve. Bytes and biomes are now inseparable, and the challenge is to ensure that digitally mediated efforts to protect nature do not obscure their environmental costs, political implications, and uneven impacts. 

---

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

**Banner photo: AI-generated illustration imagining Southeast Asia’s digital–environment nexus, created using Sora OpenAI from prompts written by the authors. 

The post Bytes and Biomes: The promises and limits of digital environmental governance in Southeast Asia  first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.

Blue bonds are becoming an increasingly popular way to finance the Blue Economy. Over the last few years, the Asian Development Bank has set up a Blue Bond Incubator, and in Southeast Asia both governments and companies have issued blue bonds to finance sustainable marine and water management projects. Challenges, however, remain as my recent research attests. In this blog, Dr Ebbe Rogge expands on these findings, in particular by considering the usage of blue bonds as part of debt-for-climate swaps.

---

Financing aligned with the UN SDGs

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted at the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in 2015. The Agenda 2030 seeks, amongst others, to combat poverty and inequality, as well as to protect human rights and the planet. Part of the Agenda are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  These are distinctive objectives, which together provide the framework for making Agenda 2030 a reality. Within the current context, SDG 14 ‘life below water’ is the most relevant of our purposes as it addresses the sustainable usage of oceans, seas, and marine resources.

Both governments and companies seek to finance various projects which are aligned with one or more of these specific SDGs. Financing large projects is often done by accessing capital markets through the issuance of bonds. Conservation finance, in particular the financing of sustainable projects, can be done via the issuance of so-called ‘sustainability-linked bonds’ to a wide range of investors. The proceeds of such a bond issuance can then be used to fund the aforementioned sustainable project(s). These bonds are often referred to as green bonds, or when linked to SDG 14, blue bonds. There is great potential for their usage especially in the Pacific region. The Asian Development Bank, for example, has issued blue bonds to finance ocean-related projects in Asia and the Pacific.

Sustainability-linked bonds are sometimes issued as part of a programme including the restructuring of government debt. In this situation, a spending commitment is made by the issuing government towards sustainable goals in exchange for a reduction of the outstanding government debt. These are commonly referred to as debt-for-nature swaps or debt-for-climate swaps depending on the commitments made. The Nature Conservancy, through its Nature Bonds programme, is one of the organisations aiding governments refinancing or restructuring their debts whilst making funds available for conservation and climate action.

Blue Bonds and UN SDG 14 Life Below Water

In Southeast Asia, most countries have a very substantial coastal line as well as a vibrant Blue Economy.  It is perhaps not surprising that sustainability-linked financing is becoming increasingly popular in (South and) Southeast Asia – and in particular blue financing, i.e. financing aligned with UN SDG 14, including blue bonds. Examples of recent blue bond issuers include the government of Indonesia and companies in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. The blue bond issuance in Thailand by TMBThanachart Bank, for example, is aimed at financing ‘climate-smart solutions’ as the blue economy in Thailand is said to ‘contribute approximately 30 percent of gross domestic product’. Similarly, Southeast Asia Commercial Joint Stock Bank in Vietnam will use the proceeds of the blue bond issuance to ‘expand its funding for sustainable economic activities associated with ocean and water’. Noting that Vietnamese coastline is around 3,000km in length, the ‘country’s blue economy is projected to contribute about 10 percent to the GDP by 2030’. From these examples, it becomes clear that financing through blue bonds will become increasingly important in Southeast Asia.

There are various ‘standards’ as well as ‘guidance’ available for structuring these blue bonds. Such standards typically emerge first from market participants and bodies, as the market benefits from having some uniformity and clarity. The underlying objectives of these common standards is thus to provide transparency and certainty to the markets, increasing confidence with potential investors. Examples of private law standards for sustainability-linked bonds more generally include the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) sustainability-linked bond principles and the Climate Bond Standard by the Climate Bond Initiative. As regards blue bonds specifically, the Asian Development Bank has, together with other financial market organisations such as ICMA, developed guidance on best practices. A key difference with other forms of sustainability-linked bonds is of course the determination of eligible blue projects.

Challenges with blue bonds

In general, there are various complexities and challenges to issuing any sustainability-linked bond, and some additional ones to blue bonds specifically. These general issues fall broadly into three categories (although other categorisation is certainly possible): 1) the definition and eligibility of projects as usage for funds; 2) the definition of related performance targets and meeting these targets; and 3) the reporting and the independent verification thereof. These general issues are remedied to a degree through standardisation and guidance as mentioned above. For example, the ICMA Guidelines for External Reviewers seeks to set guidance for professional and ethical standards for the external reviewers of Sustainability-Linked bonds.

Besides these more generic issues, blue bonds have some specific difficulties. These relate in particular to the selection of qualifying projects and blue objectives, which in turn stems from the difficulty of the use of terminology such as ‘Blue economy’ and ‘sustainable ocean development’. These can sometimes be construed as including, for example, more sustainable ways of extracting fossil fuels or deep-sea mining. Various international organisations have sought to resolve such ambiguity by defining Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Principles. The practitioner’s guide on blue bonds is also fairly clear on such issues. Lastly, these observations are supported by academic research arguing investors require greater clarity and disclosure on projects financed through blue bonds.

Usage as part of Debt-for-climate swaps

Blue bonds can be issued as part of a debt-for-climate swap. The idea of a debt-for-climate swap is not novel and similar to the concept of debt-for-nature swaps. The Nature Conservancy is a vocal supporter of these swaps, arguing that they present a crucial lifeline for our environment and for aligning financial flows in line with the Paris agreement. As pointed out above, The Nature Conservancy is actively involved in restructuring and refinancing sovereign debt, including through blue bonds.

Although each individual debt-for-climate swap transaction might be structured slightly differently, the general approach is as follows. The debtor nation and the creditors agree to restructure (part of) the outstanding nation’s debt, typically by forgiving some of this current debt amount. In exchange, the debtor nation transfers debt that is not serviced into a special purpose vehicle, a fund, which is used to finance climate projects. This new debt which is issued to replace existing (not serviced) debt can take the form of blue bonds, but in any event, there will be agreement as to the use of proceeds and performance linked targets (addressing climate changes) and incentives (e.g. favourable interest rate). This brings various benefits to the debtor nation: it increases climate-related spending, it reduces debt with creditors, and it can be used to stimulate the national (blue) economy.

Debt-for-Climate swap reviewed

The idea behind debt-for-nature swaps has already existed for many years. In 1998, US Congress approved The Tropical Forest Conservation Act (TTFCA) through which many debt-for-nature swaps have been executed. Within the Southeast Asian region, for example, Indonesia agreed a debt-for-nature swap with the United States under the TTFCA and several non-governmental organisations at the start of 2025 following earlier deals in 2009, 2011, and 2014. The objective of this latest program is to protect marine resources and coral reef.

In 2017, the Seychelles was the first country to structure a debt-for-climate swap. As part of this transaction, some of the Seychelles’ debt was restructured and the Seychelles will now repay replacement loans to the newly created the Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust (SeyCCAT). Together with additional private donor funding, the money from SeyCCAT will be used to conserve various marine protected areas covering a substantial amount of the Seychelles’ coral reefs.

Not everyone has been enthusiastic about debt-for-climate swaps. Climate Action Network, for example, has highlighted various challenges and risks. In short, the criticism appears to be two-pronged: it is suggested the swaps neither reduce the outstanding debt significantly, nor do they generate adequate funding needed to support the climate goals. For the debt reduction to be impactful, it is argued that a substantial amount of a country’s debt should be included in the swap plus a large amount should be cancelled. Otherwise, the transaction is unlikely to be bring appropriate financial benefit for a country to be worthwhile from a debt-relief point of view. Moreover, the resources which are freed up are unlikely to make any significant impact towards the climate change or adaptation objectives. For example, Climate Action Network has criticised both the amount of actual debt relief for the Seychelles as well as the amount of funds allocated to marine conservation. Debt-for-climate swaps have also received academic criticism concerning the extent to which local communities would actually benefit. Further concerns have also been raised as to inflexibility in the allocation of blue projects as well as the profits allegedly going to the arranging financial institutions involved.

Concluding remarks

In summary, both blue bonds and debt-for-climate swaps are gaining in popularity. Sustainability-linked bonds, including blue bonds, are increasingly likely to be used, especially by developing countries, as a greater financial flow towards sustainable ocean development is needed. In the Pacific region, for example, these blue bonds have great potential for the simple reason that the Pacific Ocean is central to the nations’ life, culture, economy, and livelihoods. With increasing issuances, both standards and practices are likely to improve. Likewise, debt-for-nature swaps, as well as debt-for-climate swaps, are also increasingly popular and may entail the issuance of blue bonds. These restructuring transactions are also not without their challenges. Lessons learned from the recent Seychelles case include that debts should be retired and not just restructured, the transaction must be of sufficient scale, and it must have regard for the needs of local population and local priorities.

---

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

**Banner photo by Stanislav Rozhkov on Unsplash

The post The Increasing popularity of Blue Bonds and Debt-for-Climate swaps in Southeast Asia first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.