Michael Dwyer
Michael Dwyer has studied the history, practice and politics of land formalization, agribusiness investment, and natural resource development in Southeast Asia since 2004. He received his PhD from U.C. Berkeley's Energy and Resources group in 2011, where his dissertation examined the effects of Cold War conflict and postwar reconstruction on the geography of rubber investment in northwestern Laos. Email:mdwyer@berkeley.edu |
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Research on Land-grabbing:
The formalization fix? Land titling, agribusiness concessions and geographical transparency in contemporary Cambodia
In a widely read discussion paper, the FAO, IFAD, UNCTAD and the World Bank propose the respect for existing property rights as the first of seven principles of “Responsible Agricultural Investment.” Noting that property rights are complex and often informal, the authors call for centralized property formalization – “the identification of rights holders, [the] legal recognition of rights and uses, [and] their demarcation and registration” – on a massive scale. Yet land administration programs have been a staple of Western lending and donor aid for decades; at least 13 countries in the “global land grab” have had them since 1990. This paper investigates one such country, Cambodia, where the geographies of land titling and agribusiness investment are relatively transparent, thanks to civil society pressure. The paper shows (i) how and why titling tends to avoid the hinterland regions targeted by “state” land concessions; (ii) an example of how conflicts over “state” land are playing out in areas outside the titling zone; and (iii) how the politics of transparency and opacity figure centrally in not only land grab debates, but in land administration as well.
