Concessions granted to investors in Cambodia have generated a deep sense of insecurity in rural forested areas. Villagers are not confined to a passive “everyday resistance of the poor,” as mentioned by James Scott, insofar as they frequently engage in frontal strategies for recovering land. Such has been the case in the northeastern provinces, where indigenous livelihoods are recurrently threatened by foreign and national companies. But what happens when a land conflict ends up in a stakeholder dialogue?

Since the early 2000s the Lao government has dramatically increased the number of large-scale land concessions issued for agribusinesses. While studies have documented the social and environmental impacts of land dispossession, the role of Vietnamese labour on these Vietnamese-owned rubber plantations has not previously been investigated. Taking a political ecology approach, we situate this study at the intersection between ‘land grabbing’ studies and work on ‘labour geographies’.

ABSTRACTED FROM WEBSITE: What is happening with the land and natural wealth around the world, and to the people who depend on them? How are people responding to these trends, threats, and challenges?

As Chinese investment in foreign land and agriculture expands dramatically worldwide, a growing body of research has emerged on the prevalence of land deals in Latin America and Africa. Southeast Asia, however, has only recently begun to receive significant attention in these discussions. A deeper exploration of the Southeast Asian context offers crucial insights into understanding the puzzle of global land deals (why, where, how they occur) more broadly.

Agricultural large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) is a process that is currently not captured by land change models. We present a novel land change modeling approach that includes processes governing LSLAs and simulates their interactions with other land systems. LSLAs differ from other land change processes in two ways: (1) their changes affect hundreds to thousands of contiguous hectares at a time, far surpassing other land change processes, e.g., smallholder agriculture, and (2) as policy makers value LSLA as desirable or undesirable, their agency significantly affects LSLA occurrence.

Political and economic transitions have had substantial impacts on forest conservation. Where transitions are underway or anticipated, historical precedent and methods for systematically assessing future trends should be used to anticipate likely threats to forest conservation and design appropriate and prescient policy measures to counteract them. Myanmar is transitioning from an authoritarian, centralized state with a highly regulated economy to a more decentralized and economically liberal democracy and is working to end a long-running civil war.

Farm incomes in rural Vietnam are tightly constrained by very small farm sizes. Stringent limits on the area of cropland that individuals may own means that farmers need a well‐functioning rental market to consolidate land parcels, grow their farm enterprises, adopt new technology and increase incomes. This research investigates the efficiency and equity impacts of the rental market in rural Vietnam and attempts to identify transaction costs impeding the market.

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.

The recent political and economic liberalization in Burma/Myanmar, while indicative of some positive steps toward democratization after decades of authoritarian rule, has simultaneously increased foreign and domestic investments and geared the economy toward industrialization and large-scale agriculture.

This paper aims to contribute to understanding the existing knowledge gaps in the linkages of energy, water, and land use in Southeast Asia and explores the political economy of energy transition in the Mekong region (MR). Investigating the struggle over hydropower development and decision-making on water and land across the region, this study shows that countries that are the winners or losers in the hydropower development schemes are not the only ones managing the Mekong; rather, it is part of the region-wide strategy of nations to sustain the MR.

ABSTRACTED FROM INTRODUCTION: This report explores the relationships between land tenure security and food security in Laos, with comparison to other developing countries. The purpose of the study is to better understand these linkages in order to recommend pathways for policies and projects to improve food insecurity by increasing rural poor people's access and tenure security to land.

Political transitions often trigger substantial environmental changes. In particular, deforestation can result from the complex interplay among the components of a system—actors, institutions, and existing policies—adapting to new opportunities. A dynamic conceptual map of system components is particularly useful for systems in which multiple actors, each with different worldviews and motivations, may be simultaneously trying to alter different facets of the system, unaware of the impacts on other components.