This report takes a snapshot look at how urbanisation is impacting three of Cambodia's secondary cities – Sihanoukville, Battambang, and Siem Reap – and, in particular, their urban poor settlements. The report is based on desk review and field research. The report provides information on history, urban planning, urban poor settlements and interventions for each city.

This report provides select findings of an extensive survey of relocation sites in and around Phnom Penh, conducted in 2011 and 2012. The aim of the report is to highlight some key issues facing residents at existing relocation sites, and provide recommendations for both improving existing sites and improving future relocation practices, in cases when relocation is considered unavoidable. The report follows a previous 2007 report ‘Relocation sites in Phnom Penh’.

This report is a review of city’s development paradigm, including an examination of urban services and infrastructure, the regulatory framework, mobility networks, major stakeholders, and key issues in the city's development. The authors argue that Phnom Penh stands at a crossroads. Ahead is the continuation of a “planned” development of the city first developed by the French and then adopted by the Sihanouk regime. To either side is the new “unplanned” approach, a path that already seems to be the favored choice.

Through LMAP, and subsequent LASSP, Cambodia has made impressive progress in building a functioning cadastral system over the last ten years. This process has proved complex and challenging, but since commencing, the land registration teams have successfully issued over 1.7 million land titles, a strong legal framework has been developed for the functioning of the land administration bodies and mechanism, institutions have been built and strengthened, and a dispute resolution process has been established for dealing with disputes over unregistered land.

This paper uses four years of panel data on 793 households collected during 2001–11 to measure chronic poverty in rural Cambodia and to identify its key determinants. A household wealth index—a proxy for long-term welfare—constructed by polychoric principal component analysis is used as welfare indicator. Both ordered logistic and multinomial logistic regression models are adopted to identify the causes of chronic and transient poverty by focusing particularly on five explanatory variables: agricultural land and livestock, demography, human capital, social capital and natural resources.

Although Cambodia is one of Asia’s smallest and poorest economies—in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) only Burma’s per capita purchasing power is lower—changes in its environment for business and trade since the turn of the millennium have been rapid and dramatic. Insiders and outsiders alike are increasingly recognizing the country’s economic potential as a range of new investment and infrastructure projects evince growing confidence and opportunity.

Cambodia is highly dependent on agriculture: the agricultural sector is responsible for more than 30 percent of GDP and provides employment for more than 70 percent of people who are employed (ADB 2011). Given such high dependence on agriculture, an important question is, "How will Cambodia be affected by climate change, especially the agricultural sector?" Climate change, by definition, will alter temperature and rainfall patterns.

Land distribution to the poor is discussed in the broader context of the Cambodian land reform which is considered to follow a liberal approach based on the re-introduction of private property rights in land following Cambodia’s socialist period. This approach has produced good results for providing private land titles for existing land use on state private land but has turned out to be quantitatively ineffective in the distribution of state public land for the poor through social land concessions.

Northern Burma’s borderlands have undergone dramatic changes in the last two decades. Three main and interconnected developments are simultaneously taking place in Shan State and Kachin State: (1) the increase in opium cultivation in Burma since 2006 after a decade of steady decline; (2) the increase at about the same time in Chinese agricultural investments in northern Burma under China’s opium substitution programme, especially in rubber; and (3) the related increase in dispossession of local communities’ land and livelihoods in Burma’s northern borderlands.

Despite the tens of millions of dollars in aid and concessional loans being spent in Cambodia with the ostensible aim of securing land tenure and making the management of land and natural resources more equitable and sustainable, the evidence shows that tenure insecurity, forced evictions and large-scale land grabbing are escalating to alarming levels.