ABSTRACT

This chapter is about community mobilization and conflict around the issue of irrigation reservoirs in the Tonle Sap Lake floodplain in one subdistrict of Kampong Thom province, Cambodia.1 As the chapters in this volume

amply illustrate, many of the ‘land dilemmas of Southeast Asia’ written about by Hall et al. in their book The Powers of Exclusion (2011) are evident in contemporary Cambodia – the ins and outs of land titling programs, the practical realities of defining protected areas and market penetration by local and non-local actors. While we might quibble on some points and re-combine some of their categories, the area of the Tonle Sap floodplain we are concerned with here is the site of some of these same dilemmas. Such developments on the floodplain – the seemingly unstoppable march towards more intrusive ways of defining control and ‘exclusion’ from natural resources, is a major historical drama. For the purpose of this chapter, we focus on a fairly peripheral phenomenon as it occurs in relation to these other processes, which is nevertheless of interest as representing grassroots agency: the creation of what was called a ‘people’s’ reservoir. This also links to Hall et al.’s discussion of ‘collective mobilizations for land and territory’ (Hall et al., Chapter 7).