Abstract
This paper draws on case studies from three communities in Ratanakiri to illustrate both the forces driving land-use and tenure change as well as how effective community stewardship can guide agricultural transitions. The study combines a time series of remotely sensed data from 1989 to 2006 to evaluate changes in land use, and relates this data to in-depth ground truth observations and social research from three villages. The methodology was designed to evaluate how indigenous communities who had historically managed forest lands as communal resources, are responding to market forces and pressures from land speculators. Krala Village received support from local non-government organizations (NGOs) to strengthen community, map its land, demarcate boundaries, strengthen resource use regulations, and develop land-use plans. The two other villages, Leu Khun and Tuy, each received successively less support from outside organizations for purposes of resource mapping and virtually no support for institutional strengthening. The remote sensing data indicates that in Krala, over the 16 year study period, protected forest areas remained virtually intact, while total forest cover declined at an annual rate of only 0.86% whereas in Leu Khun and Tuy the annual rates were 1.63 and 4.88% respectively.
