Common-pool resource management is a critical element in the interlocked challenges of food security, nutrition, poverty reduction, and environmental sustainability. This paper examines strategic policy choices and governance challenges facing Cambodia’s forests and fisheries, the most economically important subsectors of agriculture that rely on common-pool resources. It then outlines policy priorities for institutional development to achieve improvements in implementing these goals.

This report from EIA highlights an illegal trade in banned timber from Laos into Vietnam, where it supplies a booming furniture industry. The report suggests that this is the result of weak law enforcement and poor governance in Laos. A number of recommendations are made to address this situation, including improved cooperation between the two countries. The findings are based on undercover operations conducted in 2010 and 2011.

It has proved much easier to observe the stark divide between the ‘professional optimists’ in the development industry and the ‘professional pessimists’ in academic development studies than it has to disrupt these roles or to explain them in ways that prevent them remaining entrenched. This paper will present and discuss the “Geographies of Evasion” hypothesis which claims to explain how and why rights-based development interventions in particular fail.

Over the past decade the Asia-Pacific region has experienced tremendous changes in nearly every aspect. These changes have been particularly profound in the forestry sector, where society has dramatically increased its demands and expanded its expectations for goods and services. Almost all countries in the region have moved towards sustainable forest management at the policy level and in many countries institutional structures are also gradually changing.

Environment and poverty nexus is still a polemical issue. Some schools of thought claim that it is poverty that has the major effect on the environment, while another perspective suggests that the environment has more impact on the poor than vice-versa because the poor have no power to exploit the environment. In the context of Cambodia, there is a general consensus that the poor, particularly those living in rural areas, are heavily dependent on the environment i.e. common property resources.

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF OVERVIEW: This paper is part of a study “Policy Analysis for the Development of Land Policy for Socio- Economic Development.” Land policy relates to the institutional arrangements through which the Government of Vietnam defines which individuals and groups have access to rights in land and the circumstances that apply to gaining and retaining that access.

This document presents selected analyses of key issues in CFM in Vietnam. It brings together contributions by leading analysts and thinkers and is organized in three main parts: Part 1 discusses issues related to the transfer of forest rights to local people through FLA. It starts with an overview of FLA policy and its outcomes by Nguyen Quang Tan and Thomas Sikor. A case study by Nguyen Dinh Tien, Tran Duc Vien and Nguyen Thanh Lam alerts readers to the fact that too much emphasis on conservation objectives may endanger the food security of the local people.

Cooperatives, associations, partnerships, non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are core elements of the Social Economy. Social Economy as an economic and societal development approach could support the sustainable rural and environmental management in South East Asian countries. Examples for Social Economy enterprises are microlending institutions, fishing and rice cooperatives in Vietnam and Thailand, pepper and pottery associations in Cambodia or rural and small scale industry commodities and service associations.

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration.

The purpose of this assessment is to assist identification of key drivers of deforestation and/or forest degradation in Cambodia and review past efforts to reduce deforestation and forest degradation, in order to identify promising approaches for the national REDD Strategy. The report focuses on drivers of deforestation and degradation and additional components covered under REDD+, i.e. conservation, sustainable forest management and enhancement of carbon stocks, other than in the extent to which these aspects contribute to reducing deforestation and forest degradation.

The impacts of climate change on agriculture and food production in Southeast Asia will be largely mediated through water, but climate is only one driver of change. Water resources in the region will be shaped by a complex mixture of social, economic and environmental factors.

The Outlook is a diagnostic tool that provides a comprehensive overview of local development trends in Cambodia. It also discusses policy and governance reforms aimed at reducing disparities and exploiting the enormous potential of Cambodian territories. The report will be of interest to policy makers, Development Partners, researchers, NGOs and others interested in the dynamics of Cambodia’s economic and policy development.