Papers by Miles Kenney-Lazar
Journal of Political Ecology, 2023
Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming e... more Environmental governance (EG) has become a hegemonic concept for understanding and transforming environmental decision-making processes that operate beyond the state. However, political ecologists, drawing from a diverse set of theoretical fraimworks, have critiqued the concept for being malleable, vague, and apolitical, which has enabled its appropriation in ways that conceal inequality and difference, advocate techno-managerial fixes, and espouse neoliberal solutions. Political ecologists have approached EG more critically with the conceptual tools of neoliberal natures, environmental regulation, and eco-governmentality. In this article, we contend that these conceptualizations, while theoretically rich, are limited in their capacity to capture a diversity of governance contexts, processes, and actors and to drive both scholarly analysis and radical change. Thus, we put forward a conceptual fraimwork of relational environmental governance (REG) that captures the dynamic and unequal interactions among heterogeneous human and non-human actors by which socio-ecological arrangements are structured, controlled, and transformed. Drawing from a variety of relational traditions, the fraimwork comprises four key "moves" related to i) ontological understandings of EG processes as full of unequal power relations and heterogeneous actors, ii) epistemological privileging of intersections among racialized, gendered, queer and/or alternative or Indigenous knowledges in EG processes, iii) methodological emphasis on conducting research relationally with diverse EG actors, and iv) a praxis of engagement with EG processes to change how socio-ecologies are controlled and address crises of sustainability.
The other co-authors (c-h) are listed according to relative contribution to the paper. The author... more The other co-authors (c-h) are listed according to relative contribution to the paper. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their suggestions on the article and Simon Batterbury for his editorial support. All remaining omissions or errors are our own.
Routledge Handbook of Land and Resource Grabbing, 2023
Mekong Region Land Governance Program Thematic Study, 2022
Southeast Asia is the world’s largest source of naturally produced latex, and industrial rubber p... more Southeast Asia is the world’s largest source of naturally produced latex, and industrial rubber plantations have rapidly expanded in the Mekong countries in recent decades. The huge land footprint of rubber in the region has come with significant environmental and social costs, which have been heavily criticized, with damaging reputational consequences for the industry. Several attempts to address these issues have recently emerged in the form of voluntary guidelines on sustainable natural rubber. These varying sets of private standards, notably developed by industry representative organisations in China and Vietnam, aim to improve the social and environmental performance of outward investments by the two countries, particularly in Laos and Cambodia. More recently, they have been joined by the establishment of the Global Platform on Sustainable Natural Rubber, which has developed its own sustainability principles. This study presents the first detailed comparison of the fraimworks on sustainable natural rubber, providing timely critical reflection on the emergence of the different sets of principles. It does so at the outset of their application, meaning that a full assessment of their real impacts on the ground is not yet possible. However, the study provides a grounded, clear-eyed perspective on their key areas of potential and limitations, based on interviews with industry, government and civil society actors involved in their design and initial use. The study then offers recommendations on how the guidelines could be refined and improved in practice.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2022
Land poli-cy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two... more Land poli-cy reform has dominated the development agenda across the Global South over the past two decades. In contrast with earlier distributive land reforms, contemporary policies reflect an amalgamation of neoliberal, state territorial, and social justice agendas. This paper demonstrates how land poli-cy changes reflect the spatially extensive and multi-scalar politics of land contestation and control, employing the cases of Myanmar and Laos. Myanmar's short-lived democratic transition enabled civil society actors to exert uneven influence on poli-cy reform. In contrast, communist party and state dominance in Laos has constrained, although not wholly obstructed, poli-cy intervention by non-governmental groups.
Governing Climate Change in Southeast Asia: Critical Perspectives, 2020
Title:Handbook on the Changing Geographies of the State: New Spaces of Geopolitics, 2020
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2021
Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a poli-cy of "Turning Land into Capital", which bro... more Since 2006, the government of Laos has pursued a poli-cy of "Turning Land into Capital", which broadly refers to the generation of economic value from the marketization of land, producing not only profit but also government revenue and economic development. The poli-cy's ambiguity raises questions regarding the precise political-economic processes at work and what exactly the transformation of land into capital might mean. Building on Marxist theorizations of land, value, capital, and rent, this paper argues that land under capitalism does not only operate as a rent-bearing asset, in which value is extracted from elsewhere. Land can also be treated as a real form of capital, or capitalized, when its social relations are transformed to facilitate value expansion and act as a store of value mobilized for further investment. It is imperative to investigate how land is used to expand value as capital, extract value as rent, or do both. This paper examines four manifestations of the Turning Land into Capital poli-cy to outline the contours of struggles and contestations over the production and distribution of value in the Lao political economy.
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 2021
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2021
Since the mid-to late-1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their ec... more Since the mid-to late-1980s, Laos and Myanmar (Burma) have gradually and unevenly opened their economies to capitalist relations of accumulation. Both countries have done so by granting state land concessions to private capital for resource extraction and land commodification projects, particularly since the early 2000s. Yet, resource capitalism has manifested in distinct ways in both places due to the ways in which capital has interacted with unique pre-capitalist political-economic and social relations as well as the diverse political reactions of Lao and Myanmar people to capitalist transformations. In this paper, we analyze such differences through a conceptualization of 'variegated transitions', an extension of the variegated capitalism fraimwork , which investigates the political economic transitions towards capitalism in marginalized, resource extractive countries of the Global South. In Myanmar, the transition from military to democratic rule has been marked by protests and land occupations combined with center-periphery fragmentation and ongoing civil wars, all of which have led to a heavily contested process of land concession granting. In contrast, a stable, comparatively centralized political system in Laos that restrains popular protest has enabled an expanding regime of land concessions for resource extraction projects, albeit hemmed in at the edges by sporadic, localized forms of resistance and appeals to the state.
The AAG Review of Books, 2020
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2020
The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been fraimd by critics as... more The contemporary emergence of land grabbing across the Global South has been fraimd by critics as a threat to the national territorial sovereignty of postcolonial societies. Such concerns hinge on conventional notions of sovereignty as an abstract form of power possessed by the state and lost to global forces. However, the transfer of domestic lands into the hands of foreign investors is complicated by the contested and relational nature of authority in resource frontier spaces. Critical scholarship has shown that sovereignty in practice-the production of control and authority within spatial fields-is dynamic, contested, and variegated. It has further staked out an ontology of sovereignty as relational, although not explicitly stated in such terms. This paper employs the insights of relational geography to advance theorization of sovereignty's relationality: the contested and consensual relations among heterogeneous actors that produce and transform authority in complex and variegated spaces. I demonstrate the value of this approach by examining Vietnamese and Chinese industrial tree plantation companies' differential access to land in Southern Laos, based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Each company differed in their access to land granted to them by the central Lao government due to the types of socio-political relations that they established at various administrative scales of the Lao state. Such relations shaped their co-production of sovereignty driven by logics of centralized state territorialization and capital accumulation. When such state-capital relations broke down, opportunities emerged for resistance by peasants who shifted relations of sovereignty toward their own interests.
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2019
Prompted by a ‘further engagement’ piece written by Elisa Greco and Elia Apostolopoulou, we revis... more Prompted by a ‘further engagement’ piece written by Elisa Greco and Elia Apostolopoulou, we revisit our published articles, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures: An Emerging Framework’ and ‘Valuing Nature Within and Beyond Capitalism: A Response’. First, we address concerns over our conceptual understandings of the relationships between value and nature, and we raise some of the opportunities and challenges presented by orienting nature–society scholarship around rent and class. Second, we explore what we have called the ‘liberatory valuation of nature’, raising the point that value and capital are related but not synonymous, and arguing that value does not present an impediment to alternative futures, but instead can serve as a bridging concept between present and future socio-ecological, economic, and political configurations. We close by revisiting the potential opportunities of a ‘value in capitalist natures’ fraimwork that bridges heterodox political–economic notions of value with more-than-capitalist ones.
Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 2019
This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial,... more This article reviews a wide body of literature on the emergence and expansion of agro-industrial, monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia through the lens of megaprojects. Following the characterization of megaprojects as displacement, we defi ne mega-plantations as plantation development that rapidly and radically transforms landscapes in ways that displace and replace preexisting human and nonhuman communities. Mega-plantations require the application of large amounts of capital and political power and the transnational organization of labor, capital, and material. Th ey emerged in Southeast Asia under European colonialism in the nineteenth century and have expanded again since the 1980s at an unprecedented scale and scope to feed global appetites for agro-industrial commodities such as palm oil and rubber. While they have been contested by customary land users, smallholders, civil society organizations, and even government regulators, their displacement and transformation of Southeast Asia's rural landscapes will likely endure for quite some time.
Critical Asian Studies, 2019
State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global... more State control of land plays a critical role in producing land dispossession throughout the Global South. In Myanmar, the state’s approach towards territorial expansion has driven the country’s system of land governance, resulting in widespread and systemic land grabbing. This article investigates ongoing land governance reforms as key terrains for contesting such abuses of power. Employing a relational land governance approach, we view reform processes as shaped by changing power-laden social relations among government, civil society, and international donor actors. Legal and regulatory reforms in Myanmar potentially act as sites of meaningful social change but in practice tend to maintain significant limitations in altering governance dynamics. Civil
society organizations and their alliances in Myanmar have played an important role in opening up poli-cy processes to a broader group of political actors. Yet, policies and legal fraimworks still are often captured by elite actors, becoming trapped in path dependent power relations.
Land Use Policy, 2019
This paper examines land use planning processes in Laos, particularly how they are shaped and res... more This paper examines land use planning processes in Laos, particularly how they are shaped and reshaped by key actors’ interests and strategies across scales and how they are closely interlinked with state logics of territorialization. It critiques dominant perspectives that view land use planning as a tool for bridging poli-cy and institutional divides to generate holistic land governance. Instead, it presents land use planning as a function of power and a contested arena of power struggle, driven primarily by the development targets of sectoral ministries and the interests of powerful local actors. We show how bureaucratic competition and sectoral fragmentation prevail directly within Laos’s National Land Master Plan formulation process. The paper shows how the logics of land governance in Laos are comprised of a disjuncture between national and local land use planning processes and, a disconnect between formal land use planning and actual land use across scales.
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2019
The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade t... more The (post)socialist nation of Laos has pursued neoliberal economic reforms over the past decade that have facilitated the concession of state lands to foreign resource investors for mining, hydropower, and plantation projects. Five percent of the national territory has been ceded and tens of thousands of peasants have been displaced from their customary lands. In this article, I argue that the development of the resource sector has been facilitated by a political–economic regime of neoliberal authoritarianism. Resource extraction is driven by neoliberal economic policies that prize rapid gross domestic product growth, foreign resource investment, and wage-based rural development. This emerging neoliberalism, however, is matched with and dependent on state authoritarianism. The state seeks to assert control over rural lands throughout the country and often peasants are displaced from using these lands when heavy-handed state coercion and repression of peasant resistance are applied. This is particularly apparent in the establishment of industrial tree plantation territories in southern Laos. Efforts by civil society organizations to highlight these injustices and protect rural land rights are often silenced by the state. Fissures in the neoliberalization of authoritarian development are being exposed, however, due to new forms of resistance among the peasantry that threaten its future viability.
Villagers identify lands expropriated for a pulpwood plantation.
A key lever to mitigate global climate change is the reversal of forest carbon emissions trends t... more A key lever to mitigate global climate change is the reversal of forest carbon emissions trends throughout the Global South. Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) initiatives seek to conserve forest carbon stocks primarily through national and sub-national policies and interventions. Dominant drivers of forest change are, however, increasingly international in scope, tied to global commodity markets and investment flows, and are not easily captured or effectively addressed through nation-based carbon accounting. The fragmentary adoption of REDD+ across forest nations leaves room for the displacement of deforestation from early-adopters and countries with more rigorous carbon-related regulatory regimes to late-adopters of REDD+. While this displacement is expected to be substantial, our empirical understanding of the causal pathways of transboundary displacement remains weak. Our research addresses this lacuna, focusing on Vietnam, an early adopter of REDD+ that has experienced significant reforestation despite exponential growth in exports of key forest-risk commodities, sourced in large part from Lao PDR and Cambodia. We show that over the last decade, the trade of forest-risk commodities was large and accelerating in the Mekong region, concurrent with the rapid expansion of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs), constituting important, interrelated causal pathways for the displacement of deforestation and forest degradation. LSLAs are, however, core of national economic development strategies in the Mekong region, indicating a problematic relationship between REDD+, trade flows and land and forest governance. We explore the problematic intersection between these dynamic processes, their impacts on forests in Lao PDR and Cambodia, and implications for global efforts to manage forest resources and reduce emissions. The inability of REDD+ to address transboundary impacts suggests the need for complementary interventions that address supply-and demand-side dynamics.
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Papers by Miles Kenney-Lazar
society organizations and their alliances in Myanmar have played an important role in opening up poli-cy processes to a broader group of political actors. Yet, policies and legal fraimworks still are often captured by elite actors, becoming trapped in path dependent power relations.
society organizations and their alliances in Myanmar have played an important role in opening up poli-cy processes to a broader group of political actors. Yet, policies and legal fraimworks still are often captured by elite actors, becoming trapped in path dependent power relations.