This report documents the contemporary ecological, social and economic transformations occurring in one village in Lao PDR’s central Khammouane province under multiple sources of development-induced displacement. Rural development policy in Laos is focused on promoting rapid rural modernisation, to be achieved through foreign direct investments in two key resource sectors: hydropower and plantations. Laos’ land reformprogram is also a key component of the changes underway in the countryside, as swidden (or shifting) upland cultivation is targeted for stabilisation and elimination.

This study uses publicly available financial and spatial data to examine the geography of land-intensive investment in Southeast Asia, and to identify the
limits imposed by problems with data availability. It focuses on three regions where land has been widely seen to be available for new investment: Indonesia’s outer islands; the “development triangle” where Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam meet; and the Golden Quadrangle region which comprises the borderlands of northeastern Myanmar, northwestern Laos, southern and western Yunnan, and northern Thailand.

This paper focuses on one community in Cambodia that won back land from a large land deal by grabbing onto the rupture in property relations initiated by a one-year land titling campaign. I document the struggle between competing legibility and illegibility projects which I examine through two moments, one of the state choosing to see its population and their relations to territory, and another in which the state’s excuses for not recognizing smallholders’ claims began to falter.

This article focuses on two cases where companies have sought to develop more socially benign––and, they believe, more profitable and sustainable––plantation concessions in a context that is still marred by extensive land conflict. The first is the Mong Reththy Investment Cambodia Oil Palm (MRICOP) Company (Preah Sihanouk province); the second is the Grandis Timber Company (Kampong Speu province).

This article focuses on how climate change mitigation policies and economic land and mining concessions in Prey Lang, Cambodia, accommodate and facilitate each other physically, discursively and economically. Maps and project descriptions reveal that climate-related policies and extraction coexist in the same landscape, even the same projects. Knowledge co-produced by the authors and affected individuals suggests that climate change mitigation initiatives are not only intimately linked to economic intensification in Prey Lang, but they also contribute to conflict and dispossession.

A discussion note from Mekong Region Land governance (MRLG) summarizing findings and recommendations of a multi-stakeholder initiative and study tour conducted in Southern Laos, to study the social and environmental practices of two large scale companies holding large scale concessions in Lao PDR, published by MRLG in January 2017.

O investimento é, certamente, um factor com grande influência sobre a produção, por via do aumento de novas capacidades produtivas, da modernização do tecido produtivo, através da inovação, mais eficiente e com maior produtividade.

Novas capacidades produtivas significam mais emprego, mais renda para as famílias e aumento de impostos. Mais exportação e/ou menos importações. Pode implicar mais segurança alimentar, dependendo dos tipos de investimentos realizados (tipos de produtores, culturas e mercados de destino dos bens produzidos).

Mokoro’s practical and action-oriented long-term strategic research project, the Women’s Land Tenure Security Project (WOLTS), is piloting its methodology through a ‘Study on the threats to women’s land tenure security in Mongolia and Tanzania’.

The food security of more than 80% of Tanzania’s population and the country’s economic growth depend on family farming on certifi ed village lands. Realizing importance of smallholder’s roles in food security and economic development, the government introduced Village Land Use Planning (VLUP) as a tool towards sustainable family farming in support of green growth – a strategy for sustainably improving productivity within degrading natural resources.

Pastoralism has been under pressure due to a number of factors including climate change, population pressure and socioeconomic dynamism. These factors have affected the relationships among different pastoral groups and the functioning of the customary institutions in managing natural resources. Interference of the state structures into pastoral areas, land alienation for large scale investment and delineation of protected area from communal grazing areas have negatively affected the relationships between pastoralists and the state.

‘This study is in-depth, up-to-date and the first of its kind on a massive infrastructure development project in the region, examining its history, politics, evolution, the emergence of actors and interests and effects on the poor and marginalized. It presents the ambitions and ambiguities of a megaproject never seen in the development history of the region. The report is a comprehensive analysis of the hopes and fears emanating from a megaproject in the region and provides invaluable data on which future studies will certainly have to rely.’

Southern Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley is one of the most culturally and biologically diverse areas in the world, yet the Ethiopian government is transforming more than 375,000 hectares (1450 sq. miles) of the region into industrial-scale plantations for sugar and other monocrops.