Zaehringer, Julie G.; Lundsgaard-Hansen, Lara; Thein, Tun Tun; Llopis, Jorge C.; Tun, Nwe Nwe; Myint, Win; Schneider, Flurina (2020). The cash crop boom in southern Myanmar: tracing land use regime shifts through participatory mapping. Ecosystems and people, 16(1), pp. 36-49. Taylor & Francis 10.1080/26395916.2019.1699164
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Text (The cash crop boom in southern Myanmar: tracing land use regime shifts through participatory mapping)
Zähringer_et_al_2020_Cash_crop.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons: Attribution (CC-BY). Download (2MB) | Preview |
Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing vast transformations. Myanmar was long an exceptionto this trend–until recent policy reforms put economic development at the forefront. Underambiguous land rights, commercial agriculture has spread rapidly, causing an unprecedentedloss of biodiversity-rich forest. In south-eastern Myanmar, where land tenure is highly contesteddue to several decades of conflict, scientific evidence on these complex social-ecological pro-cesses is lacking. In the absence of past satellite data, we applied a participatory mappingapproach and co-produced annual land use information with local land users between 1990and 2017 for two case study landscapes. Results show that both landscapes have undergonea land use regime shift from small-scale farmers’shifting cultivation to plantations of rubber, betelnut, cashew, and oil palm. These changes are likely to have long-term impacts on land users’livelihoods and the environment. We call for a reconsideration of land governance arrangementsand concerted land use planning that respects the rights of local land users and strengthens theirrole as environmental stewards. Applied with careful facilitation, participatory mapping could bean important tool to engage communities in the highly challenging process of transforming landgovernance to achieve more sustainable outcomes in this post-conflict context.
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