Concealed contradictions: sustainable development goals and indigenous land dispossession in Cambodia

This paper examines how the dual forces of Economic Land Concessions and nature conservation projects in Cambodia converge to dispossess the Indigenous Bunong communities of their forest commons—land held as common property and managed collectively by local institutions, with access determined by matrilineal descent. Drawing on ethnographic research, it argues that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), rather than transforming entrenched exclusionary practices, function as an institutional epiphenomenon: a discursive layer that enables the Cambodian state to reframe ongoing dispossession in the language of global sustainability while leaving underlying power structures intact.