No abstract

The Peruvian government seeks to stop deforestation in its primary forest in the Amazon. It alleges that the main culprit of deforestation is smallholders who practice swidden farming. However, this is a simplified view, concealing the main reasons for deforestation and the complexity of land use changes. By studying land and forest use through the lens of the indigenous Kechwa-Lamas people, who live along forest covered mountain slopes in the region San Martín, we attempt to show the complex and intertwined reasons for deforestation, as well as how the indigenous people try to cope with this development. We identify and discuss three "ideal" types of land use-the swidden and tree based systems of the Kechwa-Lamas people, agricultural intensification practices (particularly perennial cash crops), and state conservation approaches. In practice these uses overlap spatially and have synergistic and antagonistic aspects. Kechwa-Lamas may clear land for tree cash crops, but they also manage forests and seek to conserve them for particular needs. Migrants from the Andes clear forests to plant perennial crops, penetrating the ancestral territories of the Kechwa-Lamas, while large scale capital intensive agriculture often intrudes into primary forest and jeopardizes existing subsistence systems. The opening up of forest areas in San Martín and its gradual integration into the nation's market economy, together with the local government's division of the region into zones intended for different purposes, have had both intended and unintended consequences. There is a need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the forms and complexity of forests and their transitions, particularly where secondary and managed forests replace previous rainforest areas. The findings draw on field observations and interviews with households, key NGO informants and a detailed case study of 13 Kechwa-Lamas villages.

The bureaucracy that regulates land tenure, agriculture and communitybased forest management (CBFM) in the Brazilian Amazon aims at achieving an impartial administration and process of practices that complies with the intention of laws, regulations and decrees and safeguards the rights of the citizens at large and particularly people in a vulnerable position. Yet the local power-holders' actual interpretation and implementation of laws, regulations and decrees is to large extent opaque, arbitrary and contingent upon subjective intentions, interests and perspectives. These irregularities and arbitrariness affect poor smallholders hard and hamper their access to resources and formal rights. This paper intends to show how the smallholders who have initiated a CBFM project in a settlement in the north-eastern region of the Brazilian Amazon are unable to manage the project on their own, because they lack financial capital, as well as the necessary social and political capital to be able to obtain compulsory permits and make the contracted firm and people comply with the terms of the contracts. In order to transcend these difficulties, the smallholders utilize their social networks, above all vertical contacts, to attract brokers. The paper argues that this strategy assigns great power and influence to various brokers, and affects how policies are implemented, how resources are distributed or not distributed and how power relations are articulated. These aspects of governance and governmentality are grossly under-theorized in research on development projects in general and CBFM in particular. The paper is based on participant observation and various forms of interviews, carried out in 2012-2017.

No abstract

The neo-liberal rationale behind REDD programs aims to create a market for common resources, with monetary payment incentives as the most important driver for conservation initiatives. In reality, however, the chain of implementation from UN to village, encompassing numerous processes of design, planning, and practices at distinct levels and contexts, is more institutional and political than economic. This research project follows the planning and implementation process of a REDD+ project in the Kolo Hills, Tanzania. The analysis showed that the project’s main objectives were poorly understood by the men and women of the target group, who interpreted it as yet another top-down postcolonial project. The target group’s interpretations also made them act in accordance with their own cultural rationality and logic of practice and not as the donors and project implementers had assumed. The project objectives of the payment system, consciousness awareness and engagement of the target population, thus, seem to have failed, despite the donors’ and implementers’ claim of success.