9.1 Constructing the Meanings of Land and a Community
According to the questions, what are the meanings of land and a community that each social actor attempts to construct, how they construct, and the effects of their construction, the research found that the Thai state, social movements, and the Pa Bong community constructed and contested over different meanings of land resource
351
and a community. Ideally, these actors similarly saw land and forest in upland areas as important and advocated community-based approaches. However, each social actor has different perception of land resource and a community depending upon their experiences, interests, and situations faced. They attempted to construct and contest the meanings of land resource and a community through their distinct approaches. Influenced by global discourses on land values, in the policy level, the Thai state claims to conserve forest on the one hand, and actively privatizes land and natural resources so that the land would be controllable and transferable through market mechanism on the other hand. In fact, both meanings of land as a resource of economic development and a conservation resource are constructed by the state in order to claim state rights over the land which has been occupied by local people. Business actors, such as middlemen, domestic corporations, and TNCs involved in agro-commodity chains also partake in the construction of the meanings of land resources through the cooperation of state agencies. These business actors perceived land as an element of the production of globalized agro-commodities. They were concern with the exploitation of land in remote areas rather than the rights to the land. Land and forest movements condemned the state’s monopolization of land and natural resource management. They pointed out the error of state entitlements and the shortcomings of the protected area establishment by not considering the people already living in and using the upland forests. They demanded that the government allocated legal land rights to forest people, and advocated community-based approaches for sustainable use and management of land and support human rights. Most of these movements perceived land resource as a basic element of local people’s livelihoods and strengthening of local communities. However, in their view, land reform would benefit not only grassroots people, but also the economic growth of the country. Without legal rights to land, the community can claim customary and ancestral rights to land in their local community by asserting that they had lived in the land before the establishment of the protected area. For them, no matter how much land would be used for conservation or economic development, local people who had lived on the land deserved the rights to use and benefit as they had inherited land from their ancestors, and they needed to make a living.
352
Through the constructions of, and the contestations over, the meanings of land, the research reflects the contestations over the concept of community among these collective actors. I emphasize the constructing of community as a strategic practice of both social movements and my research community in empowering grassroots people to negotiate the state’s monopolization of natural resources. Meanwhile, there are tensions between the advocated concepts of community-based approaches and the complicated social relations within a real community, and between a local community and a broad network community. The government and non-governmental agencies similarly advocated community-based approaches as a key means of sustainable land and resource management and rural development. However, each actor’s ideas of community and the approaches being promoted are different. Moreover, those ideas were more likely to be distinct from how local community members, who were promoted community based resource management, perceived their own community. For the Thai state, community is understood as an administrative unit: a group of people who are living within a certain boundary demarcated by the state. In fact, the state only recently demarcated the boundaries of upland villages although the government officials had made a population census some time ago. For the Pa Bong community, the village boundary came into existence when the government imposed the conservation policy through the establishment of the Sri Lanna National Park in 1989. The research revealed the contradictions in the state policy on upland communities. On the one hand, the state has attempted to push upland people out of the lands where their communities are located or constrained villagers’ life security by confining their uses of land and natural resources. On the other hand, the government claimed to strengthen local communities, for example through the advocating the sufficiency economy approach so that local communities could be self-reliant. Such an ambitious aim of the policy seemed impossible to achieve as it did not respond to the villagers’ critical problem, i.e. land rights insecurity. Without land, the Pa Bong community could not maintain livelihood security and the villagers could not continue living in their community. Moreover, the government policy on agro-commodity promotion was contradictory to the aim of strengthening community as it caused local farmers to become more dependent on an uncertain and external market system.
353
Land and forest movements perceive land as the most important element for strengthening local communities. They thus campaigned for land rights of local people as the first priority. Most social movements also see the relation of land rights security and sustainable resource management. Some claimed that without land rights security, local communities cannot develop sustainable agriculture. Land and forest movements are involved with two dimensions of community: a cross spatial network community, and a local place-based community. In practice, the advocacy of two types of community is contradictory. Despite the promotion of community-based approaches, social movements cannot include all members of the local community in their networks. In other words, each villager is unequally involved with the network. As suggested by Vandergeest (2006b), though people act collectively to manage resource and to achieve other collective goals related to natural resource management, this does not imply that all members of community participate in or benefit from collective action in the same way. My research found that different villagers in the same local community had different interpretations and understandings of the community-based resource management advocated by the networks resulting in the discordant implementation of the approach and conflicts among the villagers. The research found that community land and forest management in the Pa Bong community was ineffective and contradictory to the expectations of the NFN. The Pa Bong villagers perceived land as the basic element of their living. Meanwhile, most villagers paid less attention to community-based resource management unless the village leaders made use of it as the tool to empower the villagers in negotiating with state authorities and to draw allies. Moreover, in the understanding of the villagers, the community was not what most government and non-governmental agencies perceived. According to my assumption of community as the sense of commonality (Fink 1994, Long 2001), the community-making of the Pa Bong community took place explicitly when the villagers were faced with problems that were considered as the “common” problem. In order to overcome their common problems, the villagers conducted collective actions and thus constructed the sense of commonality. The research demonstrated that the community relations in Pa Bong were reproduced through commercial farming and negotiating with forestry officers.
354
However, the villagers did not always perceive a sense of commonality, but there were also the conflicts among community members in other contexts. In this regard, community is not an essential entity, but can be constructed and reconstructed depending on the situation. More importantly, the strength of community, in the villagers’ view, was tied to the life security of the villagers which is related to their access to land and natural resources as these resources are crucial means for their life and livelihood.
9.2 Constructing the Meanings in the Gaps
As one of the research objectives is to examine the assumption of the extensive connectivity of globalization, I explore the relations among cross-scale actors and the influence of each actor’s ideas on the others. I found that despite their connectedness, each actor’ ideas are not harmonized, but there is still room for each actor to maintain their ideas and determine their ways of life. Within a collective actor, there are also contradictions in ideas, as the actor is not monolithic but consists of different people who have different ideas based on different socio-economic conditions. The research found the discordance in the policies and implementation on land uses of three key collective actors: state, social movements, and the Pa Bong community, and the tensions of relationship and negotiations among these actors. Despite the decisive ideas of each social actor, the appropriation of the ideas were likely discordant to these ideas and incompletely effective. Moreover, the advocacy of the ideas is uncertain, but often changes depending on the situation. There were many factors from the local to global scales that impeded the application of their ideas and brought about the contradiction between ideas and practices.
Contradictions in State Practices
The state’s policies and practices on land and other natural resource management are mainly orientated between economic development and conservation. The case of Pa Bong
9.1 Constructing the Meanings of Land and a Community
According to the questions, what are the meanings of land and a community that each social actor attempts to construct, how they construct, and the effects of their construction, the research found that the Thai state, social movements, and the Pa Bong community constructed and contested over different meanings of land resource
351
and a community. Ideally, these actors similarly saw land and forest in upland areas as important and advocated community-based approaches. However, each social actor has different perception of land resource and a community depending upon their experiences, interests, and situations faced. They attempted to construct and contest the meanings of land resource and a community through their distinct approaches. Influenced by global discourses on land values, in the policy level, the Thai state claims to conserve forest on the one hand, and actively privatizes land and natural resources so that the land would be controllable and transferable through market mechanism on the other hand. In fact, both meanings of land as a resource of economic development and a conservation resource are constructed by the state in order to claim state rights over the land which has been occupied by local people. Business actors, such as middlemen, domestic corporations, and TNCs involved in agro-commodity chains also partake in the construction of the meanings of land resources through the cooperation of state agencies. These business actors perceived land as an element of the production of globalized agro-commodities. They were concern with the exploitation of land in remote areas rather than the rights to the land. Land and forest movements condemned the state’s monopolization of land and natural resource management. They pointed out the error of state entitlements and the shortcomings of the protected area establishment by not considering the people already living in and using the upland forests. They demanded that the government allocated legal land rights to forest people, and advocated community-based approaches for sustainable use and management of land and support human rights. Most of these movements perceived land resource as a basic element of local people’s livelihoods and strengthening of local communities. However, in their view, land reform would benefit not only grassroots people, but also the economic growth of the country. Without legal rights to land, the community can claim customary and ancestral rights to land in their local community by asserting that they had lived in the land before the establishment of the protected area. For them, no matter how much land would be used for conservation or economic development, local people who had lived on the land deserved the rights to use and benefit as they had inherited land from their ancestors, and they needed to make a living.
352
Through the constructions of, and the contestations over, the meanings of land, the research reflects the contestations over the concept of community among these collective actors. I emphasize the constructing of community as a strategic practice of both social movements and my research community in empowering grassroots people to negotiate the state’s monopolization of natural resources. Meanwhile, there are tensions between the advocated concepts of community-based approaches and the complicated social relations within a real community, and between a local community and a broad network community. The government and non-governmental agencies similarly advocated community-based approaches as a key means of sustainable land and resource management and rural development. However, each actor’s ideas of community and the approaches being promoted are different. Moreover, those ideas were more likely to be distinct from how local community members, who were promoted community based resource management, perceived their own community. For the Thai state, community is understood as an administrative unit: a group of people who are living within a certain boundary demarcated by the state. In fact, the state only recently demarcated the boundaries of upland villages although the government officials had made a population census some time ago. For the Pa Bong community, the village boundary came into existence when the government imposed the conservation policy through the establishment of the Sri Lanna National Park in 1989. The research revealed the contradictions in the state policy on upland communities. On the one hand, the state has attempted to push upland people out of the lands where their communities are located or constrained villagers’ life security by confining their uses of land and natural resources. On the other hand, the government claimed to strengthen local communities, for example through the advocating the sufficiency economy approach so that local communities could be self-reliant. Such an ambitious aim of the policy seemed impossible to achieve as it did not respond to the villagers’ critical problem, i.e. land rights insecurity. Without land, the Pa Bong community could not maintain livelihood security and the villagers could not continue living in their community. Moreover, the government policy on agro-commodity promotion was contradictory to the aim of strengthening community as it caused local farmers to become more dependent on an uncertain and external market system.
353
Land and forest movements perceive land as the most important element for strengthening local communities. They thus campaigned for land rights of local people as the first priority. Most social movements also see the relation of land rights security and sustainable resource management. Some claimed that without land rights security, local communities cannot develop sustainable agriculture. Land and forest movements are involved with two dimensions of community: a cross spatial network community, and a local place-based community. In practice, the advocacy of two types of community is contradictory. Despite the promotion of community-based approaches, social movements cannot include all members of the local community in their networks. In other words, each villager is unequally involved with the network. As suggested by Vandergeest (2006b), though people act collectively to manage resource and to achieve other collective goals related to natural resource management, this does not imply that all members of community participate in or benefit from collective action in the same way. My research found that different villagers in the same local community had different interpretations and understandings of the community-based resource management advocated by the networks resulting in the discordant implementation of the approach and conflicts among the villagers. The research found that community land and forest management in the Pa Bong community was ineffective and contradictory to the expectations of the NFN. The Pa Bong villagers perceived land as the basic element of their living. Meanwhile, most villagers paid less attention to community-based resource management unless the village leaders made use of it as the tool to empower the villagers in negotiating with state authorities and to draw allies. Moreover, in the understanding of the villagers, the community was not what most government and non-governmental agencies perceived. According to my assumption of community as the sense of commonality (Fink 1994, Long 2001), the community-making of the Pa Bong community took place explicitly when the villagers were faced with problems that were considered as the “common” problem. In order to overcome their common problems, the villagers conducted collective actions and thus constructed the sense of commonality. The research demonstrated that the community relations in Pa Bong were reproduced through commercial farming and negotiating with forestry officers.
354
However, the villagers did not always perceive a sense of commonality, but there were also the conflicts among community members in other contexts. In this regard, community is not an essential entity, but can be constructed and reconstructed depending on the situation. More importantly, the strength of community, in the villagers’ view, was tied to the life security of the villagers which is related to their access to land and natural resources as these resources are crucial means for their life and livelihood.
9.2 Constructing the Meanings in the Gaps
As one of the research objectives is to examine the assumption of the extensive connectivity of globalization, I explore the relations among cross-scale actors and the influence of each actor’s ideas on the others. I found that despite their connectedness, each actor’ ideas are not harmonized, but there is still by Browser Shop" style="border: none !important; display: inline-block !important; text-indent: 0px !important; float: none !important; font-weight: bold !important; height: auto !important; margin: 0px !important; min-height: 0px !important; min-width: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; text-transform: uppercase !important; text-decoration: underline !important; vertical-align: baseline !important; width: auto !important; background: transparent !important;">room for each actor to maintain their ideas and determine their ways of life. Within a collective actor, there are also contradictions in ideas, as the actor is not monolithic but consists of different people who have different ideas based on different socio-economic conditions. The research found the discordance in the policies and implementation on land uses of three key collective actors: state, social movements, and the Pa Bong community, and the tensions of relationship and negotiations among these actors. Despite the decisive ideas of each social actor, the appropriation of the ideas were likely discordant to these ideas and incompletely effective. Moreover, the advocacy of the ideas is uncertain, but often changes depending on the situation. There were many factors from the local to global scales that impeded the application of their ideas and brought about the contradiction between ideas and practices.
Contradictions in State Practices
The state’s policies and practices on land and other natural resource management are mainly orientated between economic development and conservation. The case of Pa Bong
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