Events

Due to the evolving COVID-19 situation globally, the talk will be cancelled. We apologies for any inconvenience caused.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Jonathan Rigg, University of Bristol, UK

ABSTRACT

Following the National League for Democracy’s landslide victory in the 2015 national election, Myanmar embarked on a series of legal and political transitions. This paper highlights parallel processes alongside such transitions. Linking land governance with the ongoing peace processes, and taking Karen state as a case study, it brings to light how both processes are in fact closely interlinked. Building on legal pluralism research, we argue that in the context of ethnic states, farmers’ strategies to strengthen their land rights resemble the very notion of state transformation. The paper looks at state spatiality as complex processes and practices of socio-spatial regulation across scales shaping and reshaping state-society relations. Placing dual authority as one of the building blocks for state transformation, it illustrates how political authority produces rights, and vice versa (Lund and Rahman, 2018), within the context of legal and institutional pluralism. It shows how these processes and practices are rooted in the production of political space, centering on farmers’ strategies to strengthen their land rights, and how these are entangled in the central government-farmers-KNU power relations. In particular, it looks at: 1) the conflicting legal frameworks pertaining to land governance in the country; 2) how these legal frameworks are negotiated and appropriated at the village level through various means and institutional set up, including how they interact with customary land rights; and 3) how it reflects back on and influences farmers’ land tenure security.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Diana Suhardiman has over 15 years experiences in natural resources governance with particular focus on water governance in Southeast Asia (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, China Yunnan Province). She is currently Senior Researcher at Research Group Lead Governance and Inclusion at the International Water Management Institute, Southeast Asia Regional Office, based in Vientiane, Lao PDR. Her research focuses on the political economy and political ecology of natural resource governance, in particular at the intersection of land, water, food and energy. Linking the government’s infrastructure development plans in hydropower, mining, agricultural plantation with the notion of ‘weak’ states and the overall shaping of state spaces, her research contests the predominantly a-political approach to economic development as means to benefit the greater common goods, and the way transfer of knowledge and technology is framed merely as technical, managerial issues. Prior to joining IWMI, Diana received a PhD at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, where her research focused on the role of government bureaucracies in shaping water policy formulation and implementation in Indonesia.