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.

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.

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.

Our efforts to research the land grab in Cambodia were thwarted on multiple fronts. This article emerges from our collective experiences of fear and intimidation to reconsider land grabs as a project that produces fear and is reliant on fear. Recent literature on resource conflict focuses on acts of physical violence, but for people who live near spaces of land grabs, the everyday is marked by a different kind of violence, an incoherence and pervasive fear that threatens people's sense of self and the entire social fabric of their worlds.

INTRODUCTION: Myanmar stands at a historic crossroads: one where the optimism of a "critical juncture" that is "more promising than at any time in recent memory" meets apprehension over what could happen if a "host of social crises that have long blighted our country" go unaddressed. After more than sixty years of civil war and ‘social crises’, land grabbing figures are high. New legislation is designed to move land out of the hands of rural working people and into the hands of ‘modern farmers’ and foreign and domestic big business actors.

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.

After 50 years of military rule, in 2011 the Thein Sein government’s reforms in Myanmar (Burma) entailed a reengagement with the international community, including major international financial organizations, donors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society organizations (CSOs). The government’s social and economic development policies, which were strongly influenced by this engagement, encouraged private domestic and foreign investment in agriculture to create wealth and reduce poverty.

Labor migration and large-scale land enclosures are increasingly central to the story of agrarian change throughout the Global South. Nonetheless, there remain limited understandings of how recent explosions of mobile labor and new sources of smallholder capital shape and are shaped by ongoing land use and property transformations. This article reviews this gap in Southeast Asia – a region where labor and capital are highly mobile and where the expansion of industrial agriculture and forestry has been particularly rapid.

This paper deepens the economic analysis of the effects of land consolidation – reduction of land fragmentation. It does this in the context of rural Vietnam, studying whether land consolidation promotes or hinders the Vietnamese government's policy objectives of encouraging agricultural mechanization and stimulating the off-farm rural economy. The analysis views land consolidation as a form of technical change, making it possible to apply the rich insights developed in the economic literature on that subject.

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.

ABSTRACTED FROM WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This briefing looks at the particular situation of people displaced by armed conflict. It will do so from the perspective that displacement is complicated in its own right, but any proposed solutions to displacement must also be understood in a wider context of rapid land polarization. Failure to take this perspective risks more harm than good. For people affected by displacement, land is much more than just an economic asset.