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  • Project Background

The Land and Natural Resources Law Project (LNRLP) promotes secure access to land and natural resources for vulnerable groups - particularly indigenous peoples (IPs) - in Cambodia.  It does this through legal capacity building, empowerment, and advocacy.  LNRLP implements its work within a sustainable rural livelihood approach that builds upon structures and processes to generate improved livelihood outcomes, including increased well-being, reduced vulnerability, and more sustainable use of the natural resource base.

LNRLP is based in Phnom Penh, and has target areas in Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, and other provinces containing vulnerable indigenous populations.  It has provided direct grassroots trainings to more than 300 indigenous villagers in the northeast provinces, and conducted training-of-trainer sessions to IP villagers and NGO workers, as well as Forestry Administration, Department of Land, and Environmental officers.  In addition to its training initiatives, LNRLP engages in national policy initiatives dealing with indigenous peoples and land and natural resources issues, and has provided its consultancy expertise to the International Labour Organization's Indigenous and Tribal Peoples project.

Training and Empowerment

LNRLP has hosted a series of trainings in the remote provinces of Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri.  Through these trainings, LNRLP seeks to:

  1. Improve the institutional and regulatory framework for the registration of indigenous communal land title.
  2. Increase the capacity of indigenous people for asserting their claim to a fair distribution of land and natural resources by enhancing indigenous peoples' awareness and understanding of their legal rights.
  3. Improve the institutional and regulatory framework responsible for the distribution of land through social land concessions.

Policy Initiatives

In addition to its trainings, LNRLP aims to improve the institutional and regulatory framework for the protection of land and natural resources, particularly as it relates to IP issues.  Recognizing the need to give voice to local communities in national level policy efforts, LNRLP has cooperated with several NGOs to organize community consultations on draft laws, giving local communities an opportunity to participate in national level legislative processes.




 
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LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES LAW PROJECT
 
 
Copyright ©2006 Community Legal Education Center (CLEC).
  • Target Audiences

The project is working basically in Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces. We are working with our provincial partners in order to provide capacity building on legal frameworks an policies to the IP communities in both provinces. This text below is giving some situation of Cambodia and Indigenous issues:

Cambodia is one of the Southeast Asian countries and one of the Mekong River Region's countries. Cambodia has 181 035km2 of space. Cambodia bordered by Vietnam, Lao and Thailand. The population is more than 12 million people. Most people in Cambodia are Buddhist, and the others are
Muslim, Christian etc. There are some indigenous people. They are living in the northeast of Cambodia. It has 24 provinces and cities. Phnom Penh is the capital. Cambodia is a Constitutional Monarchy.

Cambodia was under the French Colonization for about 90 years since 1863 until 1953. In 1953 after getting independence from France, Cambodia became a monarchy with neutral policy. In 1970, with the support of the US, a military group staged a coup d' etat and ruled the country for five years. In 1975 after US lost the war in Vietnam, Khmer Rouge Communists came to replace the US military regime. For 3 years in Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was covered with killing fields, and everything was destroyed such as buildings, tradition, religion, industries, education, health institutions, etc. All the people in the town were sent to the remote areas for doing agriculture with rice paddy. Intellectuals including teachers, professors, medical peoples, former militaries, artists, engineers, etc. were killed. About 2 million people died. In 1979 Vietnam invaded Cambodia and appointed a socialist government. During this period, there were resistances at mostly the borders by Khmer Rouge Communist, Royalist, and Republic. In 1993 after the intervention of UN, all conflict parties came to an agreement. There was the first election in Cambodia in 1993 and Cambodia became the second monarchy up to date. Then Cambodia became one of the poorest countries in the world (UNDP).

Since 1993, Cambodia opened for free market. Business people and investment came, and the government started to build up their strategic development plan. Tourism, industry, and infrastructure were planned to undertake in some areas in Cambodia. Unfortunately, most of the plans were not carefully done such as without impact assessment. Those developments therefore had negative impact to the poor and vulnerable people, especially to the indigenous people. Particularly, land issues become a hot conflict between authorities and rich people with the poor people. One of the examples is that the government provided economical land concessions to private business companies without consultation with the local communities, so that the concession then became a subject of the conflict between the local communities and the companies. The reason was that the lands proposed to give to the companies have been used traditionally from a very long time ago by the local communities. Most of the time when development plan for the rural areas set up, most of the information never reaches those rural people, but the powerful and rich people who are very close to the government. Then, they come to buy that land with a very cheap price, or grab that land from the poor.

This has a strong affect on the indigenous people  who are all living in the remote areas where the goal of the development is. The indigenous people work so hard during a year, for example, on the land, but they still cannot have enough food for affording their life for one year. Some people have to walk at least five kilometers from their village to the market for selling some fruits, vegetables, or other non-timber forest product. So each family can have only little money, and some other very remote people even never use money. The communication infrastructure and transportation services connected their villages to the town is so much difficult, so that the local people can hardly access to education, health and information services. Literacy rates are very low among indigenous people; few men and even fewer women in a village can speak and write script. They also suffer with illnesses like malaria, respiratory infections, malnutrition, diarrhea etc.

The indigenous people in Cambodia now are living in the remote area and highland of Cambodia, especially in the Northeast of Cambodia. Ratanakiri, Mondulkiri, and Preh Vihea. These provinces are located far from Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, as the communication infrastructure is very bad, but they are rich of natural resources so far.

Migration and economic development from lowlands have all most negatively impacted into their security of land and natural resource use management, such as illegal logging, non-participatory concession, and land encroachment. More than that, these indigenous people struggle to access information, and other public services like education and health, which is just pushing them into poor knowledge and capacity to deal with the problems currently happened.

The civil societies including CLEC have been working with each other strongly to deal with this problem. Particularly, CLEC has been working on awareness-raising on legal frame work and policy related to land and natural resource management and advocated government to consider the issues and needs of the indigenous people during the development of those legal frame work and policies. (see the background)

Note: The indigenous people in Cambodia are living in highland and practice swidden agriculture. Their livelihood are dependent on land and natural resources. They plant rice on one plot of land for about three years and then move to another one for a few years. They might come back to the same swidden plot as the forest grow and made the soil fertile enough for their rice. They believe in animist, they have a traditional boundary of land and using their land and natural resources collectively. In their boundary, there are forest spirit, cemetery and other places where they are sacrificing as the holly thing.
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