Ethnic minorities in the mountainous forest regions of northern Thailand and northern Vietnam live in a particularly restrictive political, social and economic environment. Widespread degradation of land, water and forest resources has adverse effects on the livelihoods of these groups. Given the dramatically increasing scarcity of natural resources, regulation of resource access and allocation are becoming fundamental for the development of sustainable resource management, in which an active participation of the local population in planning and implementation is a crucial prerequisite.

While there is an important body of research on environmental discourses and policy in Southeast Asia, the situation in the Lao PDR remains understudied. This paper builds on debates related to environmental change and knowledge production and examines the socio-political construction of the current mainstream discourse on land degradation in Laos.

The government of Laos has identified the eradication of poverty as a priority. Given the primarily agricultural character of the country, it has selected land reform as a core policy to reach this goal. The policy has two major aims: to increase land tenure security in order to encourage farmer involvement in intensive farming, and to eliminate slash-and-burn agriculture to protect the environment in a country still rich in forest resources.

Transforming conflict is a key component of sustainable forest management. Transformative conflict mediation is an approach to transforming conflict that aims not only to resolve the conflict but also to foster long-term relationships and cooperation. This study explores how application of mediation contributed to conflict transformation.

In the early 1990s, the Lao government launched a nationwide Land Use Planning and Land Allocation programme in a bid to foster socio-economic development while protecting the environment. However, the programme has long been perceived as having negative impacts on rural livelihoods. A central criticism was that limited local participation results in unsustainable land use plans; consequently, the government introduced significant changes into the process to enhance participation.

Sudden and gradual land use changes can result in different socio-ecological systems, sometimes referred to as regime shifts. The Lao PDR (Laos) has been reported to show early signs of such regime shifts in land systems with potentially major socio-ecological implications. However, given the complex mosaic of different land systems, including shifting cultivation, such changes are not easily assessed using traditional land cover data. Moreover, regime shifts in land systems are difficult to simulate with traditional land cover modelling approaches.

Scholars point to climate change, often in the form of more frequent and severe drought, as a potential driver of migration in the developing world, particularly for places where populations rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. To date, however, there have been few large-scale, longitudinal studies that explore the relationship between climate change and migration. This study significantly extends current scholarship by evaluating distinctive effects of climatic variation and models these effects on men’s and women’s responsiveness to drought and rainfall.

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.

Political transitions often trigger substantial environmental changes. In particular, deforestation can result from the complex interplay among the components of a system—actors, institutions, and existing policies—adapting to new opportunities. A dynamic conceptual map of system components is particularly useful for systems in which multiple actors, each with different worldviews and motivations, may be simultaneously trying to alter different facets of the system, unaware of the impacts on other components.

ABTRACTED FROM FIRST PARAGRAPH: Cambodia’s forests are vital components of the highly threatened Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot. They contain species found nowhere else on earth, support important populations of some of the planet’s most threatened large mammals and birds and provide resources vital to the livelihoods of millions of rural Cambodians. Prior to changes within the Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) in early 2016, the Ministry of Environment (MoE) and Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) were both responsible for forest management.

The Asia-Pacific region is a hotspot for forest landscape conflicts which are played out between local communities and outsiders such as government agencies and private companies. Increased competition for limited natural resources, rapid sociopolitical change, and expanding markets for forest products and land have heightened tensions and intensified conflicts over resource-use priorities. There are numerous methods for addressing conflict, including negotiation, arbitration, adjudication and mediation.

This essay explores the changing landscape of food sovereignty politics in the shadow of the so-called ‘land grab’. While the food sovereignty movement emerged within a global agrarian crisis conjuncture triggered by northern dumping of foodstuffs, institutionalized in WTO trade rules, the twenty-first-century food, energy and financial crises intensify this crisis for the world’s rural poor (inflating prices of staple foods and agri-inputs) deepening the process of dispossession.