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

peer reviewedIn 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

Going along the river by the bend; entering the village by the country: A spatial planning perspective to enhance community-based natural resource management in Cambodia

This paper suggests that new decentralized and de-concentration reforms, which set out a framework to bring important governance functions to the sub-national level, have opened new spaces to explore complementary approaches for environmental governance. Using the Battambang spatial planning framework as a basis, the paper reviews some of the limitation of CBNRM implementation of the last ten years and then focuses on detailing the methodology used to develop and build the framework and how it can be beneficial to current CBNRM. The argument continually defended is that the integration of CBNRM initiatives into a comprehensive spatial planning framework at the provincial level can reinforce local actions and give communities stronger recognition. In a discussion of the three dimensions of the spatial planning framework which include land use planning, territorial policy, and territorial governance, the analysis does not negate the important contribution of local support to rural communities but tries to identify complementary (and not substitutive) approaches that might strengthen communities in their daily livelihood issues

Cambodian peasantry and formalisation of land right: Historical perspectives and current issues. 2nd Edition

A first version of this working paper was published in 2015 by GRAESE (Research Group on East and Southeast Asia). The objective of this second edition is to update the picture we drew in 2015 with the latest figures and information available to us. The general intention remains the same. We conceive this document as a resource for students and researchers aiming to understand Cambodian land issues and their historical background.2nd ed