On 17th October 2019, SEAC hosted the first Southeast Asia Discussion Series seminar of the academic year chaired by SEAC Director Prof. Hyun Bang. The main speaker was Dr Paul Rabé (Senior Expert, Urban Land Governance, Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam), speaking on the topic of land sharing in Cambodia and Thailand. Dr Anna Cant (Assistant Professor, Department of International History, LSE) will be offering her insights as Discussant.

Summary of Dr Rabé’s talk: With the challenge of informal settlement, slum formation and the lack of affordable housing continuing to grow in and around major cities, the interest in land sharing—as a land access tool for informal settlers and as a conflict resolution tool between landowners and (informal) land occupants—continues to grow among scholars, activists and policymakers. In this talk, Paul Rabé will first trace the origins of land sharing (as formally practiced) in Bangkok, from the 1970s to the 1990s, and then critically highlight some later experiences with land sharing in Cambodia, Thailand and other countries in the region.

• Dr. Paul Rabé is Head of the cities cluster at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, the Netherlands, where he (co-) coordinates the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) and the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network (SEANNET). He is also Senior Land Expert at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research and professional interests focus on urban land governance and access to land for social, economic and environmental uses. His current focus is on the intersection of land policy and the management of water resources in urban and peri-urban areas. Paul has researched land sharing as a land conflict resolution tool in Thailand and Cambodia during the last two decades. 
• Dr Anna Cant is Assistant Professor in the LSE Department of International History. She is a Latin American historian with expertise in twentieth-century politics, cultural history and rural development. She gained her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge (2015) with a thesis on land reform in Peru. She is currently revising the thesis as a book titled Land Without Masters: Agrarian Reform and Political Change in Peru, 1968-75. Dr Cant has taught in the UK and Colombia, and received scholarships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. She is on the editorial board of the journal Historia Agraria de América Latina and an associate member of the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies at Cambridge University.

Download and listen to the podcast here

This event relates to SEAC's #urbanisation theme.