Gendered eviction, protest and recovery: a feminist political ecology engagement with land grabbing in rural Cambodia

Abstract

We examine what we argue has been overlooked in the Cambodian context: the roles and practices of women in relation to men and their complementary struggles to protest land grabbing and eviction, and subsequently rebuild community and state relations. We present research carried out in Cambodia in 2014–2015 in Kratie, the country’s most concessioned province. Through a feminist political ecology lens, we examine how protest and post-eviction community governance are defined as women’s or men’s work. Our case also reveals how ‘rebuilding’ gender relations in rural Cambodia simultaneously rebuilds uneven community and state relations.

Keywords:

• gender
• land grab
• eviction
• Cambodia
• Southeast Asia
• state-gender relations

Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was done with input and assistance from Vannavy Choeun, Dang Bao Nguyet and Kaneka Keo. Special thanks to Bec Leonard and Nga Dao for their earlier discussions on land and gender in Southeast Asia. We also thank the editors of this collection for their helpful feedback and guidance, as well as fellow ‘Gender and Generation’ panelists at the Chiang Mai 2015 LDPI conference. The paper was much improved from the feedback of participants of the November 2015 ‘Understanding Contemporary Land Acquisitions in Southeast Asia’ workshop in Toronto, not limited to Alice Beban, Peter Vandergeest, Hilary Faxon, Derek Hall and Tim Gorman. Most importantly, thank you to the community in Kratie province for taking the time to help us understand the impact of evictions, and their responses to these transformations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Vanessa Lamb http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1717-6777

Carl Middleton http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5327-3748

Notes

1 An independent estimate from the NGO LICADHO shows that more than 2.1 million hectares has been granted to ELCs in Cambodia (LICADHO 2015b).

2 As evidence of the focus on women as gender, many of these reference women directly in their titles; examples include Cambodia’s Women in Land Conflict (CCHR 2016) and Brickell’s (2014) study ‘“The whole world is watching”: intimate geopolitics of forced eviction and women’s activism in Cambodia’.

3 The Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries numbers do not include concessions granted by the Ministry of Environment (MoE) within their territories (protected areas, wildlife sanctuaries, etc.). MoE began granting concessions in 2011, but this information was not publicly available at the time of research.

4 The 2003 Sub-decree on Social Land Concessions states that in addition to targeting the poor and landless, SLCs may also be granted to families who have been displaced by public infrastructure development or affected by natural disasters; demobilized soldiers and families of soldiers who were disabled or died in the line of duty; facilitating economic development; and facilitating ELC by providing land to workers of large plantations (Article 16).

5 As Neef et al. explain, ‘SLC land provides secure use rights and gives special attention to women and the disadvantaged’ (2013, 1100).

6 See also Ikeya’s (2014) argument that gender scholars in Asia and Southeast Asia focus on ‘women as gender’.

7 In turn, this unintentionally risks mirroring what has been shown in development studies as placing the burden for change on women (Schroeder 1999; Gururani 2002).

8 Implementation of SLCs has received skepticism (Neef, Touch, and Chiengthong 2013; LICADHO 2015c).

9 The closest Khsem came to receiving a formal land title was during the Prime Minister’s Order 01 land-titling campaign that targeted state forests, and areas near ELCs and forest concessions. In December 2012, 186 families applied to the commune authorities requesting that the youth volunteers working to measure land as part of the campaign come to measure their land. The youth volunteers never came.

10 By legibility we refer to two linked processes. The first, clearing land and planting crops, is a visible claim to neighbors, local officials and/or an encroaching company of their right to use the land. This form of claim-making is pre-condition to a second form of legibility achieved by appearing in the central cadastral system through processes like the Order 01 titling campaign (Scott 1998).

11 Notably, the indigenous Stieng families were also displaced during the Khmer Rouge period and had re-settled two to three times before arriving to reside in Khsem.

12 Initially, some Khsem residents did not accept the offer, which provided less than the three to six hectares many of the families were already farming (Sek 2014). Eventually, however, the community did accept the SLC, with specification that the land would be divided equally among claimants and that for families whose land was outside the SLC boundaries, they would obtain a plot inside the SLC by lottery.

13 We heard different versions of the make-up of the eight-member committee, including that the committee comprised between zero and two women. There was one woman listed on a series of meeting minutes with the District Governor that we reviewed from 2014. In follow-up with two of the male members of the committee, they did not remember a female representative.

14 Further complicating matters, some families have their names on the list and their land within the SLC boundaries, while others are eligible to receive land but their land holdings are outside the designated SLC area. We spoke with 17 households who confirmed their names were on the list of families to get land, and 11 households who both were on the list and had land that fell within the borders of the SLC.

15 As of August 2015, after more than one year, the committee’s census for final SLC allocation is incomplete, largely due to a lack of communication from the government authorities (Interviews 37 and 38, June 2015).

Additional information

Funding

In 2014, the research team conducted a research consultancy on ‘Access to productive agricultural land by the landless, land poor and smallholder farmers in four LMB countries’ as part of the Oxfam regional project called Sustaining and Enhancing the Momentum of Innovation and Learning on SRI in LMB countries (SEMIL-SRI-LMB) funded by the EU. Subsequent research was conducted independently.

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Lamb

Vanessa Lamb is a lecturer in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne. She completed her dissertation, Ecologies of rule and resistance, focused on the politics of ecological knowledge and development of the Salween River, at York University’s Department of Geography in 2014. Her professional experience includes policy analysis and research into the social dimensions of environmental change.

Laura Schoenberger

Laura Schoenberger is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at York University, Canada. Her research interests are in political ecology, agrarian transformations, state power, conflict and land. She is currently completing her dissertation on land control and property formation in the context of recent state efforts to redistribute land in Cambodia. Email: [email protected]

Carl Middleton

Carl Middleton is Deputy Director for Research Affairs on the MA in International Development Studies (MAIDS) Program, and Director of the Center for Social Development Studies (CSDS), in the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. His research interests are orientated around the politics and policy of the environment in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on environmental justice and the political ecology of water and energy. Email: [email protected]

Borin Un

Borin Un is an NRM research fellow. His main research focus is on water governance, natural resource management, and livelihood development policies in Cambodia. Since 2011, he has conducted several studies on sustainable fishery and agricultural management plus livelihoods development around Tonle Sap Lake. His current research interest is the resource degradation, emergence of migration, and livelihood transitions in the lake. Email: [email protected]