Creating Law from the Ground Up: Land Law in Post-Conflict Cambodia

Being anchored in the broader policy debate on the effectiveness of international human rights standards on the ground, this chapter inquires whether human rights carry any relevance in the Cambodian landscape of contestation of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and long-term leases. The chapter first establishes that substantive and procedural obligations relevant to LSLAs result from Cambodia’s ratification of human rights treaties. It then examines whether and to what extent this normative framework informs the acts and actions of the government in relation to land transactions, and the strategies employed by affected communities. The study relies on legal analysis to unearth tensions between processes set in motion by land laws and shortcomings in their implementation in terms of transparency and participation, accountability and redress, and identification of vulnerable groups. It also draws on desk and field research in a rural and an urban area of Cambodia to examine the mobilisation strategies employed by the two communities affected by LSLA-related forced evictions; the focus is on processes of appropriation and adaptation of human rights by affected local communities, known as ‘vernacularization’. The chapter shows that the rural-urban spatiality, a constructed element, is of relevance in explaining the different configurations of social activism occurring in each setting and these configurations’ use of human rights. It finds that, contrary to similarly LSLA-affected rural citizens, urban dwellers made extensive use of human rights language and human rights mechanisms to challenge their forced evictions and also achieved a certain success. Furthermore, the chapter shows that deficient governmental practice, in particular in the area of information and access to justice may play a role in entertaining this divided spatiality, especially by incapacitating the vernacularization of human rights in rural settings.

Justice for the Poor, 2008

Amsterdam University Press, 2019

Small landholding is a defining feature of Cambodian farmers and represents the ways of life of the majority of Cambodians. Despite rapid urbanization, a large majority of Cambodians remain living in rural areas and most of them are smallholders. Socially and historically Cambodian smallholders were 'class in themselves' and their cultural significance has been relevant to recent Cambodian social and political lives. Today Cambodian smallholders play a crucial role in the country's economy but are faced with issues that threaten their ways of life, from national politics and policies to regional economic dynamics and climate change. While smallholding remains economically and politically crucial for Cambodia, the next generation of Cambodian smallholders may find their smallholding future uncertain.

Cambodia has long had a difficult mix of resource wealth and weak land governance, a function of its legacy of enduring postwar conflict and neoliberal development policies of the 1990s. Since 2012, however, its government has undertaken a series of self-described ‘deep reforms’ aimed at overcoming the poverty, land conflict, and unequal rural landholdings created during the 2000s, when over 2 million hectares of economic land concessions were allocated to private companies. This paper, commissioned as part of a Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) ‘learning journey’ on inclusive land governance, inquires whether these reforms constitute durable institutional change, or temporary and calculated forms of social inclusion aimed at managing an increasingly volatile political and economic landscape. We use the example of community forestry in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province to examine (1) rural land scarcity at the village scale, which is caused by a mix of corporate plantation concessions and land markets involving inter-province migrants and other business interests, and (2) regulatory geographies and overlaps among competing state authorities, which are exacerbated by recent reforms. The study concludes with a set of ‘ways forward’ for SDC and other actors interested in inclusive land governance, both in Cambodia and elsewhere, focusing on the enhancement of tenure-protecting institutions, the cultivation of discussion and debate, cross-sectoral land-related programming, and legal areas for additional possible reforms.

In a widely read paper, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and others propose systematic property rights formalization as a key step in addressing the problems of irresponsible agricultural investment. This paper examines the case of Cambodia, one of a number of countries where systematic land titling and large-scale land concessions have proceeded in parallel in recent years. Cambodia’s experience exemplifies the challenges of the ‘formalization fix’ – the proposition that property formalization constitutes a preferable front-line defense against land grabbing – and highlights formalization’s uneven geography as an issue that has yet to generate adequate discussion internationally. Three dimensions of Cambodia’s less-than-successful formalization fix efforts stand out: (1) the spatial separation of systematic land titling and agribusiness concessions that emerged during the 2000s and has only recently begun to be addressed; (2) the deployment of property formalization as a means of land grabbing, especially when applied selectively and unevenly; and (3) the political arena of efforts to legitimize ‘state land’. The paper questions the formalization fix as a policy solution, and argues for both greater spatial transparency in property formalization efforts throughout the global South, and greater attention to the problem of unmapped state land in general.

(2011) 17 Asian Yearbook of International Law 1-46

This article aims to provide an assessment of the human rights impact of economic land concessions (ELCs) and other land concessions in Cambodia (generally referred to as “land concessions” throughout the article unless otherwise specified). It includes not only an analysis pertaining to agro-industry (for example, rubber, sugar, acacia, and cassava plantations), but also to concessions for mining, oil and gas, forestry, and concessions for the purposes of tourism, property development, and large scale development projects, such as hydropower dams. The situation in Cambodia is a particularly interesting one. At the outset, it should be noted that historical circumstances, including policies of the Khmer Rouge regime, have led to the proliferation of land disputes that the government is trying to manage. It should also be noted that Cambodia as a developing country may wish to utilize its land and natural resources in order for the country to develop and become more prosperous

This article discusses the ongoing hybrid war crimes tribunal taking place in Cambodia — in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) — in relation to the simultaneous eviction of the Boeung Kak Lake community in the capital, Phnom Penh. Presenting these two phenomena alongside one another highlights the contradiction inherent in the liberal peace model’s humanitarian rhetoric of societal reconstruction and its economic imperatives, which serve the interests of the elites. The material discussed here suggests that so-called transitional justice interventions may accompany a period of stabilisation, which is good for the global market, but do little to enhance fairness and peace for ordinary people.

Technical Committee on “Land Tenure and Development”, AFD-MEAE , 2018

A first version of this working paper was published in 2015 by GRAESE (Research Group on East and Southeast Asia). The objective of this second edition is to update the picture we drew in 2015 with the latest figures and information available to us. The general intention remains the same. We conceive this document as a resource for students and researchers aiming to understand Cambodian land issues and their historical background.

2019

In 2011, the conflicts over economic land concession (ELC) were hardened and became more violent than before. Hence, Order 01 on “measures for strengthening and increasing effective management of economic land concession” was decreed on 07 May, 2012. The aims of this study were 1) to evaluate the strength and the weakness of the land registration procedure under Order 01, and 2) to assess the challenges and opportunities for improving land registration. A qualitative approach, incorporating observations and semi-structural interviews with 96 local families based on questionnaires survey and 23 key informants, were applied in this study. Secondary data were collected from Cambodia’s ministry of land and land administration sub-sector program (LASSP). The results of this study showed that land conflicts were reduced and solved, measures for preventing land conflicts were taken, illegal land occupations were regularized and 361,734 titles were provided to the people. The process was fa...

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2017

This paper focuses on one community in Cambodia that won back land from a large land deal by grabbing onto the rupture in property relations initiated by a one-year land titling campaign. I document the struggle between competing legibility and illegibility projects which I examine through two moments, one of the state choosing to see its population and their relations to territory, and another in which the state’s excuses for not recognizing smallholders’ claims began to falter. By centring the role of excuses, I show how state authority and property relations ruptured around the campaign and how traces of the campaign enabled citizens to claim the right to have rights.

Third World Quarterly, 2020

In Cambodia, rural citizens embroiled in protracted land grabbing cases with the state and private companies are turning increasingly to international accountability mechanisms for resolutions. This article applies the interlinked concepts of hybrid governance and legal pluralism to understand the prospects and limitations of “forum shopping” through appeals to international mechanisms for rural communities affected by land grabs. Drawing on interviews and using process tracing, it examines the outcomes of a mediation case filed with the International Finance Corporation’s Compliance Advisor/ Ombudsman (CAO) involving indigenous groups and a Vietnamese rubber company in northeast Cambodia. It argues that while international accountability mechanisms yield platforms for dispossessed groups to assert claims, they also reify choices between entitlements and attainability without circumventing the problems associated with justice-delivery under Cambodia’s authoritarian regime. Overall, this study highlights the interaction, competition and collaboration between distinct forms of regulatory authority exercised by national and transnational actors involved in land grabbing cases in Cambodia, demonstrating their role in “negotiating statehood” by governing local claims to land.

Challenges that land administration faced during the conflict and in the post-conflict period deserve deeper exploration, specifically the role that land administration had in the overall process of post-conflict state building in the case of Cambodia.