Kymberley Joan Zhen Xuen Chu

Malaysia’s mass land privatization has generated fragmented and conflicting urban planning frameworks that transform former plantation lands into lucrative residential townships with urban green spaces. In these post-plantation transformations, escalating human-animal conflict and urban resource constraints have overwhelmed the Malaysian state, prompting state officials to outsource conservation projects to local private enterprises and nonprofit organizations. My ethnographic research investigates how local Malaysian scientists negotiate and contend between ecological research, community-based conservation, and multisectoral funding demands. I ask: How do ecological models of primate territoriality become entangled with economic understandings of property management, and what are their policy consequences for urban development? Through a multi-sited and multi-species ethnography, I trace how local scientists, property developers, tourism workers, and state officials negotiate land-use governance under Malaysia’s public-private partnerships, where privatized plot management and environmental impact assessments compartmentalize ecological management. By shadowing citizen scientists, attending housing council meetings, and observing conservation outreach projects, I examine how local practices of care, repair, and maintenance produce community-based participatory models of urban design. My research examines human-animal conflicts and ecological fragmentation within the post-plantation economy of urban development, revealing how sustainability discourses mediate and reproduce socioeconomic inequities in post-plantation land governance.