Contribution short abstract

The paper examines how overlapping conservation, economic land concessions, and Indigenous land titling in Cambodia reshape Bunong territories. It exposes the contradictions between inclusive imaginaries and exclusionary realities, showing how Indigenous communities navigate dispossession.

Contribution long abstract

This paper explores how conservation and Indigenous collective land titling intersect and collide in contemporary Cambodia, where global sustainability narratives, national land reforms, and Indigenous claims meet under unequal power relations. Drawing on ethnographic research since 2010 among Indigenous Bunong communities in Mondulkiri province, it examines how environmental conservation and collective titling—framed as progressive tools for sustainability and recognition—have paradoxically reinforced dispossession. Conservation areas such as the Phnom Nam Lyr Wildlife Sanctuary and economic land concessions have fragmented Indigenous territories, while state-led titling processes remain slow, bureaucratic, and restrictive. Both frameworks rest on shared imaginaries that portray Indigenous people as forest guardians and partners in sustainable development, yet their implementation reveals deep contradictions: communities navigate overlapping protected areas, contested claims, and criminalization of traditional livelihoods. The paper shows how state, conservation, and development actors mobilize the idioms of inclusion and sustainability, central to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to legitimize exclusionary governance. These frameworks, deeply entangled with national agendas that prioritize territorial control, elite accumulation, and concessionary expansion, reproduce dispossession while projecting reformist imagery. The SDGs function less as transformative instruments than as an institutional epiphenomenon—a discursive form that enables the Cambodian state to reframe dispossession through the language of global sustainability while maintaining structural inequalities. Despite these constraints, Bunong actors engage strategically with titling and conservation regimes to mitigate loss and sustain limited access. The paper calls for conservation frameworks grounded in Indigenous self-determination, territorial recognition, and ecological justice.