Where Does the Boundary Fall? Conservation Assemblages and Their Discontents in a Protected Area, Northern Cambodia

The chapter examines the ins and outs of a protected area zonation undertaken by the Ministry of Environment and a large conservation organisation in Northern Cambodia. On paper, the approach was innovative as it aimed to promote an inclusive form of forest management where customary land and resource tenure are recognised and formalised. We used an analytic of assemblage to look critically at the initiative and ask who benefits and loses out in these processes. We examine two distinct assemblages existing within the same forest landscape but which are constituted by radically different components. The first is comprised of state agencies and a conservation organisation that undertook the protected area zonation, which are the central pillars of a larger conservation assemblage. The other is forged by largely autonomous Kuy communities that assembled to protect their forests from outside interests and which have a very different perspective of what constitutes the forest, its uses and values, its more-than-human dimensions, and approaches to conservation. We examine how and why the conservation assemblage goals to conduct a more inclusive zonation process were not realised in practice, despite the good intentions of individuals involved and significant resources deployed. In particular, we draw attention to the question of people’s participation and the narrow scope of what was up for discussion; processes of simplification at play that failed to grasp the complexity of people’s livelihoods and use of forests; and the subsuming of political claims over forests into technical problems to be fixed, which served to reinforce the knowledge and authority of the Ministry of Environment. It resulted in a process of exclusion of the people it was supposed to benefit, caused by the combined exercise of distinct forms of power that speak to different sets of actors, agendas,
and socio-political contingencies.