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... Community forests (CF) in northern Burma, particularly in Kachin State, have been sprouting up in villages since the mid-2000s, spearheaded by national NGOs. The recent watershed of CF establishment follows several contingent foundational factors: greater political stability and government control in cease-fire zones; enhanced NGO capacity, access, and effectiveness in these areas; and most prominently the recent threat of agribusiness. This paper will critically examine (inter-)national NGO‟s assistance to rural farmers in formalizing collective forestland in cease-fire zones as a resistance strategy to land dispossession from military/state-backed agribusiness concessions.
My overall argument is that while CF represents a legally-sanctioned, bottom-up resistance against land dispossession – a rare phenomenon in a country such as Burma – an unintended consequence is producing forms of contested state authority and power in cease-fire zones. For instances of post-war zones with continued contentious ethnic politics and contested state authority, as is the case in northern Burma, rebuilding state-society resource relations and institutions present new political and resource use and access challenges. Data presented here is part of a broader research agenda conducted since the early-2000s on resource politics in northern Burma, with qualitative analysis for this paper based upon interviews with CF user groups, participant observation at CF workshops, interviews with Burmese NGOs, and secondary materials. This research project is a work-in-progress, and all errors are of course of my own unintentional making.
CF represents a refashioned collective property regime. This novel land management strategy does not represent any sort of customary arrangement; in fact Kachin are upland swidden farmers, not strictly forest-dwelling communities. This scenario then causes conflict in that the CF joint- management plans mirror state land classification schemes that firmly delineate between „forest. and „agriculture. land uses, unlike traditional land management (much like for other rural communities) that does not clearly separate forest from agriculture. CF falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry (MoF), which enables the increasingly weak MoF to stake an institutional claim against the increasingly powerful Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation (MoAI). In addition to symbolizing emerging state institutional struggles in cease-fire zones, newly established CF are also altering local resource use and access by villagers planting state-favored, high-value timber trees, such as infamous Burmese teak, in former swiddens – an act that uncomfortably brings colonial-dictated resource use practices into the present. Furthermore, only CF user groups can access forest products, with outsiders (non-CF members, even within the village) formally blocked from access, including for shifting cultivation.
By farmers and NGOs attempting to block the expansion of large-scale agricultural plantations, they instead cultivate state authority and institutions, in this case the Forestry Department, state-recognized land management categories, and new state-governed farmers. This case study highlights the importance of seriously considering how development interventions cultivate new forms of authority and power –perceived as both legitimate and illegitimate by different actors – in post-war zones when devising collective action strategies. These same interventions also inculcate new environmental practices in farmers, shaping them into NGO-state subjects that contrast with their customary practices. In this case, NGOs assisting farmers in establishing state-authorized collective property in the form of CF does not respect customary land use, facilitates bringing in a villager-perceived illegitimate state, and is increasing food insecurity. The positives though – which may or may not outweigh the negatives – include stemming the tide of land dispossession by private companies and providing a potential platform for political mobilizing at the village level. An alternative strategy could be to push for legal recognition of customary land management, such as upland swidden cultivation, could potentially block rubber expansion while concomitantly strengthening food security, customary land use regimes, and traditional village power bases to challenge state centralization in these politically contested cease-fire ethnic areas...
