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.

WEBSITE INTRODUCTION: This report presents a synthesis of the main findings from case studies carried out in six countries in Africa (Ghana, Sierra Leone, United Republic of Tanzania and Zambia) and Asia (Laos and Philippines). The findings were disseminated and discussed in multistakeholder initiatives at regional and country level. The report illustrates how poor rural women and men are affected differently by agricultural investments, and demonstrates that they may not benefit equally from emerging opportunities.

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.

WEB INTRODUCTION: The literature on agricultural large-scale land acquisition in Myanmar is rather fragmented and consists mainly of case studies. While these provide key insights into particular stories, they often fail to identify the main patterns and trends at country level. To fill such gaps, this thematic study aims to present an updated synthesis of the genealogy, institutional complexity and the ins and outs of large-scale land acquisition processes for agricultural development in Myanmar.

Economic globalization promotes the economic development of underdeveloped regions but also influences the ecological environments of these regions, such as natural forest degradation. For inland developing regions with underdeveloped traffic routes, are the effects on the ecological environment also as obvious?

This is a case about innovative approach of Boonrueng wetland forest conservation against land conversion for Special Economic Zone. Boonrueng wetland forest is the largest seasonal flooded forest in the Ing watershed located in the North of Thailand. It provides the high ecological functions and qualities of the tributary in the downstream Ing River, out-flowing into the Mekong River. The conversion of land for the economic regionalization in Chiang Khong district is geared up in 2015 and Boonrueng wetland forest was identified as an area for Special Economic Zone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Farm incomes in rural Vietnam are tightly constrained by very small farm sizes. Stringent limits on the area of cropland that individuals may own means that farmers need a well‐functioning rental market to consolidate land parcels, grow their farm enterprises, adopt new technology and increase incomes. This research investigates the efficiency and equity impacts of the rental market in rural Vietnam and attempts to identify transaction costs impeding the market.