ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways in which gendered systems of power operate in relation to rights to land and natural resources in rural Cambodia. The commercialization of land and agriculture have accelerated throughout the country since the mid-1990s, giving rise to environmental degradation, dispossession, and indebtedness while exacerbating inequalities within agrarian communities. Although government documents frequently highlight the success of the joint land titling system enshrined in the 2001 Land Law, in practice, the vast majority of women in the country have not benefitted from more equitable access to land as a result of neo-liberal cadastral reforms. Our discussion uses a feminist legal geography framing to map the lived experiences of dispossession and discrimination alongside gendered forms of resistance and contestation, which take place against a normative backdrop that privileges private land titling, agricultural commercialization, and microfinance as solutions to structural inequalities in rural areas.
