Mapping nature: Territorialization of forest rights in Thailand (original) (raw)

Dealing with Contradictions: Examining National Forest Reserves in Thailand

Thailand has experienced rapid deforestation especially since the s. While large areas of forestlands were designated as national forest reserves, many forests were actually converted into farmlands. This article focuses on the institutional and administrative aspects of the national forest reserve system, the core institution of forest conservation in Thailand, and examines the institutional structure, historical process mostly since the s, and procedures of the national forest reserve system and related policies at both in national and local levels. The national forest reserve system institutionally lacked sufficient mechanisms for enforcement and, because local people's land use was not investigated in advance, the contradiction arose that large numbers of people resided and cultivated land in national forest reserves. While occasionally policies to give cultivation rights to these people were carried out, designation of national forest reserves continued without any structural amendments, and the contradiction was perpetuated. In the procedures of forest protection units, the sole organ for on-the-spot policing, breaches were sometimes overlooked in order to balance the regulations and actual situation of the local people's livelihood. Forest officers are basically faithful to their tasks, even though they know the system itself substantially fails to function. But they also behave in realistic and flexible ways in applying principles that are far from appropriate to the actual situations they encounter. Institutionalization and activation of such an unrealistic system can also be interpreted as creating a wide range of discretion, which has enabled realistic forest conservation to be carried out as far as possible in the prevailing social or political climate without much friction. In order to argue for a suitable forest conservation system, this point must be taken into consideration.

Forest Assessment and Conservation in Thailand 1

2000

In the past, Thailand was covered with dense forests distributed all over the country, except in some areas of the great central plain where the forest had been removed to make way for agriculture. The first project concerned with forest resources assessment in Thailand was conducted by the Ordnance Survey Department in 1961. The panchromatic aerial photographs of medium scale 1: 25,000 were interpreted for the main land use classification. It reported that the existing forest of Thailand in 1961 amounted to 273,628.50 sq. km or 53.33 percent of the total area of the country. In 1975 aerial photographs at the large scale of 1:15,000 were applied for cadastral survey for land titling and other multipurpose in Thailand. The Royal Forest Department (RFD) traditionally utilized these photographs to classify the forest types for inventory purposes. However, the aerial photographs, which are produced by the Royal Thai Survey Department, are rapidly going out of date and are time consuming for interpretation and mapping. The forest map that is produced at scale of 1:250,000 are required to updating the existing forest area. In 1970, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) introduced the usefulness and possible applications of data from Earth Resources Technology Satellite (Landsat presently) to the Government of Thailand (Klankamsorn, 1992). After that, the Thailand National Remote Sensing Program was set up in 1971 by cabinet decision as a new technology. According to this decision, the National Research Council of Thailand formulated the outline of the remote sensing development policy indicating the long range framework and guideline. The Thailand Remote Sensing program was later accepted by NASA in 1972 to participate in Landsat missions. This created the availability of up-to-date and accurate information required by the various government agencies concerned with the planning for development and management of natural resources. Landsat data have been applied in various disciplines. Moreover, remote sensing technology has been accepted by the National Economic and Social Development Board as a tool to investigate natural resources (Sabhasri, et. al, 1980).

People in Between: Conversion and Conservation of Forest Lands in Thailand

Development and Change, 2000

The analysis of ‘ambiguous lands’ and the people who inhabit them is most revealing for understanding environmental deterioration in Thailand. ‘Ambiguous lands’ are those which are legally owned by the state, but are used and cultivated by local people. Land with an ambiguous property status attracts many different actors: villagers hungry for unoccupied arable lands in the frontiers; government departments looking for new project sites; and conservation agencies searching for new areas to be protected. This article shows, first, how two types of ambiguous land — state‐owned but privately‐cultivated land, and communal lands — were created. It then examines how the Karen, one of the hill peoples living on the ambiguous lands, have been struggling to survive between the forces of capitalistic development and forest conservation. Using a detailed study of forest use and dependency conducted in two Karen villages, I argue that the state’s efforts to reduce the Karen’s forest dependency,...

Farming the forest: Managing people and trees in reserved forests in Thailand

Geoforum, 1990

The accelerated rate of global forest depletion poses a series of complex problems for development planners and resource managers in many developing nations. Among the issues being confronted are the need for foresters to gain new skills in managing human resources, design forest use systems which are both productive and sustainable, and to insure that the benefits of these systems are disrtibuted more equitably. In the last quarter of a century reserved forest lands in Thailand have been seriously degraded through deforestation, overcutting, and the illegal encroachment of poor and landless farmers. To counter these forces the government proposed two new forest management programs in 1975 which would grant certificates of use or limited land use rights to some degraded forest land in areas of national reserved forest. This paper examines the use of this policy in the Forest Village and National Forest Land Allotment Projects in northeast Thailand. Since their implementation in the Dong Mun National Reserved Forest 8 years ago, these projects have been plagued with conflicts over de jure and de facto land rights, public misperceptions about the government's grant of amnesty to illegal forest residents, problems controlling immigration, and the small 2.4 ha land allotments given to project participants. These conditions have produced unequal access to and distribution of land, allotment of land poorly suited for agriculture, the destruction of reforestation plots, continued degradation of reserved forest, and a pronounced pattern of social and economic inequality within and between the villages participating in both projects. We argue that these problems are fundamentally caused by government failures to correctly assess population pressures on land in the northeast and to modify program design to better fit community needs, capabilities, and insure equitability in the distribution of benefits introduction The need for improved forest resource management has become a key concern among planners and resource managers in many developing nations. The importance of this issue is nowhere more apparent than in the rate at which forests in the developing world are being degraded. Recent estimates place the level of global forest degradation at 11 million ha

Land tenure and natural resource management in northern Thailand—A case study from a Hmong village

1999

The Hmong of Mae Sa Mai established an administration system which coexists with traditional Hmong social structures and is oriented on the Thai administration system. Although the farmers are not able to get legal land titles they recognise local land ownership and use rights. They are practising a strongly cash oriented agricultural system nowadays. They are able to manage water resources themselves, though community irrigation schemes have not been established. Some villagers show strong interest in forest conservation and are engaged in reforesting activities. Opting for forest conservation, though, seems to be a strategy to deal with governmental agencies to ensure the village location in the national park.

How Participatory Is Thailand's Forestry Policy

The British influence on the teak trade since the early 1830s forced the Thai government (Bangkok) to increase its direct interference in the affairs of the northern tributary states (Lan Na) because of a threat to annex the states that stemmed from problems in the timber business. As a result, the influence of the northern princes in political economic power was almost entirely destroyed; thus the princes intensified their efforts to gain income from agricultural taxes and fees, thus creating pressure on the availability of arable land for Thai farmers, who were forced to find other places with cheaper taxes. The establishment of the Royal Forestry Department in 1896, led by Englishmen up to 1932, planted a long-lasting influence on the future of Thailand's forestry policy, which was since then set as "cutting and processing timber for export to Europe."

The Crisis of Deforestation and Public Governance of Community Forests in Thailand

Thammasat Review, 2015

This paper argues that the Thai state’s forest management since 1896 has been centralized in accordance with the traditional public administration regime, with its emphasis on top-down control without consultation or local people’s participation. This regime resulted in deforestation and crisis, which led to social conflicts during in the 1970s and 1980s. The Thai state was ineffective in managing this severe problem and then, in the late 1990s, it shifted its forest management policy to the New Public Governance regime by granting communities’ rights in forest management. This new management policy features collective public leaderships, working networks and the use of soft instruments of dialogue and mutual learning, which results in protection for the forest but also recovery in many devastated areas.