Legal geography (LG) unravels the co-constitutive relationship between law, space and society. Much LG scholarship has focused on urban issues situated in the Global North, but there is an emerging scholarship that explicitly extends this effort to the Global South and to rural locations. For example, Gillespie's LG research in Southeast Asia exposes problems in governance institutions and decision-making processes that can unintentionally exacerbate existing socioeconomic disadvantage. The feminist political ecology (FPE) approach, as conceptualized by Rocheleau et al. and more recently expanded upon by Elmhirst provides a useful additional framework for considering the intersectionality of social and environmental factors which constitute identity, and the mutual dependency between identity and ecological processes. In this paper we argue that marrying an LG perspective with FPE results in a more nuanced understanding of complex legalhuman-environment dynamics. Our focus on lore/law plus gendered identity as a lens for analysis blends an emergent LG literature with insights from FPE. This paper draws on research from a pilot project on the formal and informal regulatory mechanisms that enable and/or disable sustainable conservation in the protected wetlands of the Tonle Sap (lake) in central Cambodia.

Environmental conservation through the creation of protected areas is recognised as a key tactic in the fight against degrading ecosystems worldwide. Understanding the implications of protected area regimes on both places and people is an important part of the protection agenda. In this context and in this paper, we build on the work of feminist legal geographers and feminist political ecologists to enhance our understanding of the constitution of localised socio-legal-environmental interactions in and around protected areas. Our approach looks to developments in feminist and legal geographic thought to examine the interactions between identities, law and the environment in a Ramsar protected wetland on the Tonle Sap, Cambodia. We bring together legal geography perspectives regarding the spatiality of law with insights from feminist political ecology examining gendered roles and exclusions. We found that conservation areas interact in complex ways with local pre-existing norms prescribing female weakness and vulnerability which, ultimately, restrict women’s spatial lives.

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