Salt and Power: Making Sense of Loss in a Changing Climate through Scalar Politics

The question of what gets to be sustained or what disappears on the land under conditions of climate change is a process of “future-making” that is deeply social and political. As changes in monsoon patterns and more erratic rainfall threaten Cambodia's only salt production, which relies on labour-intensive sun-drying, the spectre of loss becomes ever more present. Loss as a transformation from presence to absence is neither total nor fait accompli; rather, it is co-produced, ambiguous, felt, and differentiated. In this paper, I examine the reworking of land relations in Cambodia's salt sector in the context of climate change and ask what disappears, persists, and for whom. I argue that engaging with climate-related loss as a socio-environmental process that is scalar, relational, and embedded in agrarian histories is necessary to expose and make sense of the politics of (desirable) land in a future with climate change.