Miles Kenney-Lazar
Biographic Data
| ID | 85354 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Miles Kenney-Lazar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Miles |
| FAMILY NAME | Kenney-Lazar |
| SIGNATURE | KENNEY-LAZAR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6977-8345 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 317 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Challenges in Forest Carbon Governance: Insights From Southeast Asia
Meeting global climate change mitigation targets will require enhanced nature‐based carbon sequestration, in which forest carbon schemes play a major role. This is despite criticisms of forest carbon schemes' efficacy, social impacts, and downgrading of other forest functions and services. Against this backdrop, we reviewed existing social science research on the governance of terrestrial forest carbon schemes in Southeast Asia, a forest‐rich reg…
Sustainability capitalism: Investing in climate transitions
Private finance has become the dominant monetary response to climate change, growing nearly twice as fast as public finance between 2018 and 2023 and surpassing $1 trillion annually. This introduction to the theme issue "Sustainability Capitalism: Investing in Climate Transitions" situates this expansion within the longer trajectory of sustainability capitalism, defined as the subsumption of sustainability principles under capitalist logics. We a…
The persistence of swidden cultivation and upland autonomy in Laos
Material subjects: Wetland enclosure and the making of a speculative peasantry in peri-urban Vientiane
Peri-urbanization in Asia, which is driven by state-led mega-projects, has incorporated peasants on the fringes of cities into the urban fabric through land dispossession and displacement. This paper enriches ongoing debates on peasant experiences in urbanization, with a focus on the role of non-human nature. We apply an urban political ecology analysis that dialectically integrates analyses of political-economic forces and materiality, showing h…
Beyond the boom-bust cycle: An interdisciplinary framework for analysing crop booms
The expansion of commercial agriculture is one of the primary drivers of livelihood and land-use changes in the world. Globalisation and other factors have intensified this expansion to the point where booms in single cash crops overtake entire regions before going bust, a pattern that is particularly pervasive in resource frontiers. Using case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, we propo…
Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos
Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a policy of "Turning Land into Capital", which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The policy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theor…
Relational environmental governance: A critical framework for praxis with the material world
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espou…
The spatial politics of land policy reform in Myanmar and Laos
Land policy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two decades. In contrast with earlier distributive land reforms, contemporary policies reflect an amalgamation of neoliberal, state territorial, and social justice agendas. This paper demonstrates how land policy changes reflect the spatially extensive and multi-scalar politics of land contestation and control, employing the cases of Myanmar and Laos. My…
Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar
Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with …
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond
This book is undoubtedly a milestone in the ongoing process of writing the histories of the great period that saw the rising of critical and radical approaches in geography from the 1960s and 1970s onward. Although these histories are characterized by a plurality of methodological approaches (biographical, transnational, place-based, and spatial-sensitive), there is increasing evidence that this rising was international, albeit one of its most fa…
Revisiting value in capitalist natures: Rent, class, liberation
Prompted by a ‘further engagement’ piece written by Elisa Greco and Elia Apostolopoulou, we revisit our published articles, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures: An Emerging Framework’ and ‘Valuing Nature Within and Beyond Capitalism: A Response’. First, we address concerns over our conceptual understandings of the relationships between value and nature, and we raise some of the opportunities and challenges presented by orienting nature–society scholarsh…
The territorial politics of land use planning in Laos
Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos
The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of autho…
The contested terrain of land governance reform in Myanmar
State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform pro…
Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post)Socialist Laos
The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade that have facilitated the concession of state lands to foreign resource investors for mining, hydropower, and plantation projects. Five percent of the national territory has been ceded and tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced from their customary lands. In this article, I argue that the development of the resource sector has been facilitat…
Mega-Plantations in Southeast Asia
This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we define mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the…
The transboundary displacement of deforestation under Redd: Problematic intersections between the trade of forest-risk commodities and land grabbing in the Mekong region
State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos
Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect acce…
Greening rubber? Political ecologies of plantation sustainability in Laos and Myanmar
Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos
The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article…
Valuing nature within and beyond capitalism: A response
This paper is a response to commentaries on our article entitled ‘Value in capitalist natures: an emerging framework’ (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017). We argue that the responses to our initial paper served to broaden our proposed framework and to underscore the need for a unified, but diverse, approach to nature–society studies with value at its center. Extending the argument from the initial article, we continue to see potential for value to act a…
Value in capitalist natures: An emerging framework
This article draws heavily upon a discussion among 11 leading scholars in nature–society geography to explore the current and historical relationships between value, nature, and capitalism. Prompted by a provocation from Robertson and Wainwright (2013) that political ecologists can no longer afford to avoid engaging with the tricky topic of Marxian value theory, we address the importance of the concept of value for contemporary work within geogra…
Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and Politics 'All the Way Down' in Vientiane, Laos
Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of 'Turning Land into Capital' (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from 'state land'. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than t…
Value in Capitalist Natures
In this special issue, we seek to examine and understand the relationships between value and nature under contemporary capitalism. Value, a central concept in Marx’s oeuvre, captures the social cha
Fields of desire: Poverty and policy in Laos
Holly High's Fields of desire: poverty and policy in Laos wrestles with the question of why poverty reduction policies and projects in Laos that fail to serve the needs of the poor continue to be p
Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos
This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationship…
Value in capitalist natures: An emerging framework
This article draws heavily upon a discussion among 11 leading scholars in nature–society geography to explore the current and historical relationships between value, nature, and capitalism. Prompted by a provocation from Robertson and Wainwright (2013) that political ecologists can no longer afford to avoid engaging with the tricky topic of Marxian value theory, we address the importance of the concept of value for contemporary work within geogra…
State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos
Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect acce…
Value in Capitalist Natures
In this special issue, we seek to examine and understand the relationships between value and nature under contemporary capitalism. Value, a central concept in Marx’s oeuvre, captures the social cha
Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos
The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article…
The contested terrain of land governance reform in Myanmar
State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform pro…
The transboundary displacement of deforestation under Redd: Problematic intersections between the trade of forest-risk commodities and land grabbing in the Mekong region
Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar
Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with …
Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post)Socialist Laos
The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade that have facilitated the concession of state lands to foreign resource investors for mining, hydropower, and plantation projects. Five percent of the national territory has been ceded and tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced from their customary lands. In this article, I argue that the development of the resource sector has been facilitat…
Greening rubber? Political ecologies of plantation sustainability in Laos and Myanmar
Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos
The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of autho…
Mega-Plantations in Southeast Asia
This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we define mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the…
Beyond the boom-bust cycle: An interdisciplinary framework for analysing crop booms
The expansion of commercial agriculture is one of the primary drivers of livelihood and land-use changes in the world. Globalisation and other factors have intensified this expansion to the point where booms in single cash crops overtake entire regions before going bust, a pattern that is particularly pervasive in resource frontiers. Using case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, we propo…
The territorial politics of land use planning in Laos
Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos
Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a policy of "Turning Land into Capital", which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The policy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theor…
Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and Politics 'All the Way Down' in Vientiane, Laos
Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of 'Turning Land into Capital' (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from 'state land'. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than t…
The spatial politics of land policy reform in Myanmar and Laos
Land policy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two decades. In contrast with earlier distributive land reforms, contemporary policies reflect an amalgamation of neoliberal, state territorial, and social justice agendas. This paper demonstrates how land policy changes reflect the spatially extensive and multi-scalar politics of land contestation and control, employing the cases of Myanmar and Laos. My…
Revisiting value in capitalist natures: Rent, class, liberation
Prompted by a ‘further engagement’ piece written by Elisa Greco and Elia Apostolopoulou, we revisit our published articles, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures: An Emerging Framework’ and ‘Valuing Nature Within and Beyond Capitalism: A Response’. First, we address concerns over our conceptual understandings of the relationships between value and nature, and we raise some of the opportunities and challenges presented by orienting nature–society scholarsh…
Relational environmental governance: A critical framework for praxis with the material world
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espou…
Valuing nature within and beyond capitalism: A response
This paper is a response to commentaries on our article entitled ‘Value in capitalist natures: an emerging framework’ (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017). We argue that the responses to our initial paper served to broaden our proposed framework and to underscore the need for a unified, but diverse, approach to nature–society studies with value at its center. Extending the argument from the initial article, we continue to see potential for value to act a…
The persistence of swidden cultivation and upland autonomy in Laos
Fields of desire: Poverty and policy in Laos
Holly High's Fields of desire: poverty and policy in Laos wrestles with the question of why poverty reduction policies and projects in Laos that fail to serve the needs of the poor continue to be p
The 18Th Annual Critical Geography Conference
The 18 th Annual Critical Geography Conference: Constructing a Radical Politics in an Age of Crisis took place in November 4–6, 2011, at Clark University, in Worcester Massachusetts. In this report the conference organizers summarize the results and offer some insights on the challenges and opportunities of mobilizing politically through the critical geography community. We argue that institutionalized actions within the academy, like this confer…
Plantation rubber, land grabbing and social-property transformation in southern Laos
This paper critically examines theories of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion for analyzing the agrarian transformations that result from contemporary large-scale land acquisitions across the Global South. Building upon Marx's primitive accumulation, Harvey's accumulation by dispossession and Hall et al.'s Powers of Exclusion, conceptual lenses are developed through which to examine how land grabs transform property and social relationship…
Fields of desire: Poverty and policy in Laos
Holly High's Fields of desire: poverty and policy in Laos wrestles with the question of why poverty reduction policies and projects in Laos that fail to serve the needs of the poor continue to be p
Valuing nature within and beyond capitalism: A response
This paper is a response to commentaries on our article entitled ‘Value in capitalist natures: an emerging framework’ (Kay and Kenney-Lazar, 2017). We argue that the responses to our initial paper served to broaden our proposed framework and to underscore the need for a unified, but diverse, approach to nature–society studies with value at its center. Extending the argument from the initial article, we continue to see potential for value to act a…
Value in capitalist natures: An emerging framework
This article draws heavily upon a discussion among 11 leading scholars in nature–society geography to explore the current and historical relationships between value, nature, and capitalism. Prompted by a provocation from Robertson and Wainwright (2013) that political ecologists can no longer afford to avoid engaging with the tricky topic of Marxian value theory, we address the importance of the concept of value for contemporary work within geogra…
Financing the 450 Year Road: Land Expropriation and Politics 'All the Way Down' in Vientiane, Laos
Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of 'Turning Land into Capital' (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from 'state land'. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than t…
Value in Capitalist Natures
In this special issue, we seek to examine and understand the relationships between value and nature under contemporary capitalism. Value, a central concept in Marx’s oeuvre, captures the social cha
The transboundary displacement of deforestation under Redd: Problematic intersections between the trade of forest-risk commodities and land grabbing in the Mekong region
State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos
Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect acce…
Greening rubber? Political ecologies of plantation sustainability in Laos and Myanmar
Governing Dispossession: Relational Land Grabbing in Laos
The government of (post)socialist Laos has conceded more than 1 million hectares of land—5 percent of the national territory—to resource investors, threatening rural community access to customary lands and forests. However, investors have not been able to use all of the land granted to them, and their projects have generated geographically uneven dispossession due to local resistance. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article…
Revisiting value in capitalist natures: Rent, class, liberation
Prompted by a ‘further engagement’ piece written by Elisa Greco and Elia Apostolopoulou, we revisit our published articles, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures: An Emerging Framework’ and ‘Valuing Nature Within and Beyond Capitalism: A Response’. First, we address concerns over our conceptual understandings of the relationships between value and nature, and we raise some of the opportunities and challenges presented by orienting nature–society scholarsh…
The territorial politics of land use planning in Laos
Relations of sovereignty: The uneven production of transnational plantation territories in Laos
The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been framed by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of autho…
The contested terrain of land governance reform in Myanmar
State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform pro…
Neoliberalizing Authoritarian Environmental Governance in (Post)Socialist Laos
The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade that have facilitated the concession of state lands to foreign resource investors for mining, hydropower, and plantation projects. Five percent of the national territory has been ceded and tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced from their customary lands. In this article, I argue that the development of the resource sector has been facilitat…
Mega-Plantations in Southeast Asia
This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we define mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the…
Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond
This book is undoubtedly a milestone in the ongoing process of writing the histories of the great period that saw the rising of critical and radical approaches in geography from the 1960s and 1970s onward. Although these histories are characterized by a plurality of methodological approaches (biographical, transnational, place-based, and spatial-sensitive), there is increasing evidence that this rising was international, albeit one of its most fa…
Variegated transitions: Emerging forms of land and resource capitalism in Laos and Myanmar
Since the mid- to late- 1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with …
Beyond the boom-bust cycle: An interdisciplinary framework for analysing crop booms
The expansion of commercial agriculture is one of the primary drivers of livelihood and land-use changes in the world. Globalisation and other factors have intensified this expansion to the point where booms in single cash crops overtake entire regions before going bust, a pattern that is particularly pervasive in resource frontiers. Using case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, we propo…
Turning land into capital? The expansion and extraction of value in Laos
Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a policy of "Turning Land into Capital", which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The policy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theor…
Relational environmental governance: A critical framework for praxis with the material world
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical frameworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espou…
The spatial politics of land policy reform in Myanmar and Laos
Land policy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two decades. In contrast with earlier distributive land reforms, contemporary policies reflect an amalgamation of neoliberal, state territorial, and social justice agendas. This paper demonstrates how land policy changes reflect the spatially extensive and multi-scalar politics of land contestation and control, employing the cases of Myanmar and Laos. My…
Material subjects: Wetland enclosure and the making of a speculative peasantry in peri-urban Vientiane
Peri-urbanization in Asia, which is driven by state-led mega-projects, has incorporated peasants on the fringes of cities into the urban fabric through land dispossession and displacement. This paper enriches ongoing debates on peasant experiences in urbanization, with a focus on the role of non-human nature. We apply an urban political ecology analysis that dialectically integrates analyses of political-economic forces and materiality, showing h…
Challenges in Forest Carbon Governance: Insights From Southeast Asia
Meeting global climate change mitigation targets will require enhanced nature‐based carbon sequestration, in which forest carbon schemes play a major role. This is despite criticisms of forest carbon schemes' efficacy, social impacts, and downgrading of other forest functions and services. Against this backdrop, we reviewed existing social science research on the governance of terrestrial forest carbon schemes in Southeast Asia, a forest‐rich reg…
Economics (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Politics (19 works) · Geography (16 works) · Cambodian History and Society (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (9 works)