Location
The Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) was established in 1998 at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University, Thailand in response to the need for integration of social science and natural science knowledge in order to gain a better understanding of sustainable development issues in upper mainland Southeast Asia. RCSD has, since that time, striven to become a truly regional center for sustainable development issues, linking graduate training and research to development policy and practice. It does this by drawing upon the three-decade long research and teaching experience of Chiang Mai University in fields such as resource management, highland agricultural systems, social science and health, environmental impact assessment and ethnic and gender relations.
RCSD was initially supported by a Ford Foundation endowment grant to the amount of US$ 1 million, and this Fund has allowed RCSD to implement and run international graduate programs, non-degree training courses and other support activities whose aim to promote information sharing among scholars in the Mekong Region. Additional support from the Ford Foundation through scholarship funding for Vietnamese and Chinese students - to attend the M.A. program at RCSD and also PhD. scholarships for staff of the Faculty of Social Sciences, has helped significantly enhance human capacity in the Mekong Region, in the fields of social science and development. Recent scholarship support from the Heinrich Bőll Foundation has also enabled RCSD to reach-out to Burmese students who would otherwise have little chance of progressing on to higher education.
Tremendous political, economic and social change in the Mekong Region resulting from recent, regionalized development is a new challenge for RCSD, and will mean having to take another look at the region - both across geo-political boundaries and as an interconnected entity -from diverse and multiple perspectives. Timely and significant support from the Rockefeller Foundation, for the recently implemented 'Program on Knowledge and Educational Enhancement in the Mekong Region' (PKEEMR), has allowed RCSD to pro-actively work and collaborate with partner institutions in the Mekong Region, the aim being to promote understanding, information sharing and mutual learning regarding emerging issues, and to link these issues to a deeper and broader conceptual understanding of the regionalized context within which they are set, as well as understand their impacts at the local level. The PKEEMR includes a comprehensive range of activities, such as collaborative research, visiting scholar and non-degree research fellowships, inter-university collaborative workshops, regional and international conferences and also the writing and issuing of publications.
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Resources
Displaying 1 - 5 of 10Land concessions and rural youth in southern Laos
Scholars have produced valuable insights on the question of recent “land grabbing” in the global South. They have, however, insufficiently studied the issue from below, particularly from the point of view of a crucial group in the land conundrum: the rural youth. This paper brings to the fore the perspectives of Laotian rural youngsters amidst a hasty agrarian transition, in which the borisat (company) –in the form of large monoculture plantations– has permeated both the physical landscape and the daily narratives of people.
Allocation or appropriation? How spatial and temporal fragmentation of land allocation policies facilitates land grabbing in Northern Laos
The Lao Land and Forest Allocation Policy (LFAP) was intended to provide clearer property rights for swidden farmers living in mountainous areas. These lands are legally defined as “State” forests but are under various forms of customary tenure. The policy involves demarcating village territorial boundaries, ecological zoning of lands within village territories, and finally allocating a limited number of individual land parcels to specific households for farming.
Land deals in Laos: First insights from a new nationwide initiative to assess the quality of investments in land
In Laos land concessions have increased dramatically over the last decade. To provide a window into the concessions landscape, we conducted a nationwide inventory between 2007 and 2011. In response to an order by the Lao Government to its ministries, we developed a methodology to update the inventory and complement existing data with a systematic assessment of investment quality in 2014. We investigated aspects of compliance as well as impacts on livelihoods and the environment.
Authoritarian resource governance and emerging peasant resistance in the context of Sino-Vietnamese Tree Plantations, Southeastern Laos
Over the past decade, Laos has experienced a land rush by foreign investors seeking to gain large tracts of land for hydropower, mining, and plantation projects. The rapid pace of the phenomenon has prompted signif icant concern by international observers, Lao civil society, and certain sections of the government, regarding the impacts upon farmers that are dispossessed of their land and communal resources. However, both investors and peasant communities alike have differing experiences with the investment process.
The neoliberal agricultural modernization model: A fundamental cause for large‐scale land acquisition and counter land reform policies in the Mekong region
Large-scale land acquisition are not new in the Mekong region but have been encouraged and have gathered momentum since the end of the 90s, particularly Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. These acquisitions are realized by national and foreign companies from the region, particularly China, Vietnam, and Thailand in a movement strongly associated with economic globalization and neo-liberal policies which promote free flow of capital at the regional and global level and the adaptation of national spaces to the requirement of liberal and global markets (Peemans, 2013).