The Politics and Ethics of Land Concessions in Rural Cambodia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12495437 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Neef (0000-0002-5079-3323, Kyoto University, corresponding author), Touch Siphat (Ministry of Health), Siphat Touch, Jamaree Chiengthong (Chiang Mai University) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1085-1103 |
| Publication date | 2013-03-13 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1187-7863 • E-ISSN: 1573-322X |
| Publisher | Springer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10806-013-9446-y |
| OpenAlex | W2026114667 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 67 |
| References cited | 16 |
In rural Cambodia the rampant allocation of state land to political elites and foreign investors in the form of “Economic Land Concessions (ELCs)”—estimated to cover an area equivalent to more than 50 % of the country’s arable land—has been associated with encroachment on farmland, community forests and indigenous territories and has contributed to a rapid increase of rural landlessness. By contrast, less than 7,000 ha of land have been allotted to land-poor and landless farmers under the pilot project for “Social Land Concessions (SLCs)” supported by various donor agencies. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two research sites in Kratie Province, this article sheds light on the mechanisms and discourses surrounding the allocation of ELCs and SLCs. Our findings suggest that large-scale and non-transparent land leases in the form of ELCs are discursively justified as land policy measures supporting national development, creating employment opportunities in rural areas, and restoring “degraded” and “non-use” land, while SLCs are presented by the government and its international donors as a complementary policy to reduce landlessness, alleviate rural poverty, and ensure a more equitable land distribution. We argue that the SLC pilot project is a deliberate strategy deployed by the Cambodian ruling elite to instrumentalize international aid agencies in formalizing displacement and distributional injustices, in smoothing the adverse social impacts of their very own land policies and in minimizing resistance by dispossessed rural people
Arable land · Development economics · Distribution (mathematics · Economic growth · Economics · Elite · Geography · Government (linguistics · Indigenous · Land grabbing · Land tenure · Political science · Politics · Rural area · Rurality · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Cambodian History and Society · Land Rights and Reforms · Ecology
Archetypical pathways of direct and indirect land-use change caused by Cambodia's economic land concessions
Actor network analysis to leverage improvements in conservation and development outcomes in Cambodia
Accelerated deforestation driven by large-scale land acquisitions in Cambodia
Guiding principles for evaluating the impacts of conservation interventions on human well-being
Cambodia's Unofficial Regime of Extraction
Home and Away
Is Greater Fishery Access Better for the Poor? Explaining De-Territorialisation of the Tonle Sap, Cambodia
Going Nowhere Fast
Indigenous collective land titling and the creation of leftovers
Mekong Scales
De-exoticizing Cambodia’s archaeology through community engagement
Concealed Contradictions
Social and Economic Impacts of Land Concessions on Rural Communities of Cambodia
Pathways to human well-being in the context of land acquisitions in Lao PDR
Sustainable livelihoods in the global land rush? Archetypes of livelihood vulnerability and sustainability potentials
Researching unfamiliar terrains
Rupturing violent land imaginaries
Rural place-making, globalization and the extractive sector
The formalization fix? Land titling, land concessions and the politics of spatial transparency in Cambodia
Gendered eviction, protest and recovery
Pockets of liberal media in authoritarian regimes
Transformative learning through an NGO’s rights-based approach in Cambodia
Linking climate change strategies and land conflicts in Cambodia
Proletarianization and gateways to precarization in the context of land-based investments for agricultural commercialization in Lao PDR
Marginal land and the global land rush
Tactics of land capture through claims of poverty reduction in Cambodia
Direct and indirect land-use change caused by large-scale land acquisitions in Cambodia
From Confrontation to Mediation
Struggles for Life
Introduction
It’s All about the Coalition
After the land rush
Future governance options for large-scale land acquisition in Cambodia
I ndigenous P eoples’ and land
The Resilience Agenda in Neoliberalising Cambodia
Land and ‘space’ for regulating artisanal mining in Cambodia
Global land grab
Linking actors and scales by green grabbing in Bozbük and Kazıklı
Rush for cash crops and forest protection
Forest plantations and climate change discourses
A country scale analysis revealed effective forest policy affecting forest cover changes in Cambodia
Reorienting paradoxical land use policies towards coherence
Exploring trade-offs between development and conservation outcomes in Northern Cambodia
The economic corridors paradigm as extractivism
Inside and outside the maps
Indigenous peoples’ responses to land exclusions
Contesting land grabs, negotiating statehood
From Land Reform to Landfare
Precarious livelihoods at the intersection of fishing and sand mining in Cambodia
Climate change migration in the post‐conflict state
Indigeneity, precarity, and peace
Peacebuilding and white-collar crime in post-war natural resource sectors
Large-scale land acquisitions and violence in post-war societies
A legal geography of property, tenure, exclusion, and rights in Cambodia
Plantation assemblages and spaces of contested development in Sierra Leone and Cambodia
Development-induced displacement in Asia
Contingent Sovereignty
Organizing against Land Grabbing in Cambodia
From Force to Legitimation
After the Grab? Land Control and Regime Survival in Cambodia since 2012
Indigenous communal land titling, the microfinance industry, and agrarian change in Ratanakiri Province, Northeastern Cambodia
Guardians of the forest or evil spirits
Who grabs the land? Unveiling the role of domestic actors in the global land rush
Du (non) désir d'enfant
Problems for the plantations
The Politics of Land Grabbing
What happened when the land grab came to Southeast Asia
Corruption and state politics in Sierra Leone
World Development Indicators 2010
Rich Forests, Poor PeopleResource Control and Resistance in Java
Rising Global Interest in Farmland
Seeing Like a State
Donor-driven land reform in Cambodia – Property rights, planning, and land value taxation
The Sage Handbook of Political Geography
The discursive tactics of neoliberal development in small Third World countries
Political Ecologies of War and Forests
A Diamond Anniversary
Spatializing the ecological leviathan
Seeing Like a State
How not to think of land-grabbing
| Unique citing works | 67 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,18 |
| Citation span | 1969 - 2025 (57) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 65 |