In this fifth volume of the Understanding Myanmar’s Development series, anthropologist Kyin Lam Mang—himself an ethnic Chin—has conducted an extended case study of the Khami Chin people of the Sami area of Myanmar’s southwestern Chin State. In the past the Khami Chin made their livelihood through shifting subsistence cultivation, using natural resources of the area and largely left alone by the Burmese state. The modern era—beginning with British colonization—has wrought drastic cultural, economic, and environmental changes on the Khami Chin way of life. Kyin Lam Mang takes a holistic look at how political and economic policies and administrative mismanagement of the last three decades, compounded by ecological degradation and a natural disaster called the mautam crisis in 2010, have resulted in grinding poverty and a host of transformations to the community’s cultural practice, livelihood, and well-being.