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Shifting cultivators depend on forest biomass inputs to nourish their crops. For them, forest resilience has an immediate impact: it affects crop productivity. A decline in the rate of recovery following shifting cultivation would ultimately affect local, regional and global carbon budgets, with feedbacks to climate. Yet the long-term impacts of shifting cultivation have been quantified in only six locations. In this study, we reanalyze data from these locations to determine whether the rate of biomass recovery is the same from cycle to cycle. Further, using case studies in Southern Yucatan, Mexico and West Kalimantan, Indonesia, we investigate the ecological and socioeconomic factors that affect forest resilience and thus determine whether or not shifting cultivation is sustainable. The reanalysis links aboveground biomass recovery following shifting cultivation to site productivity, forest age, fallow length, history of cultivation, and soil texture. Across locations, biomass accumulation rate declines by 9.3 percent with each cycle of shifting cultivation. Per cycle change in biomass accumulation rate is significantly more negative in younger forests and forests that experience a shorter fallow period. However, more detailed analyses for two case studies suggest that a purely ecological framework is of limited effectiveness in explaining variability in the effect of repeated shifting cultivation. Rather, socioeconomic factors such as migration, subsidies, roads, and settlement history can alter the outcome of shifting cultivation by limiting the accumulation and use of local knowledge.

This study documents labor migration and its impacts on household income, material well-being, and land-use practices in Mexico's southern Yucatán and examines the relation of labor migration to local forest recovery. Drawing on a 203-household survey in 14 communities, we contrast migrating and non-migrating households, showing that migration earnings substitute for agricultural earnings and that migrating households cultivate significantly less farmland. A larger percentage of migrating households maintain pasture, but, on average, not more hectares. These dynamics are consistent with the decline in deforestation registered in the area for the year 2000. Incipient local forest recovery is considered in light of current forest transition theory, with an examination of three hypothesized paths to forest recovery: economic development, forest scarcity, and smallholder agricultural adjustment. The southern Yucatán case illustrates the need to explicitly incorporate the role of globalizing household economies into forest transition theory.

Based on research conducted in a migrant-sending community in south-eastern Mexico, we find that male out-migration has forced women to take on labour tasks that are associated with new spatial and mobility patterns. While these patterns have potential for increased empowerment for women, they also call the women's morality into question, resulting in a policing of the women's behaviour, and a simultaneous restriction of their mobility, by themselves and others. Therefore, we find male labour out-migration has resulted in contradictory changes in women's mobility, with ambiguous results for women's gender empowerment.