. Tropical and subtropical forests and savannas support millions of forest-dependent people. These ecosystems are under rising pressure from deforestation, primarily due to agricultural expansion. Yet, a large proportion of agriculture-driven deforestation does not lead to productive land use afterwards, potentially because of speculative, halted, or abandoned land investment projects. Our understanding of such apparently failed projects, their links to deforestation, and their impact on local people, however, remains limited. Here, focusing on failed land investment projects in tropical and subtropical woodlands (i.e., forests and savannas), we aim to understand how these projects failed, how they led to deforestation, and how access to land for local communities changed after failure. We identified and reviewed cases of failed projects that led to deforestation sourced from a systematic literature review and global databases on land investments and environmental conflicts. Our results show that resistance to land investment projects was the most common determinant of failure, suggesting prevailing misalignment of investments with local needs. We identified various configurations on how failed projects are linked to woodland loss, ranging from land clearing for an eventually abandoned project to illegal timber harvesting. Most of the projects targeted areas used by local, forest-dependent communities. Despite failure, some of these communities lost access to lands in the process, indicating that even failed projects can result in land grabs. Our multi-case analysis revealed the pivotal roles played by governments, socioeconomic agendas, and investors in these complex predicaments. This emphasizes the need to learn from failed projects to reevaluate priorities in land governance, enhance government enforcement capabilities, and adopt a more inclusive and comprehensive approach that amplifies local voices and safeguards tropical and subtropical woodlands.

Demand for Energy Transition Minerals and Metals (ETMs) for clean energy technologies is driving a new wave of investment in mining. Many African countries contain significant reserves of ETMs and are eager to exploit their mineral wealth for economic benefits. However, extracting these minerals comes with social and environmental costs, including the degradation of high biodiversity habitats. Without learning from the past and anticipating possible futures, the potential benefits from ETMs could be offset by harms to vulnerable people and nature. In this paper, we draw from experience in the resource-rich Western Congo Basin forests to consider lessons and opportunities for anticipatory governance of ETM extraction to contribute to just and sustainable development pathways. We identify and build on four existing initiatives in which practitioners, policy-makers, and researchers can proactively engage in to enhance capabilities in foresight, networked decision-making, learning mechanisms, and open mindsets to guide responsible investment. By drawing on lessons and anticipating futures, decision-makers can strengthen institutional capability to guide and benefit from the impending wave of mine and infrastructure development. We call for greater attention to anticipatory governance for responsible investment in ETMs that aligns with environmental stewardship and community wellbeing in the Western Congo Basin.

A decade after the methodological debates of the late 2000s land-rush scholarship, this paper asks why it has been - and why it remains - so hard to get good land-deal numbers. We review the state of land-deal quantification using the example of the Land Matrix. We then use the case of China's state support for Chinese agribusiness investment in Laos to locate the ongoing trouble of 'bad' land-deal numbers in the politics of ongoing state formation. In doing so, we show how bad numbers are often an effect of the same internal state dynamics that facilitate land grabbing in the first place.

China has transformed from a laggard to a rising leader of environmental governance. It plays a unique and essential role in promoting environmental cooperation, financing and implementing global green infrastructure, and generating and disseminating environmental technology and scientific knowledge. On each front, global progress cannot be made without China, especially with the US’ retreat from global leadership under the second Trump presidency. In this article, we consider China's concrete, multifaceted environmental efforts over the last decade and show China's various motives: it is partly responding to critiques of its massive environmental footprint; partly pursuing greater respect as a responsible global power; and partly seeking economic and political gains through clean energy transition, a greener planet, and a more stable climate. We call for new approaches to engaging China's aspiration to become a global environmental leader, while asserting clear expectations and responsibilities in that role.

Increasingly, adaptive processes and decentralization are vital aspects of watershed governance. Equitable and sustainable water governance requires an understanding that different societal members have unique relationships with the environment and varying levels of interaction with policymakers. However, the factors facilitating public involvement under centralized governance remain less understood. This study combined the Institutional Analysis and Development framework with ordered probit regression to empirically investigate the determinants of willingness to participate (WTP) and actual participation of the public in integrated watershed management (IWM). Data from 933 valid questionnaires collected across 36 counties in Fujian, China, were used to define stakeholders’ perceptions of IWM. Results show that stakeholders are predominantly willing to participate in watershed conservation, management, or planning (85.9%), while only 32.8% frequently attend related events. Pro-environmental intentions were mainly shaped by interactional capacity—information exposure, interpersonal exchanges, and cross-reach support recognition—while actual participation was influenced by perceived biophysical conditions, rules-in-use, socioeconomic factors, and interactional capacity. Frequent observations of poor forest management practices were correlated with higher behavioral intentions, and socioeconomic dynamics significantly affected self-reported actual participation. Information sharing had the most substantial positive impact on both WTP and actual participation. These findings reinforce the necessity for an integrated and holistic approach to regional watershed resource management that fosters inclusivity and sustainability. This study provides workable insights into the social and institutional factors that shape public participation in watershed governance as it evolves toward decentralization.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is frequently described as a 'hard' infrastructure programme of roads, railways, and ports. But a variety of 'soft' development cooperation activities-including trainings, dialogues, research, and development projects-have also been established under the banner of the BRI. We examine how this 'soft' cooperation works hand-in-hand with 'hard' infrastructure in what we call the cooperation-infrastructure nexus. This nexus works in two parallel ways: cooperation activities establish discursive frames of Chinese development as a model to follow, while also creating channels of exchange and support that validate and facilitate infrastructure investments. These investments, in turn, legitimize and often provide direct channels for further cooperation. To make this argument, we present empirical research conducted in China and Laos in two sectors: hydropower and rubber. Both expanded rapidly in China over the past three decades and are held up as models to follow; both are also the basis for cooperation and infrastructure interventions across Southeast Asia. We show that Chinese rubber and hydropower cooperation activities serve both to frame existing projects positively and facilitate future investments in those sectors in Laos. The infrastructure established on the ground, however, rarely resembles the 'China model' upon which it is discursively based. Instead, we find that important obstacles and contradictions arise in translating China's domestic achievements into other country contexts. Our findings show the need to consider cooperation as intertwined with infrastructure, while acknowledging the disconnect between discourses of a China model and experiences on the ground.

China increasingly engages in environmental diplomacy through South-South cooperation across the developing world. Since 2019, the rise of the discourse of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) within this cooperation has been exponential. Coined just over ten years ago, NbS refers to the underexplored potential of leveraging the natural world to address socio-environmental challenges. The concept finds particular resonance in China, where it demonstrates strong parallels with the domestically-pioneered concept of Ecological Civilization – the ruling paradigm when it comes to all realms of Chinese environmental governance. Building on the global discourse, NbS has been adapted to the Chinese context, creating what some call “Chinese-style” NbS that prioritizes large-scale interventions and ecological engineering over grassroots preservation. China’s NbS are not only being pursued domestically, but also increasingly abroad through the country’s Belt and Road Initiative. From Southeast and Central Asia to Africa and Latin America, this article surveys Chinese-led or financed projects that fall under the broad umbrella of NbS. We provide a comparative analysis of these interventions – or the conspicuous lack of such interventions – to show the current status and future prospects for China’s growing sphere of influence when it comes to advancing NbS in the Global South. We find that China’s embrace of this concept in environmental diplomacy is directly related to the potential for NbS to serve as a tool for helping the country’s vision of an Ecological Civilization “go global.” The consonance between the rhetoric of NbS and Ecological Civilization, combined with the global reach of NbS, provides a powerful platform for taking Chinese environmental discourse to the global level.

Tropical and subtropical woodlands (forests and savannas) support millions of forest-dependent people. Deforestation frontiers in the tropics and subtropics primarily result from agricultural expansion, with major impacts on the environment and the local people. Yet, a large proportion of agriculture-driven deforestation does not lead to productive land use afterwards, potentially due to speculative clearings or halted or abandoned land investment projects. Our understanding of such apparently failed projects, their links to deforestation, and their impact on local people, however, remains limited. Here, we aim to understand how land investment projects in tropical and subtropical woodlands fail, how such failed projects lead to deforestation, and how access to land changed after failure for local communities. We compiled and reviewed cases of failed projects that led to deforestation sourced from a systematic literature review and global databases on land investments and environmental conflict. Our results show that resistance to land investment projects was the most common determinant of failure, suggesting prevailing misalignment of investments with local needs. We identified various configurations in which failed land projects are linked to woodland loss, ranging from land clearing for an eventually abandoned project to illegal timber harvesting. Most of the projects targeted areas used by local, forest-dependent communities. Despite failure, some of these communities lost access to lands and in the process, indicating that even failed projects can result in land grabs. Analysing across projects underscored the pivotal roles played by governments, socio-economic agendas, and investors in these complex predicaments. This emphasizes the need to learn from these projects and reevaluate priorities in land governance, enhance government enforcement capabilities, and adopt a more inclusive and comprehensive approach that amplifies local voices and safeguards tropical forests and savannas.

China's Opium Replacement Policy (ORP) is one of the country's earliest cross-border development interventions in the upper Mekong region. A massive state subsidy program for "alternative" development in the northern parts of Myanmar and Laos, the ORP helped finance a wave of Chinese agribusiness investments abroad since the mid-2000s, causing significant social and ecological transformation. Yet key details about the program remain opaque. In this article, we contribute to a growing literature on the rising economic power of China's "peripheral centers," borderland prefectures whose role in foreign affairs has increased significantly as the country's borders become more porous. We review state motives for establishing the ORP and use public records about the program's activities in Myanmar and Laos to interrogate the vertical politics that structure and complicate the ORP's implementation. The program's public records are characterized by a mix of transparency and opacity which we analyse to show that the ORP's increasing transparency since around 2010 has moved away from regulating impacts abroad and instead toward securing and distributing benefits for borderland business (and their interlinked political) interests in China. As borderland authorities play a growing role in China's foreign trade, we show that the vertical politics that increasingly shape the regulatory environment have allowed the ORP to proliferate in size and influence as state oversight of its activities abroad has waned.

In this paper, we examine the extensive use of bans (temporary prohibitions or moratoriums) on resource exploitation activities by the government of Laos as an authoritarian environmental governance tool. We focus on bans enacted recently in three sectors: on the granting of land concessions in 2012, on the expansion of banana plantations in 2014, and on logging exports in 2016. Bans have long been used in Laos, particularly in the forestry sector, despite their considerable political risk and economic costs, the way they contradict state actors' promotion of these same activities as drivers of development, and their past ineffectiveness. Most cases in the environmental authoritarian literature explore authoritarian states with a strong capacity to employ top-down governance tools. We argue, in contrast, that the Lao government's repeated use of bans instead of other effective governing tools, such as more incremental, conditional, or incentive-based policies, reflects not strong state capacity but rather the limits to its implementing and enforcement capacity. The bans examined emerge from central-local divides, unregulated village land leasing, and failures to extract state revenues, and we interpret them as central-state efforts to consolidate and assert a more centralized, command-and-control authority over the country's land and resources.

In this paper, we examine the extensive use of bans (temporary prohibitions or moratoriums) on resource exploitation activities by the government of Laos as an authoritarian environmental governance tool. We focus on bans enacted recently in three sectors: on the granting of land concessions in 2012, on the expansion of banana plantations in 2014, and on logging exports in 2016. Bans have long been used in Laos, particularly in the forestry sector, despite their considerable political risk and economic costs, the way they contradict state actors’ promotion of these same activities as drivers of development, and their past ineffectiveness. Most cases in the environmental authoritarian literature explore authoritarian states with a strong capacity to employ top-down governance tools. We argue, in contrast, that the Lao government’s repeated use of bans instead of other effective governing tools, such as more incremental, conditional, or incentive-based policies, reflects not strong state capacity but rather the limits to its implementing and enforcement capacity. The bans examined emerge from central–local divides, unregulated village land leasing, and failures to extract state revenues, and we interpret them as central-state efforts to consolidate and assert a more centralized, command-and-control authority over the country’s land and resources.

Watersheds have experienced economic and demographic development for decades. In China, this development has been associated with environmental degradation, including water quality deterioration, abnormal stream flow, and biotic resource depletion. Effective watershed management incorporates sustainability and public involvement, enabling the long-term security of the human and natural world. Management strategies however need to take into account local conditions, as every watershed is unique. This paper adopts the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) combined with the random forest model to investigate the shift in participants’ environmental awareness across different socioeconomic groups over the past 15 years. Additionally, it scrutinizes the changing public perceptions on the management priorities and areas requiring enhancement. The AHP index highlighted the importance of environmental behavioral intentions (EBI) as a component of environmental awareness (EA). Between 2006 and 2021, significant changes occurred in public environmental awareness (perception, knowledge, behavioral intention) and perceived management priorities, stressing the need for timely adjustment of management policies. Notably, environmental concern (EC) appears to have decreased over time, reflecting effective management and increased governmental attention. Emphasis on the recreational ecosystem services offered by watershed forests has increased. Males, individuals aged over 40-years-old, and individuals located in the upper reaches possessed higher risk perceptions than other groups. These findings may help policymakers to adjust management priorities based on geographic region and may assist them in promoting more effective measures to communicate watershed sustainable management goals and strategies to the public.

The expansion of commercial agriculture is one of the primary drivers of livelihood and land-use changes in the world. Globalisation and other factors have intensified this expansion to the point where booms in single cash crops overtake entire regions before going bust, a pattern that is particularly pervasive in resource frontiers. Using case studies across the Mekong Region, a place which serves as a harbinger for crop booms globally, we propose a new analytical framework for understanding and governing crop booms. We combine multiple theoretical approaches to study crop booms and draw on insights from case study work conducted across temporal and spatial scales. The framework consists of three components: 1) the nested nature of crop boom-bust trajectories, 2) the cyclical spatial and temporal patterns of crop booms, and 3) the variegated pathways and impacts of agrarian change. The framework presents new insights into the processes of agricultural intensification in frontier spaces. As such, it facilitates a better understanding of the drivers, characteristics and impacts of crop booms for researchers and decision-makers alike with the intention of supporting efforts to develop more sustainable pathways in the region and beyond.

Despite decades of efforts to curb the global supply of illicit drugs and significant shifts in how those efforts are designed and implemented, illicit crop cultivation persists. In this paper, we examine state and international development efforts to eradicate coca in Peru, opium poppies in Laos, and cannabis in California, USA and the ever-changing discourses used to justify and design these interventions. Scholarship in political geography frames eradication interventions as serving ongoing efforts to extend state and market power into the regions in which illicit crops are grown and to marginalize the people growing them. We find that environmental discourses are increasingly used to assert the need for continued illicit crop interventions, and that these discourses articulate with historical and ongoing portrayals of smallholders as environmentally destructive. Environmental harm narratives that justify enforcement and eradication efforts under the guise of protecting ecosystems from illicit crop farmers can become self-fulfilling prophecies when they disproportionately impact smallholders and push them into marginal geographic and economic positions. Our cases illustrate that environmentally-justified interventions drive cycles of marginalization for illicit crop smallholders, often conditioned by race or ethnicity, who are then portrayed as environmental criminals. Meanwhile, new state-sanctioned spaces of opportunity and profit are created for more powerful actors who are able to capitalize on the removal of illicit crop growers from the land.

Chinese state firms are expected not only to profit but also to serve state interests. But the Chinese state is fragmented: border provinces are taking on an expanded role in China's global expansion and a broad range of firm activities could be defined as patriotic contributions. Through the case of Yunnan State Farms (YSF), a province-level state-owned enterprise, this article explores how state firms interpret and navigate multiple state interests while also pursuing profit. The firm's ability to profit depends on balancing the demands and support of different Chinese state actors while depicting itself as a development partner to the Lao state and a contributor to Sino-Lao diplomatic relations and border region stability. This case thus shows that, instead of YSF's behaviour being directed by the state, the firm exercises considerable latitude in defining its contributions to state interests through the expansion of rubber production as a driver of development.

Human geographers investigating socio-environmental change in resource frontiers often encounter illicit activities occurring alongside the licit processes they study. These encounters pose logistical challenges to conducting research and moral and analytical dilemmas for researchers. Illicit activities produce what we refer to as spheres of ambiguity, which obscure certain information, relationships, and phenomena surrounding them. We address the dearth of analytical tools for approaching the uncertainty this generates by bringing concepts from agnotology—the study of ignorance—to bear on research conducted amidst illicit activity, offering a framework for systematically evaluating ambiguous field data that is incompletely observed or reported.

Mainstream portrayals of Chinese overseas land investments tend to treat Chinese capital as monolithic, synonymous with the Chinese state, and extracting resources from other countries unhindered. These portrayals flatten host country landscapes where investment occurs, obscure the embeddedness and diversity of Chinese investors, and ignore the spatially contingent channels through which Chinese capital, actors, and goods flow. In response, this article suggests that methodological shifts in the land grabs literature could address recent calls for grounding studies of global China. It compares the cases of Chinese banana and rubber investments in Laos to demonstrate that sub-national state actors, histories and material realities of land politics, and the diversity of investors across sectors and regions must be considered. The contrast between how the two types of Chinese agricultural investments have been established and governed is best understood through comparative, grounded research attentive to multiple perspectives and scales.

Despite centuries of state-directed eradication efforts, opium cultivation persists in northern Laos and Myanmar. The most recent of these efforts is China's Opium Replacement Program (ORP). Like other illicit crop substitution programmes, the ORP seeks to provide opium cultivators with licit livelihood alternatives. Unlike other programmes, it does so by supporting Chinese agribusiness investors in the region – predominantly rubber companies – instead of targeting opium producers directly. Rubber is not, however, economically or ecologically speaking, an optimal replacement for opium. Rubber and opium have contrasting production cycles and market characteristics, and are grown at different altitudes by different types of producers (large corporations and smallholders, respectively). Due to this apparent mismatch, critics have dismissed the ORP's opium eradication aims, viewing it as a pretext for land grabs. I argue instead that rubber makes sense as an opium replacement crop based on Chinese and Lao state views that opium is a symptom of weak state control and underdevelopment in the borderlands and rubber a tried and true modernising crop. I thus offer that the ORP attempts replacement by displacement – not necessarily by physically replacing opium fields with rubber plantations, but rather by drawing land and labour into rubber, away from opium.

Development cooperation is an increasingly prominent focus in Chinese foreign diplomacy, and a central justification for Chinese firms’ engagement in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) across the global South. China claims itself a success story of developing country industrialization and economic growth, and models its development interventions abroad after its own experience. This is exemplified by China’s Opium Replacement Program (ORP), which aims to reduce opium production in Northern Myanmar and Laos by incentivizing Chinese companies to invest in agribusiness in those areas. Since its establishment in 2004, the ORP has catalysed a wave of Chinese investments in these areas, predominantly in the form of rubber plantations. This paper examines the ORP’s implementation in Laos as a lens through which to understand the role Chinese firms play in China’s vision for development cooperation. It compares the conditions under which rubber emerged in Yunnan, China to those of northern Laos, and demonstrates how incongruities between the two contexts complicate efforts to translate the Yunnan rubber model abroad. It then explores the political economy of ORP supported rubber investments in northern Laos, with specific focus on the growing commercial power and market access the ORP affords Chinese companies. The study finds that the ORP goes far beyond just incentivizing individual companies; it establishes a system that privileges Chinese firms to the point of their effective monopoly in the rubber industry in northern Laos. Since the drop in global rubber prices in 2011, ORP quotas for import tariff exemptions have made participating companies the only firms able to profitably process and export raw latex back to China. This may allow them to outcompete smallholders, contract farmers, and unsubsidized companies for land and inputs as well as to dominate processing and export – the most profitable activities in the sector. This case therefore questions the idea, central to China’s development cooperation approach, of translating China’s unique development experience into other country contexts, and the ability of Chinese companies to act as effective agents of development when investing in LSLAs.