BOOK CHAPTER: Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia

Publication date: September 2022

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

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

Authors: Jean-Christophe Diepart and Carl Middleton

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

See more details on the book here.

In Cambodia, the enclosure, commodification and concentration of ownership of agricultural and forest land has accelerated since the 1990s. In the process, smallholder farmers have been pushed into the margins of Cambodia’s national development. Commodification of land in Cambodia is proceeding through three distinct processes. The first process couples the titling of land with the creation of land and credit markets and is most closely associated with the formalization of smallholder land in the country’s lowland agricultural plains. A second process of land commodification relates to Cambodia’s deepening integration into regional agricultural commodity trade, particularly with China, Thailand and Vietnam. The third process is state-sanctioned large-scale economic land concessions (ELCs) that enclose and license large parcels of land and then channel national and transnational investments into such concessions. In this chapter we argue that these three processes of land commodification and capitalization are central characteristics of Cambodia’s particular form of agrarian capitalism and state formation. We show that these processes are neither coherent institutionally nor well-articulated spatially, but none the less are central to Cambodia’s state formation. They sometimes come into conflict with one another and are heavily contested, as seen for example in recent efforts by the State to address tensions between agribusiness companies and smallholder farmers.

Please contact Dr. Carl Middleton for more information.

Citation: Diepart, J-C. and Middleton, C. (2022) “Land Commodification, State Formation, and Agrarian Capitalism: The Political Economy of Land Governance in Cambodia” 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.

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.