In defense of land rights: A monitoring report on land conflicts in six Asian countries 32 are regulated by the State through sectoral law, such as on spatial planning, forestry, plantations, water resources, management of coastal areas and small islands, and land acquisition by the State. However, these sectoral laws contain problems such as unclear mechanisms for land acquisition by private companies, overlapping allocation of areas for different purposes, and failure to recognize customary law (KPA, 2018). In recent years, a major cause of land conflict has been the increasing commodification of land. This has led to increasing cases of land grabbing, sometimes with the State taking on the role of a “broker” for private investments. Land grabbing is defined as: “the control (whether through ownership, lease, concession, contracts, quotas, or general power) of larger than locally typical amounts of land by any persons or entities (public or private, foreign or domestic) via any means (‘legal’ or ‘illegal’) for purposes of speculation, extraction, resource control, or commodification at the expense of agroecology, land stewardship, food sovereignty and human rights” (BakerSmith and Attila, 2016). Yet to many people, land remains as more than just an economic asset or commodity. Rather, land is seen as the foundation of one’s home and community, personal security, faith, culture, livelihood, and even identity. Current Drivers of Land and Resource Conflicts Based on the six country studies, the current drivers of land and resource conflicts are summarized in Table 3 below. Table 3. Key drivers of land and resource conflicts Country ANGOC Bangladesh Drivers of land conflict Disputes over private property (intra-family, boundary disputes, sales, rents, and leases) n Conflicts over property rights arising from non-registration of land parcels, missing or inaccurate records, falsification of deeds n Agrarian conflicts, including landowner-tenant disputes, evictions by landowners n Commercialization of agricultural land, contract farming, agribusiness investments with political interests n Indigenous peoples’ rights vs. statutory laws (Bengali settlers vs. indigenous peoples in the plains and the CHT) n Unsettled “Vested Property” and “Abandoned Property” n Undistributed khas lands; grabbing of khas lands n Favored State concessions and grabbing of water bodies n