The stars appear to be aligned for a sustained effort to improve information to rural development policy makers about the impact space has on the opportunities for development of the ubiquitous smallholder households in rural areas of Southeast Asian countries. The influences of spatially heterogeneous resource constraints on farming activities, distance to markets and institutions, and spatial interaction among smallholders can now be better accounted for in modelling work as a result of improvements in analytical methodologies, the growing availability of so-called 'big data' and access to spatially defined information in panel data sets. The scope for taking advantage of these advances is demonstrated with two examples from a Southeast Asian country, the Philippines: spillovers and neighbourhood effects in impact studies and the development of sophisticated spatial stochastic frontier models to measure and decompose productivity growth on smallholdings.