Environmental regulation of biodiversity hotspots, including wetlands, is of increasing importance in an era when species and habitat loss is common. A number of global environmental protection regimes attempt to set up processes that protect vulnerable species and their habitats. One such regulatory regime, the Ramsar Convention (Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat), provides overarching protection for hundreds of wetlands around the world. In this paper, one Ramsar listed wetland, Southeast Asia's and Cambodia's largest freshwater lake, the Tonle Sap, is subject to a legal geographical analysis. A legal geography approach – one that puts front and centre an examination of both the environmental protection regulations for the wetlands and the people subject to them – enables the complexity of the legal‐human–environment dynamic in this unique wetlands to be revealed. Measuring the success, or otherwise, of environmental protection regulations requires an understanding of both the biophysical and social dynamics of the place subject to that protection. Geographers, particularly legal geographers, are well placed to document the human–environment dimensions of place and to expose fragilities or disconnections between regulations and place. Regulations that do not take adequate account of complex people–place dynamics are likely to fall short of expectations and run the risk of becoming self‐defeating, giving rise to a potential catch‐22 scenario.

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A challenge in the implementation of wetlands conservation targets lies in translating principles into practice in an array of different biophysical, social and regulatory settings. The interpretation of global protection objectives can become garbled if the institutional arrangements, particularly the regulatory ones, are ill suited to the task. When decision‐making processes are complex and multi‐layered, the regulatory regime can become ineffectual because it fails to take adequate account of the intricate connections between people, place and law. This dissonance compromises the effectiveness of law as a means of regulating human–environment interactions and may threaten the viability of critical wetlands. This paper draws attention to the need for more in‐depth analysis of the effects of legal layering [following Roth, Boelens, & Zwarteveen, (The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 47, pp. 456–475) and the von Benda‐Beckmann tradition] in conservation and environmental protection practice. Based on field data from the Ramsar listed wetlands of the Tonle Sap lake in central Cambodia, closer analysis of legal layering reveals regulations that appear to perpetuate existing power structures and decision‐making dynamics through a process of bricolage (Rusca, Schwartz, Hadzovic, & Ahlers, , European Journal of Development Research, 27, pp. 777–792). In this context a legal geographical perspective proves a powerful lens to expose the dynamics of environmental use/protection decision‐making.

The scholarship of legal geography provides an alternative way of conceptualising human-environmental relationships. While laws determine access to and regulate use of land through practices of bounding and excluding, geographical studies provide insights into the way that both physical and social processes create places. The meeting of these perspectives is invaluable. Legal geography perspectives are coming of age in an era when transdisciplinary perspectives on human/ nonhuman-landscape interactions are of core concern to wider land use policy considerations. This paper draws on legal geography scholarship about property framed around three key concepts (1) tenure security, (2) exclusion, and (3) rights to reveal the social complexity surrounding these issues. This complexity is magnified in non-Western settings, and in this paper, the legal geography perspective of analysis is extended to a developing country context. Using Cambodia as the primary setting, this paper challenges the unquestioning exportation of a dominant 'Western' property model into non-Western contexts.

SUMMARYProtected areas remain the most commonly used tool forin situconservation; however growth in the USA's system of public lands has stagnated while private land conservation continues to expand. Easements can provide a range of ecosystem services (ESs), but it is unknown whether conservation easements maintain ES capacities equivalent to public protected areas. Evaluation of the capacity of seven ESs on federal and state protected areas and conservation easements in the USA using spatially-explicit ES models and publicly available data indicated that ES capacities in easements were equal to or greater than capacities within state or federal protected areas for six of seven services and, when bundled together, conservation easements protected greater focal ES capacity than other conservation areas. Economic incentive programmes and regulatory mechanisms may be used to stimulate capacity improvements for surface water regulation, riparian filtration, erosion control, and carbon storage on conservation easements, and landscape-level conservation efforts should (1) continue to protect natural and uninhabited areas that provide ecosystem and biological diversity, (2) expand private conservation efforts close to human population centres, and (3) limit future development to areas with high regulating service capacity that can sustain new population growth.

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Legal geography (LG) unravels the co-constitutive relationship between law, space and society. Much LG scholarship has focused on urban issues situated in the Global North, but there is an emerging scholarship that explicitly extends this effort to the Global South and to rural locations. For example, Gillespie's LG research in Southeast Asia exposes problems in governance institutions and decision-making processes that can unintentionally exacerbate existing socioeconomic disadvantage. The feminist political ecology (FPE) approach, as conceptualized by Rocheleau et al. and more recently expanded upon by Elmhirst provides a useful additional framework for considering the intersectionality of social and environmental factors which constitute identity, and the mutual dependency between identity and ecological processes. In this paper we argue that marrying an LG perspective with FPE results in a more nuanced understanding of complex legalhuman-environment dynamics. Our focus on lore/law plus gendered identity as a lens for analysis blends an emergent LG literature with insights from FPE. This paper draws on research from a pilot project on the formal and informal regulatory mechanisms that enable and/or disable sustainable conservation in the protected wetlands of the Tonle Sap (lake) in central Cambodia.

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