The agrarian transition in the Mekong Region: pathways towards sustainable land systems

ABSTRACT

The agrarian transition, with its rapid growth in land-based investments, has radically altered agrarian and forest landscapes across the Mekong Region. These processes were enabled and accelerated by choices of actors in the public and private sectors with the aim of alleviating poverty and boosting socioeconomic development. We examine to what extent these goals were achieved and for whom, with a focus on poverty alleviation, gender equality, and forest conservation. Our descriptive assessment shows that the sustainability outcomes of the agrarian transition offer a highly variegated picture that is often not reflected in national level statistics used for monitoring the distance to target towards achieving the 2030 Agenda. Based on our findings, we sketch pathways for a more sustainable agrarian transition in the region. These pathways are explored in greater detail in three framing papers of the special issue “Agrarian Change in the Mekong Region: Pathways towards Sustainable Land Systems’.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrarian transition
• Mekong region
• 2030 agenda
• customary tenure
• poverty
• gender

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Mekong Region Land Governance project (MRLG). MRLG is a project of the Government of Switzerland, through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), with co-financing from the Government of Germany and the Government of Luxembourg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The exact names of SDGs and of their targets can be found on https://sdgs.un.org/goals.

2. World Development Indicators: https://databank.worldbank.org/indicator

3. This does not include the investments in mineral prospecting and exploration that cover an area of nearly 11 million hectares (Hett et al., 2020)

4. Those having major part of their territory above 800 m.a.s.l. and therefore falling into the agroclimatic zone targeted by investors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Direktion für Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit; German Cooperation; LuxDev.