Land Rights in Cambodia: How Neopatrimonial Politics Restricts Land Policy Reform

Un, Kheang; So, Sokbunthoeun

doi:10.5509/2011842289

Cited by 88 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…In Cambodia, state land enclosure has been an important source of revenue to support warfare and post-war state building (Le Billon 2000;Hibou 2004) and also, from the end of the 1990s onwards, to enable the consolidation of the ruling party's power (Un and So 2011). Large-scale land investment can be envisaged in a broad perspective as a public-private partnership between a state authority and an agro-industrial corporation for the purchase or lease of a designated area of land (Land Tenure and Development Technical Committee 2010).…”

Section: State Territorialization Through (Incomplete) Enclosuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District, North‐West Cambodia

Diepart

Sem

2016

Journal of Agrarian Change

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In Cambodia, the interactions between large‐scale land investment and land titling gathered particular momentum in 2012–13, when the government initiated an unprecedented upland land titling programme in an attempt to address land tenure insecurity where large‐scale land investment overlaps with land appropriated by peasants. This paper is based on a spatially explicit ethnography of land rights conducted in the Samlaut district of north‐west Cambodia – a former Khmer Rouge resistance stronghold – in a context where the enclosures are both incomplete and entangled with post‐war, socially embedded land tenure systems. We discuss how this new pattern of fragmentation affects the prevailing dynamics of agrarian change. We argue that it has introduced new forms of exclusion and a generalized perception of land tenure uncertainty that is managed by peasants through the actualization of hybrid land tenure arrangements borrowing from state rules and local consensus. In contrast with common expectations about land formalization, the process reinforces the patterns of social differentiation initiated by land rent capture practices of early migrants and pushes more vulnerable peasants into seeking wage labour and resorting to job migration.

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Section: State Territorialization Through (Incomplete) Enclosuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District, North‐West Cambodia

Diepart

Sem

2016

Journal of Agrarian Change

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“…27 Erdmann and Engel 2007;Bratton andvan de Walle 1997. 28 Heder 2007;Un andSo 2011. 29 Sidel 1989;Reno 1999.…”

Section: The Political Ecology Of State Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…37 Larsson 2013 Gottesman 2003. 39 Pak 2011;Cock 2010;Roberts 2002;Heder 2005;Un andSo 2011. 40 St John 1995.…”

Section: Post-conflict State Formationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cambodia's Unofficial Regime of Extraction: Illicit Logging in the Shadow of Transnational Governance and Investment

Milne

2015

Critical Asian Studies

104

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Cambodia has recently demonstrated one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. While scholars have long explored the drivers of tropical forest loss, the case of Cambodia offers particular insights into the role of the state where transnational governance and regional integration are increasingly the norm. Given the significant role logging rents play in Cambodia's post-conflict state formation, this article explores the contemporary regime and its ongoing codependent relationship with forested land. Insights are distilled from comparative analysis of illicit logging in two ethnographic case studies. Both involve foreign investments by state-owned companies -a Chinese-backed hydropower dam and Vietnameseowned rubber concessions -and both are nestled in prominent conservation landscapes that are managed with international donor support. Together, the cases reveal how Cambodia's current timber extraction regime works through the use and abuse of legal mechanisms associated with forest conservation and foreign investment projects, and the mobilization of elite alliances that log both for private gain and in service of the ruling party's interests. By implication, the government's remarkable facilitation of transnational projects for conservation and development must be reappraised and ultimately seen as constitutive of a predatory and extractive regime that continues to rely heavily upon illicit logging revenues.

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“…Dating back to the social and economic dislocations of Khmer Rouge rule (1975)(1976)(1977)(1978) and its aftermath (during the 1980s and 1990s), the distribution of land and associated questions of access and ownership have long been at the heart of contemporary Cambodian politics (Chandler, 1993;Gottesman, 2003;Hughes, 2007;Un and So, 2009;Cock, 2010;Heder, 2011). One of the central motifs through which this history has unfolded is 'anarchic encroachment' , a term that state officials often use to describe the activities of smallholders on lands that are claimed as state property.…”

Section: Background: the Political Economy Of 'Anarchic Encroachment'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

2015

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Land Rights in Cambodia: How Neopatrimonial Politics Restricts Land Policy Reform

Cited by 88 publications

References 0 publications

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District, North‐West Cambodia

Fragmented Territories: Incomplete Enclosures and Agrarian Change on the Agricultural Frontier of Samlaut District, North‐West Cambodia

Cambodia's Unofficial Regime of Extraction: Illicit Logging in the Shadow of Transnational Governance and Investment

Large-Scale Land Acquisitions

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