As a global phenomenon, land grabbing has significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, often resulting in serious conflict between the local community and outsiders. The aim of the study is to get a deeper understanding of the extent to which land grabbing and resulting land-use conflicts affect the move towards sustainable forest management (SFM) in Cambodia. Two case studies were conducted involving community forests (CFs), with data collected through literature review, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and field observations.

Over the past 10 years, transnational land grabs for rubber tree plantations have proliferated across Laos. Plantation concessions are being established on village lands that are represented as ‘degraded’ and legally classified as ‘state forests’, expropriated by government officials in the name of poverty alleviation with promises that plantations will provide new wage labour opportunities for those dispossessed.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige.

Land reform, land politics and resettlement in Laos have changed people’s land access and livelihoods. But these reforms have also transformed political subjectivity and landed property into matters for government to a degree hitherto unknown in Laos. The control over people, land and space has consolidated sovereignty in ways that make government an ineluctable part of people’s relation to land. This transforms agrarian relations. Three cases demonstrate how rural small holders’ access to land depends on the ways in which property and political subjects have been produced.

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier, drawing on examples of nature's commodification and enclosure under way in the peripheral Southeast Asian country of Laos. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of social property relations and systems of legality are rapidly established in response to market imperatives.

Being an Act to amend the Petroleum ( Exploration and
Production) Act, 2011.

We estimate how a shift towards a more extractive resource policy, brought about by a regulatory reform of the mining sector, affected civil conflict in the Philippines. Our empirical strategy uses a difference-in-differences approach that compares provinces with and without mineral deposits before and after the reform. We find that the reform led to a large increase in conflict violence, most likely due to increased competition over control of resource-rich areas.

The Panguna mine on the Pacific island of Bougainville is one of the largest copper and gold deposits in the world. 

The mine was also at the center of a decade-long civil war fought between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Defense Force in the 1990s. The conflict cost as many as 15,000 lives and displaced 40,000 of the island’s 200,000 inhabitants.

[C]onservation is not a priority….. they [Frelimo] want economic growth at any point. So if they find …… coal and gas and other minerals it doesn’t matter where they are found, their priority is to develop those industries and I think they will worry about ecosystems ……. as an afterthought. Right now their main focus is growth, economic growth. (Interview with government official, discussing the governing party’s view of conservation in the context of a resources boom, 14 May 2014).

On February 2, 2017, Philippine Environment Secretary Gina Lopez, who has the full backing of the country’s controversial president Duterte, announced the closure of 23 large-scale mining operations. Two weeks later, on February 14, she announced the cancellation of 75 large-scale mining contracts, as a 

This article draws on actor network theory (ANT) and assemblage to interrogate the potential future manifestation of open conflicts due to unresolved latent local socio-economic and political grievances associated with oil exploitation near fishing communities and the implications of oil-related environmental degradation on local livelihoods in the Western Region of Ghana.

Over the past two decades, “illegal” natural resource extraction has become a significant driver of environmental change and social conflict across the Global South. In response, numerous Sub-Saharan African states have engaged in governance reforms that heed calls to securitize – or, establish and consolidate state control over – natural resources. In Ghana, securitization has served to entrench the informal economy as domestic producers, marginalized in the process of reform, continue to utilize non-state institutions to maintain access.