What about the ‘unprotected’ areas? Building on traditional forms of ownership and land use for dealing with new contexts

Conservation discourse typically divides territory into protected and ‘unprotected’ areas. This is unsatisfactory in Cambodia as protected areas or national parks can hardly be considered ‘protected’ with large areas allocated for plantation agriculture and mining, opening the door for widespread illegal logging in the process. Forested areas outside these parks are also undergoing widespread transformation driven by the substantial potential revenues from logging, plantations and land grabbing (see Chapters 2 and 5, this volume). This raises the question of what exactly is the meaning of biodiversity conservation and a protected area system in the Cambodian context, and also what other ways might there be to maintain biodiversity and support sustainable development in the country’s forested areas.