With past and continued destruction of primary forest worldwide, secondary forest constitute a large and growing component of forest cover and have been found to be very important for a wide range of goods and services. Despite its widespread usage, there is considerable ambiguity with regard to the meaning of the term 'secondary forest' and the different forest types it encompasses.

Swidden farming is the main agent of conversion of primary forests to secondary forests in the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia, but there is a deterioration and decline of the practice with land use intensification. The population growth in northern Thailand has forced lowland farmers practising permanent wet rice cultivation to turn to short rotation swidden in the foot hill zone.

Much of mainland Southeast Asia's primary forest has been converted into secondary vegetation types in the past several decades. In the Lower Mekong Subregion, nearly 100 million ha of forest were significantly altered or removed, with depletion in terms of areal percent most severe in Thailand and Vietnam.

Secondary forests form a major component of the forest types in the Central Himalayan region and in the north eastern hills of India. Deforestation in these areas is largely due to external pressures of timber extraction for industrial use.

This brief article begins with a summary of CIFOR's work on criteria and indicators for sustainable forest management (C&I). It then discusses how CIFOR programs combined to form the program called Local People, Devolution and Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests". It briefly describes the research approach and the research design underway in 9 countries.

How can different interest groups engage together in learning processes that enable them to better manage community forests? In this volume, practitioners from eight countries document their experience with the aim of identifying how to characterize social learning, as well as how to improve upon current practice.

This paper looks at the impact of the introduction of new soybean technologies on the clearing of natural vegetation (forest and savanna) in southern Brazil, the Brazilian Cerrado, and Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

This chapter spells out the theoretical framework for the discussion and case studies of the book. First, it provides precise definitions of technological change and classify technological change into different types based on their factor intensities. The discussion starts off with a single farm household.

This study focuses on the impacts of decentralisation on forests and estate crops in the original districts of Kampar and Indragiri Hulu, located in Riau Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The research was conducted during 2000, preceding the beginnings of decentralisation in January 2001, with a brief follow-up to March of that year.

Swidden agriculture in tropical Asia is a diverse practice, making it difficult to draw general conclusions on trends of the development of swidden fallow secondary forests (SFSF).

Malinau District, established through partition in 1999, is the largest district in East Kalimantan and contains some of its largest tracts of forest. With decentralization, the district has sought to generate revenues from its forests, but these efforts have been handicapped by a concurrent lack of institutional capacities to manage rapid forest exploitation and conflicts over claims.

This paper provides an economic perspective on concepts related to adaptive co-management (ACM). The discussion is cast within a formal generalised complex system (CS) framework. The authors explicitly explore the hypothesis of whether ACM can be regarded as an emergent strategy under specific conditions.