We examine five forested landscapes in Africa (Cameroon, Madagascar, and Tanzania) and Asia (Indonesia and Laos) at different stages of landscape change. In all five areas, forest cover (outside of protected areas) continues to decrease despite local people’s recognition of the importance of forest products and services. After forest conversion, agroforestry systems and fallows provide multiple functions and valued products, and retain significant biodiversity. But there are indications that such land use is transitory, with gradual simplification and loss of complex agroforests and fallows as land use becomes increasingly individualistic and profit driven. In Indonesia and Tanzania, farmers favor monocultures (rubber and oil palm, and sugarcane, respectively) for their high financial returns, with these systems replacing existing complex agroforests. In the study sites in Madagascar and Laos, investments in agroforests and new crops remain rare, despite government attempts to eradicate swidden systems and their multifunctional fallows. We discuss approaches to assessing local values related to landscape cover and associated goods and services. We highlight discrepancies between individual and collective responses in characterizing land use tendencies, and discuss the effects of accessibility on land management. We conclude that a combination of social, economic, and spatially explicit assessment methods is necessary to inform land use planning. Furthermore, any efforts to modify current trends will require clear incentives, such as through carbon finance. We speculate on the nature of such incentive schemes and the possibility of rewarding the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale and in a socially equitable manner.

Worldwide, forests provide a wide variety of resources to rural inhabitants, and especially to the poor. In Madagascar, forest resources make important contributions to the livelihoods of the rural population living at the edges of these forests. Although people benefit from forest resources, forests are continuously cleared and converted into arable land. Despite long-term efforts on the part of researchers, development cooperation projects and government, Madagascar has not been able to achieve a fundamental decrease in deforestation. The question of why deforestation continues in spite of such efforts remains. To answer this question, we aimed at understanding deforestation and forest fragmentation from the perspective of rural households in the Manompana corridor on the east coast. Applying a sustainable livelihood approach, we explored local social-ecological systems to understand: (i) how livelihood strategies leading to deforestation evolve and (ii) how the decrease of forest impacts on households' strategies. Results highlight the complexity of the environmental, cultural and political context in which households' decision-making takes place. Further, we found crucial impacts of deforestation and forest fragmentation on livelihood systems, but also recognized that people have been able to adapt to the changing landscapes without major impacts on their welfare. RÉSUMÉ Partout dans le monde les forêts fournissent une grande variété de ressources aux habitants des régions rurales, particulièrement aux plus pauvres. À Madagascar, les ressources forestières contribuent dans une grande mesure aux moyens d'existence des populations riveraines des forêts. Cependant, bien que les populations tirent parti des ressources de la forêt, les défrichements ne cessent pas et la conversion des zones boisées en terres cultivables se poursuit. Malgré les efforts entrepris depuis des années par les milieux de la recherche et du développement ainsi que par le gouvernement, Madagascar n'a pas encore connu d'inversion du rythme de la déforestation. Pourquoi les défrichements se poursuivent-ils en dépit des efforts entrepris ? C'est à cette question que nous souhaitons apporter une réponse en essayant de comprendre la déforestation et la fragmentation des forêts en prenant en compte les moyens d'existence des ménages ruraux dans le corridor de Manompana, côte Est de Madagascar. En tirant parti de la méthodologie SLA (sustainable livelihood approach), nous avons analysé les systèmes d'existence des populations locales dans le but de comprendre (i) comment évoluent les stratégies de vie impliquant la déforestation et (ii) quel est l'impact de la diminution des surfaces forestières sur les stratégies de vie des ménages. Les résultats mettent en évidence la complexité du contexte environnemental, culturel et politique dans lequel les ménages sont amenés à prendre leurs décisions. La déforestation et la fragmentation des forêts exercent des impacts cruciaux sur les moyens d'existence des ménages. Cependant, il apparait également que l...

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Following the IUCN 5th World Congress on Protected Areas in 2003, the then-President of Madagascar decided to increase the area of Madagascar's protected areas from 1.7 to 6 million ha. To combine the aims of protection and timber production, a new concept was developed through the establishment of community-based forest management (CBFM) sites, called KoloAla. However, experience shows that similar management transfers to communities in Madagascar have only been successful in a very few cases. We aimed to explore the success to be expected of this new approach in the particular case of the Manompana corridor at Madagascar's eastern coast. In a first step, the readiness of the corridor's resource users for CBFM has been analysed according to the seven resource users' attributes developed by Ostrom that predict an effective self-organized resource management. In a second step, we explored how KoloAla addresses known challenges of Madagascar's CBFM. Analyses lead in a rather sober conclusion. Although KoloAla attempts to address the goals of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and timber production under a single umbrella, it does so in a rather non-innovative way. Challenges with regard to the state's environmental governance, agricultural inefficiency and thus deforestation remain unsolved.