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Volume 47, Issue 3
Displaying 1-7 of 7 articles from this issue
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Special Issue
Land Use Changes in the Uplands of Southeast Asia: Proximate and Distant Causes
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Stephen J. Leisz, Yasuyuki Kono, Jefferson Fox, Masayuki Yanagisawa, T ...2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 237-243
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSDownload PDF (82K) -
A Village-level Case StudyMinh Truong Dao, Yasuyuki Kono, Masayuki Yanagisawa, Stephen J. Leisz, ...2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 244-262
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis paper examines the land cover and land use changes in one village in the Vietnam's northern mountain region. It overviews the changing forest policies in Vietnam from the country's independence in 1954 to 2005 and relates these changes to the management of forest land at the village level. Findings show that until the late-1980s/early-1990s Vietnam's policies encouraged the harvesting of timber for nation building activities and the expansion of cultivated land, leading to the decreased forest area within the village. After this, as government policies changed to encourage forest protection and the planting of trees by local people, tree covered forest land area increased. The trigger for the change in land cover and land use at the village level in both periods is a consistent political intention represented in a series of laws and decrees and consequent extension activities. These established a strong linkage between national and the village level forest governance and led to the almost simultaneous occurrence of national policy change and forest recovery. It is concluded that it is important to recognize the multiple channels that link the government agencies with people and the intensive learning process needed for local people to understand the political intentions behind laws and regulations promulgated at the central government level.View full abstractDownload PDF (4726K) -
A Case Study in Northern Lao VillagesThatheva Saphangthong, Yasuyuki Kono2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 263-286
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis article highlights land use changes of composite swidden farming villages in the northern part of Laos under the drastic transformation of political and economic systems at national and regional levels, including civil war, independence, implementation of a planned economy and the introduction of a market-oriented economy, during the last several decades. Interpretation of remotely sensed images and farming system analysis of the selected study villages revealed the extensive development of agriculture coupled with a rapid deforestation in the 1970s and the early 80s and the intensification of land use and commercialization of farming in the following period. These findings suggest two kinds of mechanisms of land use changes: continuous and gradual changes under a social regime and discontinuous and drastic changes when the social regime collapses. This article concludes that the latter mechanism is much more destructive and exploitative than the former and dominates the long-term tendency of land use changes.View full abstractDownload PDF (3847K) -
Stephen J. Leisz2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 287-308
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis paper draws on four hamlet case studies and a broader three district study to identify land cover and land use changes in the upper Ca River Basin of Nghe An Province and the possible trigger events that are influencing land cover and land use changes. The study uses two chronosequences of Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery, from 1989 to 1993 and from 2000 to 2003, to classify the land cover and land use for the larger study area and for the hamlet study areas. This information is combined with socio-economic data that was collected at the district and hamlet level in a series of field studies carried out from 1997 to 2003. Results show that areas of mature tree cover have expanded, the area devoted to long-term swidden/fallow land use has decreased and the area under permanent agriculture and short fallow swidden systems have increased, across both of the scales studied. The analysis indicates that a forest transition is taking place at the broader three district level and also within the four hamlet case study areas. Two trigger events are identified that may have helped initiate the forest transition. One is the agriculture and forest land allocation programs that were initiated in the districts and in three of the four hamlets during the 1990s and early 2000s and the second is market influences that appear to be linked to the increase in cattle and pig raising in the case study hamlets.View full abstractDownload PDF (6988K) -
Ratanakiri, CambodiaJefferson Fox, John B. Vogler, Mark Poffenberger2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 309-329
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis 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.View full abstractDownload PDF (3305K) -
from Swidden to RubberSithong Thongmanivong, Yayoi Fujita, Khamla Phanvilay, Thoumthone Vong ...2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 330-347
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSLand use and farmers’ livelihoods in mountainous regions of northern Laos are rapidly moving away from subsistence to market based agricultural systems, changing farmers’ relationship with land and natural resources. The current study examines patterns of land use change in northern Laos, especially focusing on the expansion of agricultural land in upland areas. It also examines factors that influence local farmers’ livelihood and their decisions on land use. A series of government policies that were implemented since the 1980s restricted upland farmers’ access to upland fields and fallow forests, and led to the relocation of upland communities. The opening of regional borders for trade in the early 1990s, which brought new economic opportunities for local farmers, further accelerated the demand for agricultural land and led to a concentration of population in settlements along the road. A combination of both external and internal factors are influencing households in rural areas to actively seek new economic opportunities and adapt their livelihood basis, as well as altering their relationship with land and resources. This rapid transformation also questions the effectiveness of the government’s resource management policy that developed during the 1990s aiming to control expansion of upland shifting cultivation practices through delineation of resource boundaries.View full abstractDownload PDF (7111K) -
Masahiro Umezaki, Hongwei Jiang2009 Volume 47 Issue 3 Pages 348-362
Published: December 31, 2009
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThe authors reconstructed the changes of adaptive strategies in two Li ethnic minority villages (Shuiman and Paori villages) in Hainan Island of China. Shuiman village lies at the foot of Mount Wuzhishan and has been influenced by government by-laws for environmental conservation and tourism promotion since the 1990s, while Paori village has adopted cash crops that have been introduced by the government since the 1980s. The interview surveys conducted with the villagers, together with the analyses of satellite images indicated that in Shuiman village, the past grasslands became secondary forest dominated by Haname lidacea over the past 20 years, while, in Paori village, the shrub/grasslands and secondary forest as well as the place where slash-and-burn gardening was practiced, were converted to cash crop gardens. The area of “mature forest” or “secondary forest” has increased in both village territories. “Triggers” of such changes were enforced by government by-laws in Shuiman and the villagers’ adoption of cash crops after “epochal” events in Paori village. External factors such as the price of cash crops on world markets and the conditions of infrastructure also affected changes in the adaptive strategies of the villages.View full abstractDownload PDF (4680K)
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