BOOK CHAPTER: Grounding Land Justice: Contested Principles, Processes, and Outcomes

Publication: Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region

Chapter title: Grounding Land Justice: Contested Principles, Processes, and Outcomes

Authors: Carl Middleton and Vanessa Lamb

Editors: Philip Hirsch, Kevin Woods, Natalia Scurrah and Michael B. Dwyer

See more details on the book here.

The relationship between land and society brings much to light about the broader nature of a country’s economy, institutions, and politics, as well as its principles and practices of justice. In the Mekong region, processes of commodification, capitalization, and financialization have fundamentally shaped land tenure and governance from the colonial era to the present day. Presenting historical and contemporary case studies from the region, this chapter examines how processes of distributional, procedural, and recognitional land justice, and the plural and contested principles embedded within them, are key issues at stake in land governance. Intensified land use and deepening power inequalities have led to land exclusions at a range of scales. Most visible has been the extensive dispossession of smallholders as states have designated concessions or state forests on areas that were previously under customary management and use. While not overstating the level of success of land justice movements across the region, the chapter also highlights cases where social movements and civil-society groups have challenged, redressed, or at least mitigated unjust dispossession, and in doing so sought to redress injustices.

Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.

Citation: Middleton, C. and  Lamb, V. (2022) “Turning Land Justice into Reality: Challenge and Opportunities” in Dwyer, M., Hirsch, P., Scurrah, N., and Woods, K. (eds.) Turning Land into Capital: Development and Dispossession in the Mekong Region. University of Washington Press: Seattle.