Land and Water Disputes on the Floodplain of the Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia

Abstract

The article can be described as a case study of social mobilization around land and water issues in rural Cambodia at a time of political-economic change. The mobilization very much relates to a specific ecological setting —the delicate ecological balance of the floodplain of the large Tonle Sap Lake in Cambodia— which the article describes in detail: a fragile progression from flooded forest to grasslands to lands near the national road traditionally used for rice agriculture, an ecology which changes in the course of the year with the annual flooding of the banks of the Tonle Sap. While there are purely ecological
issues which come into play, these are further complicated by changes in land policy and the increasing penetration of the floodplain entailed by rural development. The article specifically looks at the social and political implications of the development of a new kind of irrigation reservoir in the first decade of the millennium, which was initially supported by provincial officials. These reservoirs greatly increase the possibilities for large scale rice agriculture in the dry season. A variety of social arrangements have arisen in support of or in resistance to the new reservoirs, which are primarily owned by entrepreneurs with state land concessions, and significant disputes have emerged in several locations. While these disputes have to do primarily with the access of local populations to land, they also have to do with government policy toward the protection of the area of flooded forest surrounding the lake and protection, in a more general way, of the ecology of the floodplain. The article focuses on one communally owned reservoir, an exception to the general pattern to the degree to which it is not controlled by an individual entrepreneur. While seemingly a more positive arrangement, with benefits to villagers, the communally-owned reservoir has generated its own set of problems, both in the degree to which some segments of the rural population
feel excluded from it and in the degree to which it has also threatened protected areas. The article explores the political and social implications of the reservoir at a time of political dispute and changing policies toward the environment. It describes specific clashes between villagers, government officials and entrepreneurs during the period when research was conducted.
The article considers how the situation relates to Elinor Ostrom’s models of Common Pool Resources but tends to reject any hard-and-fast theoretical model for events which relate, as well, to capitalist penetration, increasing state intervention (and, connected to this, processes of “territorialization”, and grass-roots resistance. The paper also considers larger anthropological questions of how, in Cambodian culture, groups have tended to mobilize, rural society has been organized around the use of land and water, and how these patterns have shifted in the aftermath of the disastrous Pol Pot period and the different political and economic regimes which have been put in place since then.