Forest and Agricultural Land Use Planning: A Strategic Analysis of the TABI Approach in Lao PDR
Michael Dwyer and Vimala Dejvongsa May 2017
A review of The Agro-Biodiversity Initiative (TABI) commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)
i Imprint Forest and Agricultural Land Use Planning: A Strategic Analysis of the TABI Approach in Lao PDR.
Authors Michael Dwyer and Vimala Dejvongsa
Disclaimer The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of SDC.
Contact Swiss Cooperation Office for the Mekong Region - Lao PDR 192/1 Sibounheuang Road Vientiane Capital, Lao PDR Tel: +856 21 251 794 Fax: +856 21 251 797 E-mail: [email protected] Web: www.eda.admin.ch/mekong Vientiane, 2017
Learn more about The Agro-Biodiversity Initiative at www.tabi.la
Acknowledgments Numerous people contributed at various stages to make this report possible, both in Vientiane and in Luang Prabang. The authors are unable to thank by name everyone who helped, especially at the province, district and village levels, but we thank them anonymously for their valuable time and have tried our utmost to capture and reflect their experiences in our analysis. In Luang Prabang, Choy Cheim Tang (TABI) and especially Mr. Outhay Oudomsak of the Luang Prabang Provincial Land Management and Development Section, who facilitated and accompanied us on our fieldwork, deserve special gratitude. In Vientiane, we thank Brice Pletsers and Martin Hasler (SDC); Chris Flint and Pheng Souvanthong (TABI); Saysongkham Sayavong (DALAM); Cornelia Hett, Vincent Roth, and Rasso Bernhard (CDE); Jonas Novén, Anne Pirote and Michael Jones (NIRAS); Julian Derbidge and Peter Lentes (GIZ); Guillaume Lestrelin and Jean-Christophe Castella (CIRAD/EFICAS); and Akiko Inoguchi (FAO), Richard Hackman (ICBF), Joost Foppes (independent consultant/GIZ), Carl Mossberg (independent consultant) and Anthony Gueguen (CCL) for their generous assistance. Any errors of commission or omission are, of course, our own.
ii Acronyms CCL Comité de Coopération avec le Laos CDE Centre for Development and Environment/University of Berne DAFO District Agriculture and Forestry Office DALAM Department of Agriculture Land Management/MAF FALUPAM Forest and Agriculture Land Use Planning, Allocation and Management FAO Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations FLUMZ Forest Land Management Use Zoning FLUP Forest Land Use Planning GIZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit LUP//LA Land Use Planning/Land Allocation MAF Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry MONRE Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment NAFRI National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute PAFO Provincial Agriculture and Forestry Office PFLUP Participatory Forest Land Use Planning PLUP Participatory Land Use Planning SDC Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation SEZ Special Economic Zone SPA Small Project Agreement (of TABI) TABI The Agro-Biodiversity Initiative
iii Executive Summary Land-use planning is an important part of development in any society, but it plays a special role in de elop e t oope atio i the Lao PDR. Laos s pa ti ula ixture of insecure rural land rights and rising pressure on land to support multiple types of development and conservation (from the village level upward) has made land-use planning a consensus activity for government and donors who are fo ed to o f o t the la d uestio ut a e ofte u a le to ag ee p e isel ho to do so. This is the world into which The Agro-Biodiversity Initiative (TABI s) FALUPAM model of land-use planning fits. FALUPAM represents an effort to address two of the fundamental problems that have plagued Lao land-use planning for years: (1) the over-classification of land into restricted forest categories, and (2) closely related, the creation of formal but frequently not substantive participation by o u ities hose futu e la d use is ei g pla ed ith the assista e of outside e pe ts a d go e e t te h i ia s. FALUPAM s diffe e es a e i ediatel appa e t f o a a iet of a gles: The maps look different, both at first glance, where more spatial detail and local place names are found than is typical, but also when the maps are studied closely. Restricted forestland categories are comparatively rare, with much of the forestland that is allocated going into livelihood- accommodating uses such as forest harvesting and livestock grazing, and much longer upland agricultural fallow periods than the typical 3-plot rotation. The process is obviously different too: rather than a campaign-style, village-by-village implementation that imposes strong incentives to a ept hate e is p oposed so that illage s a get a k to o k, FALUPAM s ulti-staged implementation process, with extended periods for villagers to discuss previous and next steps among themselves without outsiders present, departs from the model of what many people in Laos think land-use pla i g is supposed to look like. This study reviews the FALUPAM process at an important juncture in the TABI project: its transition to its third and final phase. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Vientiane and Luang Prabang in O to e a d No e e , e e ie FALUPAM s sta di g i the wider arena of land land-use planning in Laos; its operations in field, including interactions with government counterparts, target communities and larger processes such as land concessions and forest-category re-delineation; its engagements in various policy discussions in Vientiane; and its knowledge products such as maps, communication materials, and monitoring reports. Our findings are generally positive: we see in FALUPAM a promising model that is pursuing a bottom-up form of de facto community control over land that is recognized by local authorities under the rubric of district development planning. Such an approach is both novel in its relationship to other land-use planning processes and potentially useful in light of ongoing challenges in the land- and forest-legal arenas. It is not without challenges, but these are issues that confront all land-use pla i g effo ts, a d FALUPAM s otto -up approach to planning provides an opportunity, we believe, to address these in a deliberative, concrete and data-driven way.
Our recommendations focus on how to pursue the promising proof-of-concept that FALUPAM ep ese ts, a d ho to use TABI s status as a ulti-issue initiative to unite a series of policy-related conversations that often overlap but remain fragmented. During Phase III, we suggest that TABI focus on making FALUPAM a fully functional proof-of-concept that engages policy conversations on land-use planning, land tenure and forest management from a position of local (village and district- level) support; use its extensive empirical results and access to data to elevate the level of evidence- ased dis ussio i the Vie tia e poli o u it ; a d test TABI s e t al h pothesis that a diversified approach to agricultural development is more productive and secure than either the smallholder- or concession-based approach monoculture cash cropping.
iv Contents Acknowledgments ...... ii Acronyms ...... iii Executive Summary ...... iv Contents ...... v List of Figures ...... vi I. Introduction ...... 1 1.1. Land-Use Planning in Contemporary Laos ...... 1 . . TABI s App oa h to La d-Use Planning: FALUPAM ...... 2 1.3. Objectives of the Mission ...... 3 II. Methodology ...... 3 2.1. Approach ...... 3 2.2. Itinerary: Where, when and who ...... 3 2.3. Data Collection ...... 5 2.4. Limitations ...... 6 III. Findings ...... 6 3.1. FALUPAM in the Big Picture ...... 7 3.1.1. Rethinking Land Use Planning ...... 7 3.1.2. Means vs. Ends ...... 8 3.1.3. Ambitiousness and Measurability ...... 10 3.2. FALUPAM in the Field ...... 12 3.2.1. Government ...... 13 3.2.2. Village Visits ...... 15 3.2.3. FALUPAM and Larger Processes ...... 28 3.3. FALUPAM at Central Level ...... 33 3.3.1. The Cost Question ...... 33 3.3.2. Branding ...... 34 3.3.3. The Wider Conversation ...... 34 3.4. FALUPAM-related Knowledge Products...... 36 3.4.1. Overview Materials ...... 36 3.4.2. Maps ...... 39 3.4.3. FALUPAM GIS Training Materials ...... 39 3.4.4. Village Land Use Management Reports ...... 40 3.4.5. Monitoring Reports ...... 41 IV. Recommendations for Phase III ...... 41 References ...... 46
v List of Figures Figure 1. Map of FALUPAM villages, 2011–2016 ...... 2 Figure 2. Fieldwork itinerary ...... 4 Figure 3. Village selection ...... 5 Figure 4. Upland field clustering, Luang Prabang ...... 8 Figure 5. Land-use pla i g ethods: the ap s. p o ess spe t u ...... 9 Figure 6. Planned land use change in FALUPAM villages, Luang Prabang ...... 11 Figure 7. Current vs. planned land use in sample PLUP and FALUPAM maps ...... 12 Figure 8. DAFO opinion of TABI versus other business models, Nambak district ...... 15 Figure 9. Planned upland agricultural rotation lengths under FALUPAM and PLUP ...... 17 Figure 10. FALUPAM planned land use map, B. Houay On, Chomphet district ...... 19 Figure 11. FALUPAM planned land use map, B. Houay Seng, Chomphet district...... 19 Figure 12. Banana concession in B. Houay Yen, Nambak district ...... 20 Figure 13. Old village sites in B. Phak Hok, Phonexai district ...... 22 Figure 14. Meeting participants with FALUPAM map, B. Phak Hok, Phonexai district...... 22 Figure 15. Village meeting, B. Som, Chomphet district ...... 24 Figure 16. Naiban with cattle enclosures, B. Donexai, Phonexai district...... 26 Figure 17. Alleged footprint of Diamond Town concession, Chomphet district ...... 29 Figure 18. Proposed re-delineation of national forest categories ...... 30 Figure 19. Forest re-delineation in Chomphet district...... 32 Figu e . O e ie poste of the pFLUP [FALUPAM] p o ess ...... 37 Figure 21. FALUPAM Process Flow diagram ...... 38
vi I. Introduction 1.1. Land-Use Planning in Contemporary Laos Land use planning has been a feature of rural development efforts in Laos for over a decade. As a general approach, state efforts to manage how rural land is used date from the Lao go e e t s efforts from the early 1980s. These sought to balance national and local i te ests i the ou t s mixed-use landscapes where subsistence agriculture and industrial forestry came into contact, and sometimes into conflict. As a more formalized practice of village-scale intervention, land-use zoning (chatsan thi din) has its clearest origins in the LUP/LA (Land Use Planning and Land Allocation, also known as Land and Forest Allocation [LFA], Mop-Din Mop-Pa, or more informally Beng-Din Beng-Pa) program, which dates from the mid-1990s and reached its heyday in the early 2000s. While LUP/LA was suspended as a full-scale government program in 2003, donors, international NGOs, private companies and, more recently, domestic nonprofit associations have taken up land-use planning in the years since, rolling out hundreds of village-level land use plans across rural Laos over the last decade-plus (ADB 1999; Badenoch 1999; Vandergeest 2003; GTZ 2004; Rigg 2006; Barney 2007; Baird & Shoemaker 2008; Lestrelin et al. 2012). This proliferation of land-use planning activities has seen a variety of methods developed and tested, ranging from rapid, meso-scale searches for potential concession lands to resource-intensive, participatory village exercises focused on facilitating deliberation and debate in rural communities (see Section 3.1). A few years ago, practitioners had begun to notice that this diversity was verging into fragmentation (NIRAS 2010), replicating the wider inconsistency of land and forest governance practices that are found across the Lao hinterland (Barney 2009). Recent years have seen a range of efforts to bring different land-use planning approaches and methods into conversation with one another, for example through the Donor Roundtable process (Land Sub-Sector Working Group) and other less formal settings (e.g. Castella 2016). At the same time, land use planning has emerged as one area (of many) of expanded focus in the current revision of the Lao Land Law; whereas the earlier (1997 and 2003) Land Laws referenced land use planning sparingly (twice in 1997, once in 2003), the current draft-in-circulation refers to land use planning 21 times in 13 separate articles (MONRE 2015). One reason for this mix of popularity and diversity is that land-use planning tries to address the fundamental and difficult issue of rural land tenure. In the last decade, rural and especially upland landscapes have emerged as key areas of la d o fli t, i la ge pa t due to the g a ti g of state la d o essions that in many cases cover and conflict with agricultural land used by local communities (GTZ 2006, 2007; Dwyer 2007, 2013; Vientiane Times 2008; Baird 2010, 2011; Kenney- Lazar 2011; Laungaramsri 2012; Schoenweger et al. 2012). By focusing on land management and zoning, land-use planning sidesteps the issue of ownership in favor of focusing on rules of access and use. This often appeals to government actors because the state s a date to zo e a d pla la d use is relatively uncontroversial – at least in comparison to some interpretations of this mandate, which is so eti es u de stood to ea that the state o s all of the ou t s la d. At the same time, land use planning is widely recognized as needing to be participatory, involving community members who have a stake in its outcome for both purposes of fairness and effectiveness. As a comparatively safe template for development cooperation, land-use planning has thus become widespread in practice, attempting to negotiate difficult land tenure issues on a case-by-case basis. Land-use planning efforts thus face the challenge of meeting three distinct objectives at the same time: (1) enhancing local illage s apa it to use thei illage te ito fo pu poses of livelihood improvement (the te u e question); (2) satisfying district and provincial government actors that seek to manage village-scale land use, in particular to control shifting cultivation (the regulatory
1 question); and (3) navigating the ever-shifting institutional and legal structures, interests and mandates that exist at e t al le el the u eau ati uestio . Each of these is challenging on its own. Together, they are even more difficult, and have effectively prevented a single answer to the question of how to do land-use pla i g f o e e gi g, despite o e tha t o a d a half de ades of trying.
1.2. TABI’s Approach to Land-Use Planning: FALUPAM One such new land-use planning approach, the distinctiveness of which is discussed below in section 3.1.1, has been developed over the last few years by the Lao Agro-Biodiversity Initiative (TABI). This approach, Forest and Agricultural Land Use Planning, Allocation and Management (FALUPAM),1 is the focus of this mission. Since TABI Phase I began in 2009, FALUPAM has been implemented in 262 villages in ten provinces, ostl du i g the p oje t s se o d phase (2012–2016). As Figure 1 shows, it has ee o e t ated i TABI s o e p o i es of Lua g P a a g, Huapha and Xieng Khuang, and has been implemented in pilot areas of Phongsali, Bolikhamxai, Savannakhet, Salavan, Xekong and Attapeu.2
Figure 1. Boundaries of FALUPAM villages (n=262), 2011–2016
1 Different versions of the acronym exist in TABI materials (FALUPAM, FLUPAM, pFALUPAM, pFLUP). For consistency and to reflect the most recent usage, we use the former. 2 Although not shown in Figure 1, FALUPAM has also been implemented in Xaysomboun province (5 villages). For more detail, see NIRAS Fourth Quality Assurance report (2016, p. 12). [Note: The data we received does not show the Xaysomboun locations depicted in other sources (e.g. NIRAS 2016a).]
2 1.3. Objectives of the Mission Our terms of reference for this assignment comprised eight tasks under the general heading of a Situation Mapping/Analysis and Strategic Planning for SDC TABI Forest and Agricultural Land Use Planning in Lao PDR. For the purposes of preparing this report and our accompanying presentation, we interpreted and organized these tasks into five objectives and associated sets of questions. These structure the presentation of findings (Section III) and recommendations (Section IV) presented below: 1. Locate FALUPAM in the bigger picture: Where does it come from, and what is distinctive about it? How does it compare with other approaches to land-use planning? How does it sit within the wider landscape of land-related development planning and regulation? 2. Study FALUPAM in the field: What does it actually do (or not) for villagers, and for district and provincial staff and officials? How do these various groups perceive and interact with FALUPAM as a process/method? How does FALUPAM interact (or not) with larger processes of spatial planning, natural resource management and investment regulation at the district and provincial levels? 3. Study FALUPAM at the central level: How does it function, and how is it perceived, within relevant communities of practice – namely central-level government institutions and other development partners and projects? What have been its contributions, and what are the barriers to its wider acceptance as a standard practice? 4. Review FALUPAM-related knowledge products: How are the maps used, and by whom? What about the FALUPAM manual? 5. Recommendations for Phase III: How can TABI Phase III benefit from investigation into each of the above topics and questions? Below, we address items 1–4 in Section III and item 5 in Section IV. First, Section II explains our approach and methods.
II. Methodology
2.1. Approach Given the need to investigate FALUPAM both in the field and within the area of central-le el poli a d p a ti e de ates, e opted fo a th ee-stage approach: (1) first spend a bit of time in Vientiane talking to people close to TABI; then (2) visit FALUPAM in the field; and lastly (3) spend more time in Vientiane following up as needed with people we spoke to during the first stage while also speaking to stakeholders farther from the project to get a view of FALUPAM from farther away. Due to personal and institutional time constraints – the lead consultant was not available before the week of 24 October, and SDC needed to have preliminary results by mid-November – we were on a tight timeline. We thus opted for a single province for the field visit, and conducted meetings and interviews in Vientiane on either side of this.
2.2. Itinerary: Where, when and who We began, in late October, with three days of meetings and interviews in Vientiane; then spent 6 days in Luang Prabang province, beginning in the capital and then visiting government offices and villages in three districts; and ended with 10 days of interviews and meetings in Vientiane. We chose Luang Prabang province for our fieldwork for two reasons. First, FALUPAM had been done there first (beginning in TABI Phase I), so the longest trajectory of impact was there, as was the
3 possibility to see the evolution of FALUPAM itself as experience accumulated. Second, Luang Prabang was the site of o e of TABI s u i ue o t i utio to the ide la ds ape of la d go e a e in Laos: the piloting of the re-zonation of the ou t s three legal forest categories (Production Forest, Conservation Forest and Protection Forest). This was undertaken in late February and early March 2015, in response to concerns raised by members of civil society and amplified by the Lao National Assembly in a July 2014 oti e to i iste s NA . In Vientiane, we spoke with 23 people who could be considered stakeholders in the Lao land-use planning arena; of these, just under half (n=11) had direct connections to TABI; the rest (n=12) did not. Conversations focused on land-use pla i g i ge e al a d i fo a ts a eas of spe ializatio i particular. In Luang Prabang, we spoke with roughly two-dozen people over the course of five days. We began in the provincial capital, where we met with TABI provincial project staff and government (PAFO) counterparts focused on land-use planning, as well as the vice-director of the PAFO. Accompanied by Mr. Outhay Oudomsak, PAFO staff-person and FALUPAM Team Leader, we then visited three districts – Chomphet, Nambak and Phonexai – over the course of four days (Figure 2). We spoke with district-level forestry staff in Nambak and Phonexai, and village officials and community leaders in 8 village visits. Where possible, we included non-leadership community members in our meetings, although the rapid nature of the trip and the breadth-over-depth design of our itinerary (3 districts and 2 or more villages per district) meant that this was not always possible.
Figure 2. Fieldwork itinerary, with rezoned forest categories in color (details below in Section 3.2.3)
4 We selected the districts and villages we visited in order to maximize our exposure to different situations, while focusing (mostly) on areas where FALUPAM had been implemented. We chose to prioritize Phonexai, given that (1) it was the place where FALUPAM had been implemented longest ago, and (2) multiple land-use planning methods had been implemented in different parts of the district, and thus offered the opportunity of comparative analysis, especially by district-level staff. We isited t o TABI illages the e, as ell as a o t ol illage to a d the easte e d of the district (marked with a small circle in Figure 2), where GIZ had conducted land-use planning a few years ago; our efforts to visit a second control village (formerly in the JICA PAREDD project) were unsuccessful. We also visited Chomphet and Nambak districts in order to see a variety of local circumstances; Chomphet offered a contrast with Phonexai in that its lack of remoteness made land scarcity a bit more of an issue there (as evidenced by shorter fallow periods in the FALUPAM process), while Nambak offered the chance to observe FALUPAM in a village that also had land concessions (in this case for rubber and bananas). For the TABI villages, we selected these based on discussions with TABI staff and PAFO counterparts in Luang Prabang. While our original goal of usi g the p oje t s o ito i g data to sele t a a ge of villages on the basis of challenges and successes turned out not to be possible, project and PAFO staff were able to substitute for this by what they knew about various villages. A key variable, they explained, was whether (and if so, when) villages had been consolidated, as this created not only land scarcity, but also various internal frictions related to land use (elaborated below in Section 3.2.2). In Phonexai and Chomphet, we thus chose to visit a mix of consolidated and o igi al (unconsolidated) villages. In Nambak, we visited villages that had concessions, although these villages had only begun the FALUPAM process (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Village selection (TABI villages only, n=7 of 8)
2.3. Data Collection We relied on a mix of documents, project data and interviews, and where possible used one format to investigate and interrogate the others. We reviewed project design and review documents (in English); project data on FALUPAM implementation (Excel data in English, monitoring reports in Lao); miscellaneous reports, policy documents and published literature (in English); and project manuals (in Lao). The lead consultant also used project-provided GIS data (from CDE) to make the maps in Figure 1 and Figure 2. Our interviews were conducted individually and in groups, depending on the setting; in general, village and DAFO interviews tended to be in groups, while other meetings were conducted one-on-
5 one. Meetings e e o du ted i E glish a d Lao, depe di g o i te ie ees p efe ed la guage. The co-investigator introduced and facilitated the Lao-language meetings, and the lead investigator the English-language ones. All interviews began with an explanation of our work, and were oriented to a d i fo a ts a eas of particular expertise.
2.4. Limitations As is frequently the case, this mission was conducted on a compressed timeframe. This imposed a few limitations directly, and contributed to a few others. We feel that the choice of Luang Prabang as a fieldwork site was appropriate. That said, visiting additio al p o i es ould ha e ee helpful gi e Lua g P a a g s e eptio alit ith ega d to local government capacity (often said to be comparatively high) and prevalence of land concessions (lower than many other provinces), and the substantial work that TABI has done in other provinces, oth o e a d e pa sio p o i es. A isit to e pa sio p o i es su h as Bolikhamxai, Salavan or Xekong, which are especially known for insecure upland tenure due to the prevalence of land concessions, would have been especially valuable. Also, as noted above, we opted for a broad range of coverage within Luang Prabang, visiting eight villages in three districts in four days. While this allowed us to see a variety of situations, it also prevented us from digging deeply in any one location using isolation-based methods (such as focus groups or household interviews) to create safe spaces in which marginal actors (such as non-leaders, women, youth, etc.) are more likely to discuss sensitive issues. A othe li itatio o e ed TABI s o o ito i g data. As noted above, monitoring reports on FALUPAM implementation were made available to us, but these existed only in the form of individual village reports rather than as comparable data between villages. As such, it was not possible to conduct any type of systematic analysis of FALUPAM s i ple e tatio esults usi g the proje t s o existing data. This limited us to what we could learn from project staff, government officials and villagers through interviews, and made village selection a more subjective and project- led exercise than we would have liked. A final limitation was that we were only able to speak directly to a few government staff at central level. This was explained by a range of excuses that are common to development work in Vientiane: people were in the field; it was not a good time to talk because of the institutional transition of forest authority between MONRE and MAF; and people were busy with more important matters. While all of these reasons were entirely understandable, they prevented us from discussing our mission with a variety of central-level government stakeholders, and suggested that meetings of this nature might be better organized next time by SDC rather than by TABI staff.
III. Findings This section presents our findings following the structure laid out in Section 1.3. We begin by placing TABI s FALUPAM approach in the wider landscape of Lao land-use planning. It should be noted that the Land Issues Working Group has commissioned a study that overlaps most closely with this part of our report. We have shared and discussed our work with Stuart Ling, the LIWG s esea h o sulta t, a d e pe t that his stud ill add to a d o ple e t the the es a d uestio s dis ussed elo . Li g s epo t is expected sometime in the first half of 2017.
6 3.1. FALUPAM in the Big Picture
3.1.1. Rethinking Land Use Planning FALUPAM was developed in TABI Phase 1 in an effort to speed up land-use planning. At the time, the project was using the methodology elaborated in the so-called PLUP Manual o G ee Book developed by MAF and MONRE in the late 2000s, but village-by-village implementation was progressing slowly. FALUPAM initially emerged from an effort to rescale implementation both spatially and temporally so as to make it more efficient for government staff and less of a burden on villagers: It worked kumban (village cluster) by kumban, and timed its implementation in intervals – a few days in each village, working one step at a time rather than completing all steps at once over the period of a few weeks. This contrasts with the campaign-based approach of other methods, and had the additional advantage of providing an opportunity for villagers to reflect on each step among themselves between the visits of the implementation teams.3 In its engagement with local authorities, FALUPAM has developed a second innovation: talking about shifting cultivation as a land use that was a key part of current upland livelihoods (rather than solely upland poverty), and that needed to be worked with and improved rather than simply eliminated. Despite nuanced understandings of both the ecology and socio-economics of shifting cultivation by some government officials, many technical staff – and especially those responsible for translating policy into state action on the ground – have equated shifting cultivation with entrenched poverty, and/or see it as si pl taki g up too u h spa e elati e to o e effi ie t or ode o p odu ti e , et . forms of land use (Ducourtieux et al. 2005). FALUPAM was oriented as a practical corrective to this entrenched view that shifting cultivation needed to be eradicated; as its originators e plai , The only way to change problematic policies is to provide [government] actors with concrete, bottom-up tools and approaches to more meaningfully deal with shifting cultivation in pla i g a d zo i g. … TABI s app oa h [thus] begins with a strategy to stabilize, not eradicate, shifti g ulti atio Hei i a et al. i p ess: . One such tool is the clustering of upland fields in a way convinces communities and authorities simultaneously: This practice allows for easier fire control and – critically for our approach and objectives – a la d use pla that looks u h o e tid tha household-level fields and fallows scattered across the landscape. This may seem like an obscure argument, but experiences have shown that it is crucial for convincing local authorities to approve a plan that includes shifting cultivation beyond the official three-plot policy. (Heinimann et al. in press: 5-6) This managed approach to village land use (Figure 4) seeks to not simply balance local ownership against state control, but to actively use the latter as a means to create the former. As noted in TABI s Phase II i ple e tatio epo t, a ke lesso lea ed is that he the [Lao go e e t] explicitly recognizes upland cropping systems, then villagers are proud and enthusiastic in improving the a age e t of these s ste s NIRAS 2016b: 2). This depends on extensive outreach with local district and provincial officials, and its success relies on the combined commitment of those officials and villagers alike in order to maintain FALUPAM s a hie e e ts. This approach has both operational costs and permanency risks: the education and convincing of district-level authorities takes work, and in the absence of a mechanism for community land titling – a challenge that confronts all land-use planning efforts across the country – there is a risk that FALUPAM could be epu posed e.g. p o i ial o dist i t go e o s offi es o Pla i g a d I est e t u its to fi d a aila le la d fo o essio s once minimum community land requirements are met. But in our
3 Interviews and document review, October & November 2016.
7 assessment, in the absence of such a policy mechanism, FALUPAM s approach to generating local recognition by district-level authorities and villagers alike is a strategic and worthwhile enterprise.
Figure 4. Upland field clustering, Phonexai district, Luang Prabang
A final dimension of FALUPAM s u i ue ess a gua l ste s f o this fo us o lo al athe tha legal e og itio f o go e e t. O e i po ta t egati e lesso lea ed f o Ca odia s e pe ie e with communal land titling has been the effect of limiting communal titles to agricultural lands rather than also including village forestlands, which often form a key resource for grazing, wood access, NTFP collection and rotational agriculture. By focusing its efforts on local (district-level) government recognition, FALUPAM has worked across the village land base as a whole, targeting both agricultural land and forestland in its efforts to map and plan current and future land use. A key result of this has been the classification of substantial amounts of land as village-level utilization and p ote tio fo ests. While this has et to e lo ked i legall , its e og itio lo al go e e t goes part of the way toward addressing the longstanding conflict between village- and central-level land and forest classification, a problem recognized by the Lao National Assembly in Instruction 273 of July 2014, but thus far left largely unaddressed by the relevant ministries (see below, Section 3.2.3). While a legal path to formalizing these results will inevitably confront the bureaucratic politics e tio ed a o e halle ge # , TABI s p io itizi g of field-level rather than central-level approaches to land classification means that it has been able to gain valuable experience, evidence of impacts on the ground, and local allies at the district-government level (see Section 3.2.1).
3.1.2. Means vs. Ends One way to conceptualize different approaches to land-use planning is to imagine a spectrum between approaches whose goal is to produce an impose a map on rural land use in a top-down manner, and, at the other extreme, approaches that use land-use planning simply for deliberative purposes. In the first model, the map itself is the ultimate goal of the process, while in the second, the ap is al ost eside the poi t; su h a app oa h ould e a e the eatio of a aps
8 as part of the larger process of analysis, discussion and debate, and would not prioritize settling on a single fi al o o e t ap at all. Both models are ideal types, but provide a way to compare a number of different land-use planning methodologies. Figure 5 attempts to do so with five of the land-use planning methods mentioned or alluded to above: LUP/LA, PLUP, FALUPAM, Micro-LUP (or beng-din chulaphak) and EFICAS. One way to read Figure 5 is as a progression over time, fueled by different priorities, institutions and lo al o ditio s. As oted a o e, LUP/LA is i a a s the pa e t of la d-use planning in Laos, ut suffe ed f o ei g too top-do a d i suffi ie tl a o pa ied arious types of state outreach and financing to achieve the visions it set down in the villages where it worked. As a result, PLUP was developed in an effort to make land-use planning more participatory, and also to embed land-use planning within a process of rural land administration. The remaining three approaches are i a a s espo ses to the PLUP odel: o the o e e d, MONRE s so- alled i o ut ette la eled eso la d-use planning, which aimed to do a rapid zonation of every rural village in the ou t , allegedl i o de to fi d a aila le la d fo i est e t o essio s usi g a u ifo methodology and classification system. On the other end of the spectrum are the EFICAS and, slightly closer to the center, FALUPAM methodologies: both emphasize the importance of using land-use planning for analytic and deliberative purposes at village level, putting detailed mapping work and rigorous socio-economic data collection in the service of realistic village-scale land-use planning. But where the two diverge slightly is on the question of means versus ends: FALUPAM s e phasis is slightl to the side of fi alizi g the pla , he eas the EFICAS app oa h is o e o the side of ongoing, informed adaptation to changing conditions.4
Figure 5. Land-use pla i g ethods o the ap s. pro ess spe tru
In our interviews with land-use planning practitioners outside TABI, we consistently heard people say that land-use planning approaches toward the right side of the spectrum in Figure 5 were more expensive to implement; this occurred through statements that FALUPAM must cost significantly
4 Interviews and document review, October & November 2016.
9 more to implement than PLUP, and that neither FALUPAM nor EFICAS, as useful as they were, were s ala le . This is debatable, and ultimately turns not simply on costing data, but on impacts. Neither of these types of data was available to us, and it is thus important to emphasize two things: First, if FALUPAM s osts do tu out to e highe tha othe app oa hes, this means that the TABI- FALUPAM a d of la d-use planning is striving to be one of quality: one that costs more, but also delivers more, and is thus a high-value type of land-use planning. As described in Section 3.2 below, we found substantial support for this position through our fieldwork, but also recommend that monitoring data and costing data be examined in ways that we were unable to do. Second, this question of value (costs-versus-impacts) is a useful approach to comparing land-use planning methodologies more generally. In this sense, the question of FALUPAM s alue as o e approach among many is inherently comparative, and will benefit not only from the targeted research we conducted, but the more explicitly comparative research currently underway by the Land Issues Working Group (Ling forthcoming).
3.1.3. Ambitiousness and Measurability Land-use plans differ by how much change they attempt to impose on a particular landscape; some are more ambitious than others. This is important because ambitiousness is a proxy for expense: land use change represents labor and frequently capital invested in the landscape. But as the history of land-use planning in Laos amply shows, pairing ambitious planning with low levels of follow-up is a e ipe fo la i ple e tatio . The variability of planned land-use change is readily visible in the FALUPAM data that was shared with us. A sample of this is presented in Figure 6, which shows the net difference between categories of present land use and future land use zonation, disaggregated by village in the three districts in Luang Prabang where FALUPAM has been implemented. The villages shown in Figure 6 are presented in the order in which FALUPAM was implemented. Figure 6 thus also can be read as a timeline of how FALUPAM implementation changed over time. A few things are evident from disaggregating the data this way. First, Figure 6 shows the extent to which FALUPAM, like most land-use planning efforts in Laos, attempts to trade upland agriculture in the present for forestland and fixed agriculture in the future: in most villages, the net change in upland land-use categories (disaggregated further on FALUPAM maps, but grouped together in Figure 6 as upla d is egati e, hile fo est a d fi ed ag i ultu e atego ies (also aggregated in Figure 6) are positive. This does not mean that FALUPAM has accomplished this change – but it provides a measure of how much change has been envisioned on a village-by-village basis. Figure 6 shows that villages vary significantly in their planned magnitude of change, ranging from minimal change in villages like Pakvang and Chomchieng (in Phonexai) and Phuluang Tai and Houay Dam (in Chomphet), where planned changes are only a few percent of the entire village area; to villages like Phak Hok (Phonexai) and Xong Cha (Nambak), where planned changes are close to 50% of the village area. The variability on display here is a good thing: it supports a point emphasized by TABI staff, that FALUPAM is implemented not according to a predetermined formula, but based on the specific conditions, needs and deliberations of each village. As illustrated in Section 3.2.2, this makes sense given the variable situation on the ground.
One critique that some rural development practitioners have made of land-use planning efforts such as LUP/LA, is that they were too ambitious relative to the level of follow-up that was provided. It is one thing to plan an ambitious land-use transformation and then support villagers in the work
10 required to achieve it; but it is another thing entirely to expect communities – especially poor ones who sometimes struggle to meet subsistence needs – to achieve significant land-use change on their own. Many land-use planning efforts, including FALUPAM, are thus paired with livelihood support programs. One important thing when looking at the ambitiousness of any particular land-use planning exercise is thus to evaluate the relationship between the changes envisioned for future land use and the ability of the community to achieve the planned transition, whether with or without external assistance. As elaborated in Section 4, this has implications for how TABI proceeds in Phase III.
Figure 6. Planned land use change in villages in Luang Prabang where FALUPAM has been implemented. Note: Years refer to year of FALUPAM implementation. Red boxes indicate villages we visited; as mentioned above, the villages we visited in Nambak district had not yet been through the process of future land-use zonation, so they are not shown here.
11 A final but important point on the ambitiousness of different land-use use planning methods is that it is not always easy to measure. The data shown above in Figure 6 is useful only to the extent that TABI s p ese t la d use data efle ts a tual conditions on the ground; all accounts we heard suggest that this is in fact the case. But to compare TABI maps of present versus future with other examples of land-use planning maps is to see that present land use is not always as precisely mapped; rather than present actual land use, other methodologies often map present land use zonation. As a result, p ese t a d futu e aps te d to look o e si ila i , fo e a ple, GIZ PLUP aps tha TABI s FLUP maps (Figure 7). This does not mean that the PLUP example shown in Figure 7 is less ambitious than the TABI example, but rather that its planned degree of land-use change is more difficult to measure. As the next section elaborates, this difference in level of detail is one of the things local officials we spoke to like about FALUPAM, although it also carries certain risks.
Figure 7. Current vs. planned land use in sample PLUP (top) and FALUPAM (bottom) maps from Phonexai district, Luang Prabang
3.2. FALUPAM in the Field This section presents the results of our five-day field trip to Luang Prabang. It begins by describing how government staff we spoke to see FALUPAM (3.2.1), and then turns to FALUPAM o the g ou d i the illages e isited . .2). The final subsection (3.2.3) presents results on FALUPAM s links with larger processes such as national forest zoning, land concessions, and the recent cash crop boom among smallholders across the northern uplands.
12 3.2.1. Government Tidiness During our fieldwork, we heard consistently from government technical staff at both the provincial and district levels that one thing that most appealed to them about FALUPAM was its ability to manage and monitor where upland farming was taking place. Examples included (paraphrased): Government people want managed coordination and predictability – that s hat the look for in a land-use pla i g p o ess. This a , he the e egotiati g ith i esto s, the can actually have confidence in their ability to know where people are farming, when. They like the TABI process because it actually does this. (Interview with Luang Prabang PAFO technical staff, 31 Oct. 2016, emphasis in original) Earlier LUPLA was good for allocating plots and generating tax revenues, but not for coordinated land-use planning at the level of zoning. … [In contrast,] the main need that FALUPAM fills is keeping track of who is farming where. (Interview with Nambak DAFO technical staff, 2 Nov.) TABI has detail within the category of upland agricultural land, so we can monitor it, he eas GIZ [PLUP] does t, so people a go he e e a d it s ha d to o ito . … TABI s level of detail is in line with actual land use, [whereas] GIZ zones are too large to monitor. (Interview with Phonexai DAFO technical staff, 3 Nov.) These statements clearly echoed the point made above (and quoted in Section 3.1.1) by Heinimann et al., who noted that tidiness rather than scattered (ka-che, ka-chai) upland fields was the key to having shifting cultivation accepted by local authorities. While the added legibility clearly raises the concern that the FALUPAM process could have negative impacts if used in bad faith (e.g. to find e ess la d to gi e a a , FALUPAM s e t a detail a d asso iated legibility seem like a calculated risk that has so far produced positive results. As oted a o e, a full a ou ti g of TABI s o ito i g data was not possible, but we did not hear any reports of FALUPAM being used to deprive villages of land. To the contrary, as elaborated below, the links between FALUPAM and investment processes that we heard about focused on how to improve smallholder production (primarily through livestock – see Section 3.2.2) and how FALUPAM might have helped avoid problems created by concessions if it had been in use earlier (next paragraph, last quote).
Effectiveness Closely tied into the discourse of ease of regulation was a second perceived advantage: effectiveness on the ground. This was sometimes qualified, given the variety of situations in the field (see next section), and it came through more strongly in Phonexai and at the provincial level than it did in Nambak. (As noted above, we were unable to meet with district staff in Chomphet.) Nonetheless, the balance of comments from government staff and PAFO/DAFO leadership was supportive of FALUPAM, and echoed themes of effectiveness through participation, detailed planning, and especially a mix of the two. These included: [FALUPAM is] engaging communities to help them transition to more stable livelihoods. You can see results around deforestation reduction – FALUPAM is a good way for engaging with illage s. … We a also see he e to ta get p o otio /e te sio effo ts like li esto k a d irrigation. So [FALUPAM] is i li e ith the Dist i t s goal of po e t alle iatio (Interview with Phonexai DAFO head, 3 Nov.) TABI has some non-compliance issues [like GIZ/PLUP], for example with some households preferring the old system [of upland farming]. But the community prevails on them since they make the rules themselves. (Interview with Phonexai DAFO technical staff, 3 Nov.)
13 Village leadership, current land use and the history of relocation are the three key factors that shape the FALUPAM monitoring results [i.e. effectiveness]. Implementation is going well, but there is variability – some villages are harder than others. (Interview with TABI staff, Luang Prabang, 31 Oct.) Land-use planning [in Luang Prabang] started with a Vietnamese project in Nambak more than ten years ago. This focused on investment and development, but it was not successful. Since then, land-use planning has happened through GIZ, Agri[su]d and TABI projects. TABI has done the most villages, and is good because it is participatory – if people are involved in the process, they follow the results – and because it involves detailed data collection, and decreases conflict within and between villages …. [Re: i est e t a d la d o essio s,] FALUPAM is identifying areas, and filling in the map. This will help allocate land for investment better [in the future] – for example, the rubber concession in Nambak is right next to the villages. If they had done FALUPAM first, they would have allocated it farther away and saved land near the village for illage s agricultural production (Interview with Luang Prabang PAFO deputy director, 31 Oct.)5 As elaborated in the next sub-section, our village visits revealed a number of factors that shape – and in some cases complicate – the actual implementation of FALUPAM. But as the passages here suggest, local officials and government staff are, on the whole, pleased with what they have seen. DAFO staff in Nambak were, as noted above, slightly more circumspect with respect to FALUPAM s effectiveness. They were positive in tone, but emphasized that they were still getting the hang of the process, as well as waiting assess its impacts. The passage already uoted he e the des i ed the main need that FALUPAM fills [as] keeping track of ho is fa i g he e , was followed by this: We e still depe de t o the p o i e [PAFO] fo te h i al suppo t [ ith FALUPAM], but e e getti g the e ith ou apa it . A d if e a sho o ete esults i the fo of (for example) increased agricultural production, increased livestock, and/or demarcation and enforcement of forest zones, then we can include FALUPAM in our own work planning and budgeting in the future. (Interview with Nambak DAFO technical staff, 2 Nov., emphasis in original) DAFO staff in Nambak also e p essed suppo t fo TABI s ge e al app oa h FALUPAM plus SPAs) providing a positive alternative to both the concession model and smallholder monoculture cash cropping (e.g. of maize). While they did not have hard data to offer, they described the TABI app oa h as the ost app op iate of the th ee odels Figure 8). A final sub-theme under effectiveness also emerged in our discussion with the Nambak DAFO, although we suspect this would have also come up in Chomphet if we had had the chance to speak to them. This concerned the longstanding practice of land reservation (din jap jong), which Nambak DAFO staff noted was one means through which local elites were concentrating their landholdings. In a brief but notable remark, they mentioned that FALUPAM was appropriate for scaling up because it provided a way to counter the practice of din jap jong by elites. We return to this in Section 3.2.2.
5 The ea lie pa t of this uote o spi uousl e hoed TABI s o sto li e pa ti ipatio , detailed data olle tio , de eased o fli t, de eased isk of fi e, de eased fe i g la o , de eased o e s la o a d increased road access). So while it may not have been based on personal observation, this person seems to have held the FALUPAM process in high regard nonetheless. The example from Nambak, in contrast, is clearly grounded in an actual case, discussed below.
14
Figure 8. DAFO opinion of TABI versus other business models, Nambak district
Scaling Up The above comments converged on a general agreement among PAFO and DAFO representatives we spoke to that they would like to see FALUPAM scaled up significantly to all the districts in the province (PAFO) and all or most of the village clusters (kumbans) in their respective districts (DAFOs). (The only caveat offered was by the DAFO staff in Nambak, who said that FALUPAM would be appropriate for the whole district except for the urban and peri-urban areas.) The DAFO head in Phonexai said without qualification that he would like to see FALUPAM scaled up to all nine kumbans in the district, while the PAFO deputy director expressed the same sentiment but lamented the lack of personnel: [FALUPAM] helps with future land use planning for economic development. We have big de a d f o the dist i t le el fo doi g o e, ut e do t ha e the staff. We e o l do e about 20 percent [of the villages in the province], so our hands are a bit tied about how to speed up. (Interview with Luang Prabang PAFO deputy director, 31 Oct.) This quote echoes with the resonance between FALUPAM and official development priorities (also see next sub-section) and etu s to a poi t ade a o e i Se tio . . : TABI s brand of land-use planning is one based on quality and effectiveness, rather than rote replicability. This is something to be proud of, given the shortcomings of other land-use planning methods. But it also highlights the need for training and human resources capacity improvement if personnel bottlenecks are to be avoided. We return to this in Section 4.
3.2.2. Village Visits As described in Section 2.2, we visited 3 villages in Chomphet (all TABI), 2 villages in Nambak (both TABI), and 3 villages in Phonexai (2 TABI, 1 non-TABI). Key findings for each are presented in bullet- point form, village-by-village in our presentation slides. Here, we discuss these visits thematically. Some themes have emerged already above; others are introduced here for the first time.
Theme 1. Tidiness for Recognition: FALUPAM’s Social Contract As explained above, FALUPAM seeks to gain state recognition for village-scale land-use planning that makes shifting cultivation more governable by making it more spatially consolidated and more predictable in by location. This approach follows loosely in the footsteps of the social contract attempted under the LFA program, which sought to offer tenure recognition (although often limited) by the government in exchange for changes (often reductions) in land use by villagers. As is widely known, LFA came up short on both counts: planned intensifications failed to emerge, and the limited tenure recognition that was granted in the form of temporary land use certificates was not followed
15 up with more permanent titling efforts. FALUPAM seeks to improve on this earlier model by making planned land use changes actually realistic by planning for longer fallow lengths than those allowed u de the sta da d -plot allocation, and by conducting village consultations in a way that allows meaningful discussion and deliberation in private, rather than merely formal participation. The data presented in the previous section suggests at least some degree of buy-in from provincial- and district –level governments. (The caveats are important – central government is not part of this list (yet); local government recognition does not et i lude ha d land titles; and the data presented above is only from Luang Prabang, which is by some reports comparatively progressive on these issues – and are revisited below.) Given the evidence of government buy-in so far, what is the other side of the coin: the evidence from the villages themselves? To what extent is the promised control over shifting cultivation actually occurring? We did not have the data or resources to do the sort of before-and-after comparison using aerial (satellite or photo) data that could ultimately settle the question of FALUPAM s i pa ts; as o e practitioner we spoke to pointed out, clustered upland fields of the sort visible in Figure 4 are not evidence of FALUPAM s i pa t, if the illages i ol ed e e doi g this al ead . Gi e that FALUPAM s ethodolog of upla d field luste i g is ased on existing practices in some northern communities, this is indeed possible. That said, the evidence we collected was promising in a few ways, and supports the conclusion that TABI is indeed developing a model of land-use planning that is much closer to the recognition-for-tidiness social contract attempted (but largely unachieved) by the LFA program. As detailed elo , the e ide e of su ess o the tidi ess side of the e uatio varied from village to village. But this does not detract from the overall finding. FALUPAM is working in contexts where the difficulties of land use governance are many and varied. In such a context, the key question, to us, is as much whether FALUPAM contained the tools for success, and whether these had begun to bear fruit in at least some villages. We begin with one key indicator of FALUPAM s i pa t o shifti g ulti atio : the length of the rotations planned under its future land-use management regimes.
Theme 2. Length of Upland Agricultural Rotations It is widely accepted by upland development practitioners in Laos that 3-year rotations (2-year fallows) are insufficient for upland rice. The 3-plot policy reportedly derives from the Lao Property La s use it o lose it p o isio , hi h is ased o the p i iple of o tinuous use and the practice fixed cultivation. Three-year rotations, in other words, are generally acknowledged to be antithetical to working with shifting cultivation – a key principle of the TABI approach – and are a good indicator of land-use plans that, in contrast, seek to eliminate it. Figure 9 shows planned fallow lengths in all of the villages where FALUPAM has occurred in Phonexai and Chomphet districts (n=26), as well as in the single village (n=1) we visited in Phonexai where PLUP was implemented a few years ago (B. Na Ngoi). A limited sample is used here for the TABI villages because this data is not readily available from the project spreadsheets we received (such as the one used to produce Figure 6) and thus had to be extracted from project maps, village by village. Two things are readily apparent from Figure 9; both a e o siste t ith TABI s stated app oa h to dealing with shifting cultivation in a realistic manner. First, rotation lengths in TABI villages are roughly double those of the standard 3-plot pattern exemplified by the LFA program and its descendants. In Phonexai, TABI villages where FALUPAM has been implemented have planned rotation lengths ranging from 4 to 8 years, and a central tendency around 6 years (average 6.05 years, median 6 years). In Chomphet, the range was only slightly smaller (4 to 7 years), and the median was the same as in Phonexai: 6 years. The average (4.9 years) was shorter due to one village (B. Na Kham) planning to eliminate upland production entirely. These numbers show that TABI has
16 succeeded in moderating the lassif -it-all-as-fo est i pe ati e that undermined earlier land-use planning efforts; given that this entails a significant reorientation of government dogma on land allocation in upland villages, this is a significant achievement. Combined with the data shown above in Figure 6, the achievement is all the more striking: The preservation of long upland rotations has been done even as TABI has planned to decrease the areas under upland agriculture and replace them with forest categories (Figure 6). This is an example of a moderately ambitious approach (to use the language used in Section 3.1.3) to land-use planning that has the potential to address forest conservation and regrowth and upland livelihoods simultaneously. As reiterated in Section 4, this should be monitored and examined in other parts of the TABI landscape during Phase III.
Figure 9. Planned upland agricultural rotation lengths (in years) under FALUPAM (gray, n=26) and PLUP (hatched, n=1) in two Luang Prabang districts
Another way that Figure 9 complements Figure 6 is in showing the extent to which FALUPAM responds to village-specific contexts rather than according to a preconceived, one-size-fits-all model. While TABI illages otatio le gths a e u ifo l lo ge tha under the standard 3-plot rule, they vary significantly f o illage to illage. As ela o ated i the e t the e, this ste s f o TABI s efforts to address a range of circumstances, many of which stem from inherited difficulties.
Theme 3. Dealing with Land Scarcity For a country with such a low population density, land scarcity is a surprisingly common theme in Laos. As Jonathan Rigg (2005) and others have pointed out, this has often been due to the creation of (non-demographic) land scarcity by policy-related practices such as village consolidation and land- use planning, which have brought together large groups of previously dispersed farmers and taken (or at least attempted to take) significant chunks of land out of production, respectively. Our field visits reflected this story in some ways and complicated it others.
17 It is notable that land scarcity emerged as an explicit theme of our discussions in only two of the eight TABI villages we visited, and as elaborated below, FALUPAM was being actively put to the task of helping to deal with land scarcity that had been induced by a variety of reasons – some policy- related, others not. Equally importantly, it was notable that land scarcity did not come up in the other six TABI villages we visited, despite at least one of them having been consolidated. We take this to reflect the fact that land-use planning, in certain circumstances and if done well, can actually help alleviate the land scarcity induced by village consolidation, if sufficient land for long-fallow upland cultivation can be preserved. This is precisely what happened in B. Phak Hok (Phonexai district), where three communities were consolidated into one in 2003, and the resettlement process was a painful and complicated one for all parties involved. Below (theme 5), we discuss some of the other issues that stemmed from this process, but it is notable that a shortage of upland agricultural land was not one of them. The two villages where land scarcity was identified as an issue were both in Chomphet district. The first, B. Houay On, had an upland rotation period of 4 years, which was the shortest we observed in TABI s FALUPAM work (see Figure 9). This, it turned out, was due chiefly to the history of the illage s fou di g athe to e e t o poli -induced events. The village had been established during the war years by refugees fleeing the fighting in Nambak; they had been forced to carve out a village territory in between existing villages. Unlike its longer-established neighbors, B. Houay On had no lowland paddy area, and thus relied entirely on its uplands. But its population was too large for the land base it had been able to claim, and it was thus facing a land shortage. This was exacerbated to a small extent by land sales to private individuals from other areas who had developed teak and rubber plantations on village land. But as Figure 10 show, these losses were small relative to the land base as a whole. Even with minimal planned reduction in upland land uses (Figure 6) and most of the village allocated to upland agriculture (Figure 10, right), the village only had sufficient land for four years of rotation. As with a number of other villages in the area, B. Houay On was thus planning a relatively rapid transition to large livestock rearing as a way to decrease its dependence on shifting cultivation (see theme 8 below). But given its limited land base, this transition was more urgent than many of the other villages we visited. The second village where land scarcity emerged as an issue in our interviews is interesting because it shows FALUPAM working with, rather than against, a well-known coping mechanism in many upland communities that have been resettled: returning to farm in old village areas. In B. Houay Seng (also in Chomphet district), the villagers we spoke to were members of the Khmu portion of the village, who had been relocated a number of years earlier and merged with an existing Lao village; perhaps in an effort to welcome the resettlers, the new village was given the a e of the ig a ts old village – Houay Seng – a watershed in the northern portion of the village territory (Figure 11, circled). Resettlers found a shortage of land in the area around the new village, however, and began to return to the old village area to farm. This shows up in FALUPAM current land use map as both upland rice and bush fallow (Figure 11, left). As the map on the right shows, this earlier use has been incorporated in the illage s la d use pla under FALUPAM through both present-year upland fields (Figure 11, right, light yellow) and future fallows (darker orange). The villagers we spoke to praised TABI for helping them to access these areas in a planned way by helping them build a road to the area. (We return to this theme of road building in theme 9 below.) Those we spoke to were all men, but they described this more ordered approach – clustered fields accessible by road – as being popular with women in the village, since they could walk to work in groups rather than alone.
18
Figure 10. B. Houay On (Chomphet district), FALUPAM planned land use map (inset map enlarged at right)
Figure 11. B. Houay Seng (Chomphet district). Current village location is at lower right; circled area is the Houay Seng watershed, location of old Khmu village.
19 Theme 4. Dealing with Land Concessions O e of TABI s e t al h potheses is that di e sified li elihoods ased o i dige ous o odit production can be more successful than the imported monoculture-centered models of land concessions and contract farming. Although testing this claim was beyond the scope of our assignment, one dimension of this has to do with improving how land is governed – including how it is allocated in the first place – at the village scale. I Na ak s Na Yang cluster, we had the chance to visit two villages where a land concession had ee g a ted p io to TABI s a i al. While this is not the only way to investigate FALUPAM s elatio ship to o essio s (also see Section 3.2.3 below), it showed us that at least some communities are hoping that FALUPAM can help them mitigate the negative impacts of past concessions. Our initial examination focused on a well-known Chinese rubber concession, but in the process, it became clear that villagers were dealing with a banana concession as well as a district timber concession. In B. Houay Yen, most families (50+) are owners of lowland paddy, while a few (7+) are not, and rely exclusively on upland fields; all families, according to our interview, have garden land. So, while land scarcity per se was not an issue, villagers reported being unhappy with the options available to them to make money, and were hoping to use FALUPAM to help create an alternative. Currently, they relied heavily on labor in the banana and rubber concessions that occupied prominent lands in the village – the banana plantation was adjacent to a large expanse of paddy land (Figure 12), while the rubber plantation was also located close to the settlement.6 Village residents complained about the toxic exposure that came with banana work in particular, mentioning dizziness, nausea, weight loss and fatigue. Rubber plantation work, they said, was a bit better, but required higher skill and was thus open to a smaller segment of the community. Their hopes for the FALUPAM process were that it could help them develop their own livestock production so that they would not be forced to work in the concessions in order to make money.
Figure 12. Banana concession adjacent to rice paddies in B. Houay Yen, Nambak district
6 This was mentioned above by the PAFO deputy director as well. During our fieldwork, we heard that the rubber company had initially promised to develop plantation land farther from the village, but had not made a map prior to beginning land clearing. This absence of a planning map figured centrally in the way the rubber concession was described, but it had apparently not made enough of a difference to avoid repeating the same thing with the banana concession a few years later!
20 The neighboring village of B. Houay Hit was also impacted by the rubber concession, but the residents we spoke to did not emphasize this in our discussion. This was one of two villages where it was clear that we were only getting part of the story: the village had been consolidated one, and none of the Khmu community had been at (invited to?) our meeting. Moreover, we found out later that the Khmu portion of the village had petitioned the district to let them separate from the Tai Lue portion – this was mentioned casually after our meeting by the DONRE staffer accompanying us! Our Tai Lue informants were nonetheless excited to have FALUPAM implemented, seemingly because it would increase transparency over village land use with respect to both Khmu residents (who they said ofte de eloped fou o so plots of la d ut o l de la ed o e o t o , a d ith ega d to a dist i t ti e o essio uota in the same area where the Khmu swidden land was located k a a . While ou i fo a ts e e ui k to state that the ti e allo atio as up to the district and beyond their control, the message seemed to be that the transparency that FALUPAM brought would be a welcome addition to land use in the village. As the example of the Khmu residents suggests, however, this transparency would not only impact outside actors. This brings up the next theme.
Theme 5. Dealing with Village Consolidation B. Houay Hit, discussed above, highlighted the importance of dealing with the complications created by village consolidation when implementing FALUPAM; this was no surprise, since TABI and PAFO staff had told us this as well.7 Two additional consolidated villages are discussed to illustrate this and the next theme. The first is a village in Phonexai where FALUPAM is attempting to address the after- effects of a long and difficult village consolidation, while the second focuses on a related issue – reserved land (din jap jong) – that became a problem largely due to an earlier village consolidation. We discuss the second case separately, as its own theme, since the issues associated with din jap jong are likely to occur in non-consolidated villages as well. B. Phak Hok, i Pho e ai s Sop Jia cluster, was founded in 1975, and was combined with three additional settlements from the nearby area beginning in 2003. The initial resettlement process dragged on for a decade, however; we were told that this was because some of the esettle s had a poor political understanding, likely indicating a reluctance to relocate. While FALUPAM was thus working in a context that might appear on the surface to be relatively straightforward – plenty of land, a single ethnic group, and a resettlement event that is relatively old – this history turned out to matter substantially. This was one of the villages that was selected for us as one where FALUPAM had faced some challenges during implementation. The main challenge was that residents of the resettled villages did not want to farm in parts of the village territory which they were unfamiliar with. Those who had moved from the settlement to the north did not want to have their fields in areas to the south, and vice versa. We saw two ways that FALUPAM dealt with this. The first may seem quotidian or obvious, but is not: the FALUPAM process begins with local place names so that village residents can discuss land uses in different parts of the village territory without relying exclusively on the map. The two former settlement areas, Moklahang and Houay Souay, thus appear clearly on the current land use map (as previously developed areas) and, more importantly, as areas labeled by name on the future land-use map (Figure 13).
7 Ten of the 18 villages where FALUPAM had been implemented in Phonexai district were described to us as o solidated ot o igi al illages PAFO staff.
21
Figure 13. Old village sites on current land use (left) and planned (right) land use maps, B. Phak Hok, Phonexai district (circles, arrows and enlargements added).
Figure 14. Meeting participants pointing to this year’s split produ tio zo e (lightest yellow), B. Phak Hok, Phonexai district
22 Second, FALUPAM accommodated these preferences for north and south by splitting the first year of production into two zones, each located in the area of the old villages (Figure 13 [right, light yellow areas] and Figure 14). As in B. Houay Seng above, this accommodated and worked with a coping mechanism that were already occurring. As the map on the right side of Figure 13 shows, however, year 1 was the only year in which production was split into two separate zones (lightest yellow patches, in both the northeast and southwest portions of the village territory). Year 2 will bring the illage s p odu tio area together in a single zone, located just outside the residential area. Year 3 (2018) is likely to be the real test, since it is located in the far northern part of the village territory. B. Phak Hok thus shows FALUPAM s pote tial to ha dle o e t pe of difficulty inherent in working in consolidated villages. Whether this potential actually materializes is not guaranteed, and will need to be monitored and supported as TABI continues.
Theme 6. Dealing with Existing Tenure Institutions: Din Jap Jong B. Som, in Chomphet district, illustrates a special type of land scarcity that can occur within FALUPAM, even if the village in question has plenty of land – this village had a 7-year rotation planned, among the longest in the district (Figure 9). A particular type of land scarcity occurred within the annual allocation of upland agricultural land, however, not because FALUPAM failed to allocate enough land, but because an existing indigenous land tenure institution got in the way. The specific institution here was la d ese i g jap jong din), which occurs in many rural Lao villages, and can be especially challenging in cases of village consolidation, where different sets of socio- cultural norms are forced to interact and, in some cases, compete. This is what occurred in B. Som. Our meeting was well attended, and included both Lao and Khmu villagers, including the village leadership; this was one of our few meetings where women both attended and played an active part in shaping the discussion (Figure 15). Early in the meeting, while discussing the history of land-use planning in the village, a few Khmu villagers said that they had preferred the earlier LFA process that had taken place in 2004-2005 precisely because it had been more poorly coordinated; FALUPAM, they said, had actually decreased their ability to sell rice. As the discussion unfolded, the reason for this became clear. A Khmu woman explained that this had to do with the shortages of land that Khmu members of the village were experiencing because much of the good land in the FALUPAM allocation for that year had already been reserved by Lao residents of the village, who had been paying taxes on it for many years. This meant that the remaining land in the FALUPAM upland allocation for that year was of poor quality. The Khmu woman who had spoken up said that she had thus had to lease land from Lao members of the village in order to get good land for production; FALUPAM had thus acted in combination with the existing institution of din jap jong to create land scarcity and, as a result, an informal land rental market. Our PAFO guide tried to explain, both to us and to the villagers themselves, that this was not how it was supposed to work: villagers were supposed to follow the 3- ea use it o lose it rule for private claims. FALUPAM had thus intended to replace the traditional practice of reserving land, but as our conversation made clear, it was instead interacting with it. Unlike in B. Phak Hok, however, it was not clear in this case that FALUPAM contained all of the tools needed to address the issue. The problem, it was explained, was that reserved land was a key component of the illage s ta ase; according to one village official, it generated LAK 29-35 million per year. This created a strong incentive to maintain din jap jong as a social institution, and may have contributed to the naiban s opinion, expressed to one of us, that Khmu residents should stop practicing shifting cultivation altogether. B. Som thus showed that it is not only local officials who need to be convinced to work with shifting cultivation, but also village leaders who – as in many consolidated multi-ethnic villages – are steeped in the rhetoric of stabilizing (i.e. eliminating) it.
23
Figure 15. Village meeting, B. Som, Chomphet district, Luang Prabang
Theme 7. Land Taxes Land taxes came up in a few of the villages we visited. The issue had actually come up first in our meetings with PAFO staff, in response to our question about why communal land titling – initially planned for in TABI project documents – had not occurred. One of the answers we were given was that villagers were reluctant to pay the taxes that a communal title would bring, and felt that government endorsement of FALUPAM s la d-use plans would provide a sufficient degree of tenure protection. This is perhaps a flimsy excuse, but it nonetheless raises the issue of the relationship between tenure recognition and taxation – in other words, another version of the social contract. Both the PAFO technical staff and the vice-director we spoke to said they were advocating with the provincial governor to waive the taxes on the agricultural land allocation that FALUPAM had created, making it clear that this was still an open policy question. This, we believe, may not be such a good idea. We were informed that Lao land tax policy is often inconsistent, but that it generally taxes fallow land at higher rates than land in production. This was difficult to confirm in any general way, but we did note that reserved land (perhaps analogous to fallow land) was taxed at rates like LAK 35,000 (B. Som) and LAK 50,000 (B. Houay Hit, both discussed above).8 Using reserved land tax rates for fallow land under FALUPAM would make agricultural land taxes exorbitantly high; if presented with this sort of scenario, villagers would understandably seek to avoid this at all costs. At the same time, the proposed PAFO solution of waiving taxes on fallow land entirely did not make sense to us, given that the failure to generate tax revenue is one of the central reasons given by state officials for allocating upla d a eas to state la d o essio s. Notwithstanding the substantial food security implications of this argument, it does make an important point: untaxed lands require the ongoing goodwill of the government. On the other hand, taxing fallow land at lower rates than production land would bring fallow land – that is, all of the land allocated to agriculture under FALUPAM – into the taxation
8 This is consistent with a recent online comment by Stuart Ling, who noted rates of LAK 50,000 and 15,000 for uncultivated and cultivated land, respectively, in central Laos.
24 system, and give villagers an economic and legal claim on the land, rather than simply a moral and cultural one. B. Donxai, one of the villages we visited in Phonexai district, was in fact doing some version of this. While e did t get the details, the illage head told us that the had lo e ed the ta ate fo fallo land compared to land under production. This village is discussed further in the next section, but this detail highlights the potential, as well as the need, to bring the taxation system in line with the type of village-wide land-use planning – and specifically increased allocation of agricultural land – that FALUPAM is trying to achieve. More generally, given the subtle but important differences between fallow and reserved land, it may be worthwhile to try to differentiate these concepts at the policy level so that reserved land can continue to be taxed at higher rates while fallow land taxes are lowered.
Theme 8. Resonance with District Development Planning (a.k.a. Betting on Large Livestock) As described above, a number of the villages we visited are in the process of embracing cattle raising as pillar of their livelihood transition. In B. Houay On, cattle sales are the future the village is betting on when the 4 years of upland agricultural land run out; the residents of B. Houay Yen are similarly hoping that cattle raising will allow them to stop depending on concessions for sources of wage labor. In the northern uplands, cattle are a common answer to the question of how to actually pursue the transition away from exclusive reliance on subsistence-based shifting cultivation. Two villages we visited have something to add to this general narrative. B. Donexai, in Phonexai district, is in some sense a showcase village for the TABI project. The village chief is a highly charismatic farmer who spent a number of years living in another village where, as he put it, he saw the advantages of using land according to rules and plans. Since returning to B. Donexai, he has become a livestock enthusiast and, more recently, a vocal advocate and model farmer for the TABI project. Despite his initiative – he said he learned 20 percent of what he does elsewhere and figured out the rest on his own – it is unlikely that leadership alone explains B. Do e ai s su ess so fa . A u e of othe fa to s ha e o e togethe as ell. The first is that the village, formed originally in 1984, is not a consolidated one, but rather is the product of migration of a single community. During our conversation, we heard a similar situation described as in B. Phak Hok, described above: some families were reluctant to follow the FALUPAM land-use plan because they were used to farming on their own side of the valley rather than in the area selected under the zoning process. But the weight this carried was described as being less significant than in Phak Hok, which may reflect the stronger power the community has over its members than in villages where multiple communities have been brought together. As it was described to us, this included not only the ability to prevail on members of the community who fell out of line, but also a willingness – and, read another way, a capability – to enforce fines for land-use transgressions (rather than simply saying that they had a policy but not being able to give any examples of enforcing it, as described below for a non-TABI village.) As the village head described it: If people go to the wrong area [to farm], we explain our rules and the district rules. We have a o ittee a d e e al a s o ito i g e ause e e i the a ea, so e see it. We e fi ed people, a d people k o e e se ious so the do t do it again. (Interview with village leadership, B. Donexai, Phonexai district, Luang Prabang, 3 Nov.) A othe i po ta t, also alluded to i the uote a o e, is the dist i t s poli of e ou agi g livestock commercialization. We heard this mentioned in other villages as well (e.g. B. Houay On, discussed above), but what made it especially relevant in B. Donexai was the confluence of official de elop e t poli ith illage s i ludi g the illage leade ship s o -the-ground innovation. B.
25 Donexai residents had developed a series of relatively large livestock enclosures (Figure 16), which they used to manage cattle operations, including cattle-sharing arrangements where one person takes care of animals owned by others in exchange for some t pe of pa e t. While the dist i t s livestock policy had not dictated these types of arrangements, it seems like it may have created a political umbrella of sorts, under which local innovation and experimentation could occur. With its flexible framework and emphasis on deliberation, FALUPAM seems to have contributed to this process significantly by providing a grammar through which this conversation and experimentation could take concrete form.
Figure 16. Naiban pointing at cattle enclosures, B. Donexai, Phonexai district, Luang Prabang
A cautionary tale, however, emerged from our visit to B. Na Ngoi, a village farther down the road in Phonexai district that had been the recipient of PLUP and at least three livestock programs. While there were important differences between the land-use planning that was implemented there and FALUPAM, there was also a similar story-line – using livestock to make the transition from upland rice to commercial upland agriculture – that, as we observed, seemed unlikely to work out without additional assistance. This pointed toward the need to consider sustainability in TABI villages, and highlighted the question of ambitiousness in land-use planning, introduced above.
B. Na Ngoi was created in 1974-1975 by Lao and Khmu families fleeing the fighting in Xieng Khuang; later, the village had briefly included about a dozen Hmong families in 2013-2014, but these had left after village leadership refused to let them settle separately from other village residents. The village was thus a mix of lowland and upland people who had lived together for a long time, and depended both paddy rice and upland rice. At 27 ha, the illage s padd esou es e e su sta tial; according to our informants, these were at least partially distributed among everyone in the village. Of the illage s o so households, 20-30 grew upland rice, while almost all (60+) kept large livestock. This last component had begun in 2006 with a SIDA livestock project that had begun in the wake of the illage s LFA e e ise. Although the initial LFA had failed to take root, over time, district officials brought a series of livestock (banking/rotation) programs – villagers would receive a few
26 animals one year and have to give that same number of animals back a few years later – aimed at helping stabilize shifting cultivation. The abovementioned SIDA program (2006) was followed by a World Vision project, also focused on cows, and a GIZ project focused on goats, which also came with PLUP, which had allocated three plots per household in 2013. The villagers we spoke to described these projects using the language of the social contract: they had agreed to not cut down the forests for rice production, and in return the government had promised to help them develop alternative livelihoods:
After LFA [in 2003], we understood [the rules] but cleared wherever anyway. But now under the new [PLUP] system, we have a lot of rules and we follow them. Now, our [upland rice] yields have gone down, so the government has had to give us development support – e.g. for livestock – so that people do t go ack to long-fallow rice. (Village interview, B. Na Ngoi) The issue here is that contract was, to hear the villagers tell it, both precarious and dependent on additional inputs that had not yet materialized. They noted the challenges with building up livestock herds under rotation/banking programs that, despite providing credit, removed animals from the village rather than giving them to other needy families (SIDA); that only provided calves, making the wait a very long one (World Vision); that only provided two animals per household (SIDA and World Vision); and that did not provide adequate follow-up on caring for the animals (GIZ). They also noted that livestock prices had fallen recently, and that only 1-2 traders were allowed to come to the village, which depressed prices even further.
In sum, the residents we spoke to implied that they were scraping by, but would not be able to maintain the agreed-upon commitment to three upland plots for much longer. When we pressed for details on land management and enforcement, these were not forthcoming; they said they had a policy of fines and mandatory replanting if anyone planted in the forest, but that they did not recall how much the fines were because no one actually did this. This is suspect, and given the critiques of the livestock programs summarized above, it seems likely that that the three-plot rotation planned under the PLUP exercise will break down soon, or maybe already has. Phrased in the language used in Section 3.1, B. Na Ngoi exemplified land-use planning whose ambition was greater than the resources that were brought to support it. That these resources – including three separate livestock projects – were not insignificant only bolsters the point: As TABI works through Phase III, it will be imperative to avoid repeating this type of overreach, making sure that planned land-use transitions are in line with existing capabilities and resources. Thus far, FALUPAM s la ge allo atio s of la d fo upland agriculture are a good sign; the key will be to maintain the viability of this allocation over multiple years.
Theme 9. Locking in Tenure Security? Recognition in the Absence of Land Titles A closely related question is thus how to lock in and even strengthen the limited degree of tenure security that has come from district and provincial approval of FALUPAM planning maps. As noted above, the earlier (and often default) plan of seeking communal land titles has not yet been possible; in the context of current policy conditions, it seems likely that even if this become possible, getting title coverage to correspond to FALUPAM s e te si e allo atio of la d to illage-use-based categories may prove difficult. On the other hand, as the village of B. Na Ngoi suggests, an equally difficult, although very different, challenge is getting buy-in from villagers themselves; the type of implicit threat conveyed by the villagers we spoke to is likely typical throughout much of the country.9 The TABI villages descried above suggest that FALUPAM has made significant strides in this direction; key question is how to lock these in.
9 This seems to be the case in at least some SUFORD villages, for instance (see sources quoted in Dwyer 2017).
27 We observed two ways in which FALUPAM seems to be creating forms of state recognition for village land use across the extent of entire village territories despite the p og a s la k of fo al titling. The first has to do with seeking recognition for the land use plan itself from district authorities rather than seeking a title through the centrally governed land administration bureaucracy, while the se o d has to do ith illage s o efforts to put the plan in practice, including by investing their own resources through the building of road infrastructure. We discuss these briefly in turn. Village land-use plans are often said to be the spatial version, and the village-scale portion, of the district development plan. In many earlier land-use planning efforts, this was the basis of their failure: district plans emphasized forest conservation and shifting cultivation stabilization, and LFA maps operationalized this plan village-by-village, often producing land-use plans that were unworkable and, in practice, ignored. I TABI s ase, ho e e , the fo us o ealisti la d-use transitions has made FALUPAM planning maps at least plausible, and with this comes the potential for confluence between village-level and district-level planning. Although not operationalized via land titles, the forms of recognition – both formal and informal – that FALUPAM s la d-use plans are in the process of producing are, in our opinion, extremely important. Land concession processes comes from multiple levels, but generally require some kind of sign-off at the district and even village scales. By investing resources in realistic and concrete land-use plans at village and district levels, even in the absence of communal titles, FALUPAM seems to be creating a form of communal tenure that is likely to stand up well to outside challenges. We revisit this in the next sub-section. In a context where the rule of law is not guaranteed, perhaps the best way to secure land tenure is to use land in a way that is conspicuously productive and self-managed. An additional source of strength for FALUPAM s te u e se u it aspi atio s is thus likely to be the fact that in at least some project villages, residents are themselves investing in road infrastructure that will help make the p oje t s plans a reality. While we did not collect data systematically about this, what we heard was suggestive and positive – residents of B. Houay On, for example, reported that they had already invested LAK 20 million in roads to make FALUPAM work. This is a significant amount, and suggests that villagers believe in FALUPAM as more than a hypothetical exercise. Echoing the point made above in relation to taxing fallow land at low rates, this type of investment is a form of improvement that from both a legal and symbolic perspective makes it more difficult for this land to be taken away without compensation.
3.2.3. FALUPAM and Larger Processes Most, if not all, of the themes examined above connect in some way to processes that operate above the village scale, two of which we discuss here: land concessions and forest classification. A third issue, smallholder production of boom crops like maize, sugarcane and rubber, is relevant as well; although it appeared only occasionally in our investigation of FALUPAM (e.g. Figure 8), this will no doubt figure importantly in planning and assessi g TABI s effo ts during and after Phase III. Land concessions While the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (as the saying goes), it is striking that since FALUPAM began in Luang Prabang, no villages that have had the program implemented have been targeted for land concessions (or so we were told). This is consistent with FALUPAM s e phasis o local deliberation and empowerment in the land-use planning process, and involvement of district staff and officials in both making and recognizing TABI land-use plans. If one thinks of unmanaged shifti g ulti atio as a isk fa to fo la d ei g see as a aila le fo o essio s, FALUPAM has been mitigating this risk factor fairly successfully.
28 The one known exception to this pattern is instructive. As Figure 17 shows, a portion of the planned Diamond Town SEZ allegedly covers portions of five villages where FALUPAM has been implemented, including one village (Houay Tan/Dtarn) in its entirety. Without additional information about how this SEZ was approved and sited, it is impossible to understand FALUPAM s effe tiveness vis-à-vis outside concession threats. Nonetheless, it is notable that this concession – which was likely approved at very high levels – is the only one that has threatened to intrude on a FALUPAM land-use plan. In the future, as discussions and planning take place about how land inside the concession will be used, FALUPAM s e iste e i these illages is likel to e a ad a tage, e tai l to those villages and possibly to others in the area as well. It is unlikely that a concession of that size will use all of the la d o e ed the i itial o essio pol go , so a i of o ki g a ou d a d taki g existing land uses is likely to occur. This will be a case to watch closely.
Figure 17. Alleged footprint of Diamond Town concession
More generally, the relationship between TABI villages and previously approved concession projects is more complex than we were able to investigate, given the importance of timing. Did TABI avoid concessions in the village selection process? Did concessions avoid TABI villages in the land-seeking process? Both of these are possible, and neither is mutually exclusive. During Phase III, this is one type of question that could be usefully investigated with the data at TABI s disposal. In addition to land concessions for agribusiness and special economic zones, hydropower and mining concessions often have extensive impacts on village livelihoods even if they do not spatially overlap with the villages in question. Although it was not a focus of our investigation into FALUPAM, TABI has done extensive work on community fish conservation zones that has important implications in the ongoing debate about hydropower development and mining. As with shifting cultivation lands, fisheries are often easily dismissed (externalized) from impact analysis and compensation planning because they are not seen as being owned by anyone. By incorporating and at least partially formalizing fisheries management, TABI is well positioned to continue to engage in processes and discussions about mitigation and compensation related to community fisheries at both the policy and project levels.
29 Forest classification As oted i Se tio . , o e i po ta t a ea of TABI s o k during Phase II relates to the re- delineation of Laos s three national forest categories, formally requested by the Lao National Assembly in 2014. This notice instructed relevant ministries (i.e. MAF and MONRE) to adjust the aps of Laos s ad i ist ati e fo est atego ies i o de to ette at h o ditio s o the ground. TABI facilitated a formal pilot of this re-delineation process in Luang Prabang in early 2015 (Figure 18), but it is important to note that the p oje t s village-level FALUPAM work is also relevant. We discuss both of these here.
Figure 18. Proposed re-delineation of national forest categories in Luang Prabang province (TABI 2015). The current map is shown on the left, and the proposed re-delineation on the right.
In early 2015, TABI facilitated a two-week process to pilot forest-category re-delineation in the whole of Luang Prabang province; this exercise brought together district-level technical staff from around the province and worked from satellite imagery and maps of existing forest zones to propose a re-mapped version of the forest estate across the province. According to a subsequent report, the p o ess as well received by district and provincial authorities TABI : . As Figure 18 (left) shows, much of Luang Prabang province is currently classified state forest; the report mentioned above includes a table based on a GIS overlay analysis that calculated that more than 300 villages in Luang Prabang – a d al ost , illages a d more than a quarter of all households i the ou t – sit inside these state forest categories (TABI 2015: 1). This has led to a number of problems, including: Ineffective/inefficient land management due to this incorrect macro-level forestland zonation;
30 Misguided and incorrect development planning at national, provincial and district levels due to the fa t that state fo est la d does ot e uate to fo est- o e p o a l o l a out - 60% of the a ea u e tl desig ated as state fo est actually has any forest cover); Non-observance of state forest boundaries - and boundary signs and markers - by local villagers and others, because many of these areas have no forest, which leads to a general mentality of ignoring any effort to sensibly manage the state forests; and Unrealistic and confusing village land use planning due to the higher-level legal constraints imposed by the 3 state forest categories. (TABI 2015: 1) The re-delineation of forest categories proposed by the teams that conducted the exercise (Figure 18, right) noticeably decreases the overall area under the national forest categories, as would be expected from a description of the above problems. (This is also consistent with the National Asse l s e o e datio s – see Dwyer & Ingalls 2015: Annex 1 for an English translation of the notice. Gi e that ju isdi tio al tu f has ee a ke di e sio of atio al fo est atego ies fo some time now (Dwyer & Ingalls 2015: 8-12), it is hardly surprising that the support by local authorities (for whom these forest categories play an important role in their day-to-day work of governing), has not been mirrored by central-level authorities in the relevant ministries, who are likely to see a threat. Conducted in early 2015, the proposal shown in Figure 18 had not been either accepted or formally rejected as of late 2016. An effort to re-deli eate the fo est atego ies i all of Laos s othe p o i es is epo tedl ei g funded by the World Bank and is set to begin sometime in 2017. Although the details of this scaling- up process were beyond what we were able to investigate during our mission, they are likely to be highl ele a t to TABI s Phase III o k. O the o e ha d, SUFORD has epo tedl developed a separate methodology for forest category re-delineation that is based more on computer-aided classification of remotely sensed imagery, as opposed to the approach taken by TABI, which relied heavily on visual interpretation of aerial imagery by district-level technical staff (TABI 2015). On the other hand, forest category re-delineation faces a number of larger institutional and bureaucratic hurdles, such as convincing key decision-makers that any losses to ministerial authority are more than counter-balanced by the social, economic, political and environmental benefits of having a workable forest category system. This is where FALUPAM s o k at illage le el becomes relevant to the national-level conversation about forest categories. In addition to the red-yellow-green mapping shown in Figure 18, FALUPAM has been categorizing village land across the province; by definition, this includes forest- and non- forest categories. A central question in the whole conversation about national forest categories is how the national-le el atego ies should esh ith the illage-le el o es. TABI s g eat st e gth is that it has data that can be brought to this debate. The provincial re-delineation pilot did not, according to our interviews with TABI staff, seek to impose the FALUPAM categories on the process, and the resulting re-delineation thus ended up with some areas of conflict between the two sets of maps; Figure 19 shows an example of this in Chomphet district. But the larger pattern is the more important one: much of the re-classification that TABI facilitated got the forest categories out of the village land areas, restricting national forestlands to the more remote boundary regions of the villages where overlap still exists. These overlaps may be technically ambiguous, but they are likely to nonetheless be functional in practice. More investigation is needed here, but the general pattern of leaving village-scale land classification to village-scale (rather than national-scale) processes is almost surely a principle that TABI could usefully champion.
31
Figure 19. Forest re-delineation in Chomphet district. Top: current (left) and proposed (right) forest categories. Bottom: Proposed forest categories overlaid with FALUPAM maps of forest (green) vs. non-forest (yellow) lands in eight villages. (Note: these are the same villages shown in Figure 17.)
The sort of meso-scale overlay shown in Figure 19 could be easily replicated throughout parts of Luang Prabang, where both current and proposed re-delineations of forest categories can be compared, as well as in other provinces, where FALUPAM can be compared with current forest categories alone. These types of overlay are likely to be useful for different stages of the conversation: comparing FALUPAM with current forest categories can help make the case for the importance of re-delineation, while comparing FALUPAM with proposed re-delineation can further the debate about how to actually do this and, even more importantly, how to use the results.
32 3.3. FALUPAM at Central Level As described in Section 3.1.1, FALUPAM represents an effort to address two of the fundamental problems that have plagued land-use planning in Laos over its long history: (1) the over-classification of land into restricted forest categories, and (2) closely related, the creation of formal but frequently ot su sta ti e pa ti ipatio o u ities hose futu e la d use is ei g pla ed ith the help of outside experts and government technicians. FALUPAM s diffe e es a e i ediatel appa e t from a variety of angles. The maps look different, not only at first glance, where more spatial detail and local place names are found than is typical of Lao land-use planning maps, but also when the maps are studied closely. Restricted forestland categories are comparatively rare, with much of the forestland that is allocated going into livelihood-accommodating uses such as forest harvesting and livestock grazing, and as noted above, much longer upland agricultural rotation periods than the typical 3-plot rotation. The process is obviously different too. Rather than a campaign-style, village- by-village implementation that works continuously and imposes strong incentives on villagers to accept whatever the experts propose so that they can get back to work, FALUPAM s ulti-staged implementation process, with extended periods of time for villagers to discuss previous and next steps without the presence of outsiders, departs from the model of what many people in Laos think land-use pla i g is supposed to look like. FALUPAM has been aimed primarily, in our view, at local stakeholders: at villagers and district authorities first and foremost, at provincial authorities a close second, and at central level a definite, if not necessarily distant, third. This seems justified in our view for at least two reasons. The first big hurdle that any project faces in piloting a new approach, is proving that it actually works in the field: that there is demand for what it has to offer, and that what it offers actually meets this demand; achieving this p oof of o ept, i othe o ds, requires this type of on-the-ground prioritization. Second, it is often difficult to get a clear picture of the legal possibilities and constraints regarding land- and forest-related livelihood issues in Laos; this has ee espe iall the ase du i g TABI s second phase, which corresponded closely with the rise of MONRE as a key player in the land and forest sector. Laws and maps may be clear, but as noted above with respect to the three national forest categories, that does ot ake the o ka le. TABI s hoi e to fo us o li elihood development rather than, say, prioritizing a land administration-based approach, meant an implicit elevation of local stakeholders over central-level interests and constraints. This, it should go without saying, is a good thing. FALUPAM has thus, predictably, encountered some resistance at the central level. This has not been uniform – we found a number of FALUPAM fans during the Vientiane-based portion of our mission, and as noted in Section 2.4 we were not able to speak to as many central government people as we would have liked. This section reviews three issues that came up in our conversations at the central level, and that are often spoken of as barriers to FALUPAM s oade a epta e a d uptake. As e argue, these are actually relatively easy to deal with, and in some case, represent opportunities to oade the o e satio i TABI s – and indeed the public s – favor.
3.3.1. The Cost Question In many of our conversations, we heard that FALUPAM is o e kill: as o e i fo a t put it, it s a Rolls Royce when what you need is just a good Toyota. This may be in fact true, but our suspicion is that FALUPAM is often assumed to be more expensive because it has nice-looking maps, rather than because anyone has looked at the actual numbers. FALUPAM s different process and workflow is actually likely to introduce at least some new efficiencies (economies of scale) over standard land- use planning, in particular the kumban-by- kumban approach rather than going on village at a time. Many people we spoke to – including some within TABI – believed that FALUPAM was more expensive, but no one was able to give us any evidence other than the maps themselves.
33 While costing information is important and should be investigated, it is important to reiterate a message from Section 3.1.2: FALUPAM s a d is ualit , ot heapness. But a key dimension of this ualit , as des i ed a o e, is FALUPAM s effe ti e ess i doi g hat la d-use planning is supposed to do: facilitate changes in where and how people use land. In asking simply how much one land-use planning methodology costs in relation to another (per village, per kumban, etc.), it is easy to sidestep the question of what these costs actually achieve on the ground. If measured in relation to its ability to actually plan and manage land use, FALUPAM may not turn out to be so expensive after all, even if its per-village costs turn out to be higher. The themes discussed above in Section 3.2.2 are hardly unique to FALUPAM; in addition to providing material that will help TABI continue to development and improve FALUPAM in Phase III, these themes have substantial potential to inform policy-level conversations (some of which are already occurring) about how to standardize land-use planning in Laos today. In order to deal with the heterogeneity of land-use planning methodologies currently available in Laos, a group of practitioners (including CDE staff, representing TABI) have begun to discuss a standards-based approach to standardizing land-use planning in Laos rather than trying to converge o a si gle est p a ti e ethod. This conversation is still very much ongoing, and would benefit from a discussion about how to include the issue of effectiveness in the standardization process. While it is impossible to make effectiveness per se a prerequisite, one way to build this into a standards-based approach is to include a standard or standards that deal with monitoring and data transparency. Such an approach will strengthen FALUPAM s positio i the field of la d-use planning, both because TABI is already doing this (monitoring) and because the results are likely to play in TABI s fa o . Usi g the p i iple of t ust ut e if ould help p o ote the e ide e-driven conversation about land-use planning that so badly needs to happen, and would ensure that this conversation occurs at a le el of depth that is a tuall ea i gful. You do t a t e e o e just o i g to the ta le a d sa i g, es ou ethod is effe ti e ut e o t sho ou the e ide e. ) As an initiative rather than a project, this kind of dialogue-based approach to better policy-making is ell ithi TABI s a date. Out e t al-level interviews suggest that this type of an approach would be very well received.
3.3.2. Branding While it is certainly not too late, it is unfortunate that TABI has not done a better marketing job with FALUPAM in the years since the method began to gain traction in the field. Even as FALUPAM has garnered fans, both on the ground and among a number of Vientiane-based experts familiar with the shortcomings of other land-use planning methods, the la k of a o e ted effo t to sell FALUPAM using mix of promotional materials and concrete data has hurt its brand with those who have not seen it in action. In such a context, the relative scarcity of data- and methods-driven materials about FALUPAM s app oa h a d esults, have been especially unfortunate, as this has emphasized, by default, the personal dimensions at the cost of substantive debate. Even as FALUPAM has gained traction and fans on the ground, it has failed to gain the same traction in Vie tia e s a ketpla e of ideas.
3.3.3. The Wider Conversation One implication of this is that TABI, in our view, has not lived up to its role as an initiative that brings together dialogue and evidence beyond the bounds of traditional projects and, even more important, se to s. The u e t la ds ape of poli dis ussio is oth so e hat f a tu ed et ee la d a d fo est o ti ge ts, e e though a of the people i ol ed a e ell a a e of the i ti ate li ks between the two sectors on the ground. One issue here is the root-branch structure of the Donor Roundtable process, which divides progressively into sector working groups along ministerial lines,
34 and sub-sectors working groups along sub-ministerial lines (e.g. land, agribusiness, uplands, etc.) that tend to operate in parallel. In practice, a number of development partner representatives participate in multiple working groups, but the need for coordination between potentially competing government institutions and their interlocutors in the donor community and civil society is readily apparent – including to at least some in government as well. Two areas where this has implications for TABI are (1) village-level land tenure – i.e. the domain of FALUPAM – and (2) national and sub-national forest zoning. One striking feature about the sectoral divisions in policy discussions (and the associated projects) mentioned above is that those in the land sector seem to be focusing increasingly on land titling (especially at the community scale – we are thi ki g of the LIWG s o goi g o k i the La d Su -Se to Wo ki g G oup, as ell as CIDSE s ongoing pilot of communal land titling), while those in the forest sector have been moving away from title- ased app oa hes i fa o of softe fo s of te u e su h as memoranda of u de sta di g SUFORD SU s u e t app oa h, afte a i itial pla to pu sue MOUs, o u it leases a d o u it titles a d illage fo est a age e t ag ee e ts CliPAD s app oa h . T o studies currently nearing publication have more to say about these issues.10 TABI has both proactive and reactive reasons to engage in these discussions. As an initiative, rather tha a p oje t pe se, TABI s e pli it ole is to o k a oss p oje t a d se to al li es i a s that challenge the comfortable isolation that many development projects operate within. This isolation is ofte ou te p odu ti e, p odu i g ot o l the so t of pat h o k la ds apes i the field that Keith Ba e has des i ed i his o k o Laos s esou e f o tie Ba e 9 , ut also duplication and fracturing within ministerial departments. The latter is often blamed on personal competition and patronage issues within government and the Party, but development projects may play a role as well. TABI s ole as a i itiati e has the potential to work against this "silo-ing" tendency by facilitating data-driven discussion and debate across traditional sectoral and project boundaries. There is also a reactive dimension to this: the title-based approaches mentioned above are, quite possible, in conflict with the type of de facto tenure work that FALUPAM has been seeking to do at the village and district levels. FALUPAM s app oa h is ased ot o a logi of la d ad i ist atio (which has tended to take the jurisdictional allocation of Laos s eight legal la d atego ies a o g different ministries as one of its baseline assumptions), but on a logic of local economic planning, where the village land-use plan is a localized and spatialized version of the district development plan. Such an approach, as described above, tends to treat the village territory as an integrated spatial unit, while the title-based approaches mentioned above are likely to do the opposite. (This is not inherently the case, but there does not seem to be either the interest or the power within civil society to push for territory-based approaches to village land tenure, at least so far.) One key area for TABI to take this conversation into an area that is both a strength for TABI and also likely to be socially beneficial is testi g TABI s e t al h pothesis. TABI is p e ised o the elief that diversified livelihoods based at least partially on indigenous commodities is economically superior to both the large-scale concession-based and smallholder versions of imported mono- cropping. Many participants in the conversation about land titling are aware of need to deal with the economic dimensions as well; one of the central lessons to come out of the Cambodian experience, for example, is that tenure security in rural areas is insufficient if there is no way to make a living off of the land. Between its project-specific SPA data, the concession-related data collected under the DECIDE-I fo p oje t oth the i e to data a d the Qualit of I est e t esea h , a d TABI s
10 Stua t Li g s stud of la d-use planning for the LIWG is one. Dwyer (forthcoming 2017) is another. Both should be available, at least in draft form, soon.
35 good access to district and provincial staff, TABI is well positioned to bring an unprecedented degree of data to this discussion. Such an effort would help achieve the proof of concept discussed above, but would also contribute to policy-level discussions on an even broader scale.
3.4. FALUPAM-related Knowledge Products W itte ate ials o k o ledge p odu ts a e ele a t to FALUPAM in a few ways. In the context of our mission, we identified five sets of materials to try to investigate: (1) overview materials that summarize FALUPAM for outside audiences; (2) FALUPAM maps; (3) FALUPAM training materials, in particular for GIS work; (4) Village Land-use Management Reports; and (5) village-level monitoring data. We discuss each of these in turn.
3.4.1. Overview Materials Materials that give a graphical overview of the FALUPAM process are a key part of communicating with a range of audiences, from villagers who are about to go (or are going) through the process, to government officials and technicians at the provincial and district levels, to policy-makers and development professionals in Vientiane. Although it was beyond our ability to do a detailed investigation of the relationship between each of these audiences and the specific materials that TABI has produced to communicate with them, it is fair to say that different materials may be needed various groups. TABI has produced a number of materials in both Lao and English. We received some of these from SDC and TABI project staff, and opportunistically collected others (e.g. the poster in Figure 20). Just as it was beyond our capacity to evaluate the matching of materials to different audiences, the quality and consistency of overview materials was not something we were able to devote significant time to. This was partly because it was not initially obvious which knowledge products to focus on – part of our task was to assemble the typology listed above – but mostly it was because other aspects of the fieldwork seemed more pressing. That said, we have two observations.
1. Content First, TABI has produced some good English-language materials that provide an overview of FALUPAM using a mixture of graphics and text. We photographed a poster on the wall of the TABI office that presents it pFLUP in a six-step overview and then zooms in on four key steps (Figure 20); while the numbering of the latter four steps do not always match the overview of the first six (top right box), the content and layout is intuitive and the visual materials give a very nice sense of how FALUPAM actually handles the mapping data. This approach to explaining FALUPAM in a series of sequential steps is clearly in implicit conversation with earlier explanations of LFA, PLUP and other land-use planning methods. It thus locates FALUPAM in relation to this familiar step-wise approach. We found a second graphical explanation of FALUPAM in a NIRAS quality assurance report (NIRAS 2016a) that uses a two-column approach to distinguish office-based from field-based activities (Figure 21 ; gi e FALUPAM s depa tu e f o the standard all-at-once implementation model, this visual model made sense to us. We did not see this two-column approach presented elsewhere, although as noted above, we did not look exhaustively. The only Lao-language materials we reviewed were PowerPoint presentations. These seemed to be packed with information and well-illustrated, but were also fairly crowded visually and not obviously consistent in look with the English-language materials. Given other, more pressing needs, we did not fo us o this. I the futu e, ho e e , as TABI s o u i atio s ate ials e o e ai ed at a ide audience, visual consistency between Lao and English-language materials may be a useful goal.
36
Figure 20. O er ie poster of the pFLUP [FALUPAM] process
37
Figure 21. FALUPAM Process Flow diagram (NIRAS 2016a: 9)
2. Circulation During our conversations with Vientiane-based stakeholders, we did not explicitly come across materials like those shown in Figure 20 and Figure 21. Nonetheless, many of those we spoke to seemed to have a sense of the FALUPAM process, suggesting that they had seen some version of these. As noted in Section 3.3.1, however, this knowledge was fairly partial: many people seemed to know enough about FALUPAM to assume that it was very expensive, but did not have sufficient information to be convinced that it was worth the extra (assumed) cost. Given what we heard from
38 TABI staff, it seems likely that the PowerPoint slides we viewed have been seen by stakeholders in government, but we were unable to do any inquiries about how these were received given our limited access to these stakeholders. So, we say this tentatively, given the shortage of time with which we investigated this: FALUPAM is very much present in the Vientiane milieu of land-use planning-related conversations, but the circulation of materials that document the process with a view toward convincing other stakeholders was not a major feature of this presence. One notable exception to this pattern concerned the land-use categories shown on TABI maps. For both present land use and future land-use zonation, the level of detail that FALUPAM produces is a level above that of other approaches, to the point that map legends are most effectively shown on posters. These posters did circulate in the conversation about standards discussed above in Section 3.3.1. While we did not follow, or investigate these discussions fully, the question of how much detail should be required – that is, as a minimum standard – in land-use planning, was one that seemed to generate significant debate during our mission. During Phase III, this is likely to come up again if the standards-based approach continues to be developed.
3.4.2. Maps The production of maps is a key part of the FALUPAM process, as illustrated in the materials shown above (Figure 20 and Figure 21) and as implied by much of the material presented in earlier sections. As noted above, we encountered both government staff and villagers interacting with FALUPAM maps as ea i gful a ie s of i fo atio . We spoke to go e e t staff ho liked FALUPAM s planning maps for their added level of detail, which (they said) increased their ability to monitor actual versus planned land use (Section 3.2.1). And we spoke with villagers who described the process of upland field clustering while also pointing out the areas they were talking about on the maps laid out in front of it (Figure 14). While we did not have this level of map-based interaction with residents in all of the TABI villages we visited, we believe that this level of familiarity and usa ilit is likel to e fai l o o , gi e TABI s o it e ts to usi g lo al pla e a es st ea s and mountains in particular) as an early step in the base-mapping process (Figure 21; also see the material surrounding Figure 13 above). Given what FALUPAM is trying to accomplish, the extra care and detail given to mapping may not be incidental. To return to the metaphor introduced above (Section 3.3.1), a Rolls Royce may actually not be overkill, given the need for both added horsepower and a bit of symbolic value. Extra horsepower, in this case, is the detail FALUPAM brings to the go e e t s a ilit to o ito the tidiness of upland land use; this is one half of the social contract described in Section 3.2.2 (Theme 1). The other half, recognition, helps to have nice-looking maps: just as upland hai fields have been re- branded as rice gardens (suan khao) by as a way to sidestep their negative connotations (Newby et al. 2010), maps that make upland agriculture look like it belongs on a modern land-use plan may be very well worth the extra dollar or two.
3.4.3. FALUPAM GIS Training Materials During the course of our mission, we asked about various people we met in Vientiane and in Luang Prabang (at both the provincial and district levels) about the map production process in particular, and the capacity development process in general. We were only able to get a cursory sense of this, but our impressions were that (1) capacity development occurs largely through on-the-job training, with written knowledge products such as the GIS training manual playing a secondary role primarily as a reference document; and (2) GIS capacity at the district and provincial level was substantial but not sufficient to work independently, and varied by both province and district. The GIS practitioners we spoke to told us that at the district level, there were a few technicians who were very skilled, hile othe s eeded o e help f o the p o i ial le el, a d that i ge e al, the dist i t s elia e
39 on provincial-le el pe so el fo te h i al issues elated to FALUPAM i ge e al as t ue fo GIS in particular. In Vientiane, when we asked about how the labor was distributed between project experts at CDE, government counterparts at DALAM, and project staff in the field (i.e. at the provincial and district levels together, since the latter would pass through the former before getting to Vientiane), we were told that this varies significantly by context. We did not push too hard, but our impression was that the dependence on CDE experts was perhaps higher than all parties hoped, and that while more precise evidence about this would be counterproductive to push for at the time of our mission, it would be useful to look into later. We did not have time to evaluate the GIS manual for content and usability. We received a draft of the manual during our mission, but were also told that it was still in progress and that the English translation had not yet been checked. We took it as a good sign that it was being produced in Lao language first (and translated to English rather than vice versa), but we were unable to devote significant time and resources to reading it and figuring out precisely how it was being or would be used (a prerequisite to evaluating the text itself), given our other commitments.
3.4.4. Village Land Use Management Reports Village land-use management reports cover the following topics: socio-economic baseline; village boundaries; livelihood sources; issues and challenges relating to livelihood development; short, medium and long solutions; and current and future land use areas for the village. This is a nice progression, in that it outlines and reflects the larger TABI approach of using a deliberative approach grounded in empirical data (and including spatial representations thereof) to move from the current situation to the future desired scenario. The report, in other words, is the narrative version of how the t a sitio f o is to ill o should is i agi ed; he eas a pai of aps (present use and future zonation) alone is something of a la k o , the report connects these via a sequence of data, interpretation and discussion. We did not have a chance to go through the content of any of these reports with stakeholders like villagers or district technical staff or authorities, but our opinion, based on a cursory review of a few reports we saw while in the field, is that these reports are well- assembled for their intended function of conveying FALUPAM s village-scale analysis, deliberations and plans to their target audience at the district level.11
Village land-use a age e t epo ts a e fu da e tal to TABI s app oa h to gai i g go ernment recognition for the plans that FALUPAM produces. As elaborated in sections 3.1.1 and 3.2.2 (Theme 1), this focus on local-level recognition places special emphasis on the village land-use management report: it is the document that the district governor approves, and is thus somewhat analogous (in functional purposes) to a communal land title in that, once signed and stamped, it carries official recognition for how the village has collectively planned to use its territory. During our mission, we did not attempt to verify the extent or strength of this functionality, in part because we were told that the plans were still being drafted and in the process of being approved, and more generally because we did not think it was wise to ask about this in hypothetical terms: if these reports are going to work as part of a bottom-up process of generating state recognition for de facto village control over land use (i.e. tenure), this should be tested (a) through actual land-conflict processes (rather than simply i ui ed a out i theo a d, if possi le, this should o u o e o e of them have been signed off by district authorities.
11 This assessment is informed by, among other things, the co- o sulta t s e te si e e pe ie e e aluati g livelihood projects, many of which fail to connect the current situation to future plans in a rigorous way.
40 3.4.5. Monitoring Reports The Provincial TABI teams produce annual monitoring reports in Lao language for each village. After the stage where future land use zones have been planned, the monitoring process begins. It is done early in the calendar year before land clearing begins for the new production cycle, and comprises a mix of field survey, including discussions with community leaders and members, and analysis of satellite imagery. The monitoring process is repeated at least once in order to test the adequacy of the planning process once it has been in use for a season; it is thus a key step in the process of adjusting FALUPAM as needed prior to seeking district-level recognition for the village management plan (Heinimann et al., as quoted in Figure 5 above).
As noted in Section 2, the monitoring data that we were able to access in Luang Prabang had not been quality-controlled or aggregated, and was thus not usable to assess patterns across the project landscape. Of the two village-level reports we reviewed, one was written passably, while the other had multiple issues of clarity and vagueness that made it difficult to use for its intended purpose. Six months before our visit, NIRAS s fourth quality assurance report noted the importance of monitoring data i a fe pla es, ut ote that o ito i g esults a e ei g p epa ed, ut ha e ot et ee pu lished NIRAS a: . Du i g the ti e of ou isit, it as ot appa e t that p og ess o this state of affairs was being made.
Monitoring data is important for any project, but is especially important for FALUPAM for at least two reasons. The first has been described above: it is an essential step in the adjustment process that happens prior to seeking recognition from the district governor. We did not push for details on this, ut it see s easo a le to us to o lude that the i p o ess atu e of the village land-use planning reports noted above and the lack of usable monitoring data are related.
Second, at least one researcher we spoke to during our interviews in Vientiane expressed skepticism that TABI would be able to institute upland managed fallow rotation in villages that did not already have a history of doing this. Monitoring data provides a key way to test this claim and, hopefully, refute it. This is a ke step i sho i g FALUPAM s utilit as a ge e aliza le odel, si e as noted above (sections 3.1.1 and 3.2.1), credibility in making upland agriculture o e tid is one of FALUPAM s key selling point to government officials.
IV. Recommendations for Phase III It should be clear from the findings presented above that we were broadly impressed with FALUPAM as an approach to land-use planning, and that we especially appreciate its relevance in the current policy context, where community land titles are not widely available to the generalized problem of community land tenure insecurity. As TABI enters Phase III, the project has a number of decisions to make about how to allocate resources toward completing and reinforcing existing efforts versus taking on new efforts. We believe that FALUPAM actually spans both of these, given its engagement on the ground and, to an extent that we believe should be increased, in relevant policy discussions. The recommendations made here are thus aimed at helping project staff and other stakeholders in government, civil society and the donor community build on the successes that FALUPAM has a hie ed i TABI s fi st t o phases, i pa t add essi g the halle ges that appea ed to us du i g our mission. These recommendations proceed roughly from internal activities to external engagements, although it is inevitable a number deal with both. We do not attempt to prioritize our suggestions, as many of
41 the issues are interconnected, and we presume that all will be addressed within their own timeframes. Recommendation 1. Complete the FALUPAM proof of concept for de facto tenure security enhancement at the scale of the village territory. FALUPAM is a promising alternative to the communal titling-based approach to community tenure security that others (both in and out of the land-use planning community) are pushing for. It is based on a more bottom-up approach, based on actually participatory planning at the village level and district-level recognition of the FALUPAM-generated plan as the village-scale operationalization of the District Development Plan. This is a reasonable approach, especially given the barriers and limits to title-based pathways. All of the pieces are there for a full proof-of-concept, but they have not been fully assembled yet. 1. Get FALUPAM s i te al monitoring data into shape, as this is a key step in the internal finalization process prior to seeking district-level recognition. (This has other applications as well, such as addressing external concerns about up-scaling and costliness; see below.) It is likely that TABI staff and government counterparts know a great deal of information about individual villages that is not written in the monitoring reports. This was our experience, and is consistent with the observation (in other projects) that writing and documentation are often key bottlenecks rather than in-the-field monitoring per se. 2. Get Village Land Use Management Reports (or Plans?) signed off at the district level in sufficient numbers. 3. Tabulate other internal data that can help support the proof-of-concept narrative, such as: a) SPA data: Is there a relationship between SPA success (whether measured in terms of net-positive returns or otherwise) and FALUPAM success (as measured through monitoring reports)? b) Co ti ue to stud the a hie e e t oted i Se tio . . the e : FALUPAM s balancing of increasing forestland (Figure 6) with sufficient upland fallow length (Figure 9). This should be examined in other locations and monitored over time; if the patterns described above continue, FALUPAM may have hit on a iddle- a approach to both forest protection and upland livelihood improvement that will appeal to both advocates of forest protection and agricultural development. Recommendation 2. Improve other data management streams, too. 1. Make village-level data on planned upland rotation length (cf. Figure 9) readily available. This is a key variable that should be on hand for all TABI villages but is currently only available in the planning maps. This variable is relevant both because it helps explain how urgent a illage s upla d situatio is Do they have 4 more years of upland fallow or zero?) – and if placed alongside absolute variables like village area and population statistics, it can help TABI understand the reasons for various plans as well as identify potential problems before they emerge. 2. Study the land tax issue. Collect data internally. Push for low but non-zero taxes on fallow land. By waiving land taxes on FALUPAM (as the Luang Namtha PAFO is advocating), the go e e t ill esse tiall e keepi g its optio s ope . Do t let this happe . I the absence of land titles – and actually with them, too – tax payment is a solid claim on land. Do t pass this up. It a e useful o i po ta t to introduce a conceptual distinction between fallow land and reserved land, since the logic for taxing the latter higher may be sound.
42 3. Look at costing data for FALUPAM. What does the process cost, and how do costs vary and why? As with the monitoring data, much of this is likely to be already known by project staff and government counterparts. This type of investigation will help TABI prepare for wider discussions about land-use planning in the Vientiane policy community. 4. Use project data to identify villages that will finish their planned upland rotations and begin the rotation again during Phase III. These may be useful villages for methodological adjustment (in the case of problems) or documentation of success. Ban Houay On in Chomphet district is one candidate due to its short (4-year) rotation; there are presumably others as well. 5. Work to integrate monitoring and planning, as there may be incentives for villages to plan too ambitiously in hopes of getting outside support. If FALUPAM is to be implemented in villages where livelihood transition support (e.g. SPAs) will not be available in the future, it is important not to be too ambitious in terms of the land-use changes envisioned. FALUPAM is already pretty good in this sense of not being too ambitious – see Figure 6 – and addressing recommendation 1.3(a) above will give a better indication of the relationship between FALUPAM s a itio a d SPA suppo t. But if the support gets rolled back, so too should the ambition. Plans that villagers can continue to conform to under a variety of circumstances are more likely to work as tenure enhancements in the years after TABI support wanes.
Recommendation 3. Assess the FALUPAM GIS manual as part of a larger process of evaluating the production process for FALUPAM maps. Although both of these tasks were part of the remit for our mission, they ultimately proved to be beyond our capabilities. Section 3.4.3 above provides some indicative results from our mission, but more investigation is needed before recommendations can be given. The recommendation above about gathering and systematizing of costing data will provide a significant additional step into this area.
Recommendation 4. Invest in human resources at the provincial level, and show that land-use planning should not be done lightly. FALUPAM is nuanced and difficult to do – far more so than standard PLUP. It requires competent staff who can really educate (one might even say organize) the provincial and district government staff with whom they interact, as well as villagers themselves. As noted at the end of Section 3.2.1, Luang Prabang PAFO wants to up-scale FALUPAM, but they are running out of capable staff – i.e. it is not simply a matter of budget, but of skilled personnel. TABI should thus invest in human resources development and recruitment to the extent possible, while also a k o ledgi g that the e a e li its to this. Gi e these li its, o e of TABI s pote tial lasting contributions (although this may be controversial) may be to raise the bar in terms of how any land- use planning is done using donor assistance. This is a debate that has been implicitly brewing over the last few years, but has not come to the surface for various reasons. The next recommendations focus on positive steps TABI can do to create buy-in from various stakeholders in the land-use planning sector, but it may be that there is not a consensus solution out there, given the different philosophies i ol ed. To etu to the a etapho , it a ot e a atte of Rolls Ro e s e sus Toyotas, but vehicles that work versus those that are unsafe at any speed.
Recommendation 5. Harmonize marketing materials for FALUPAM and begin to circulate them as part of an evidence-based policy discussion. As Phase III begins, TABI is poised to both begin a wider pu li p ese e i Vie tia e s poli o u it , ut it also eeds to o ti ue t i g up the loose ends for FALUPAM s p oof of o ept ide tified a o e. This ill e ui e a st ategi i of outward- facing public communications and targeted presentations of additional evidence as it becomes
43 available. The materials discussed above in Section 3.4.1 are useful as communications materials that speak to those who already believe in FALUPAM, but a broader set of materials may also be e essa to p ese t FALUPAM ot at the le el of ho ? step , step , et . , ut h ? This is strong terrain for FALUPAM, and it deserves to be showcased.
Recommendation 6. Facilitate evidence-based dialogue about the range of issues that intersect in the TABI project. Based on what we have seen, evidence-based deliberation that looks at on-the- ground impacts of land-use planning, concessions, titling, and other development interventions, and that considers these in light of current policy debates and constraints, are likely to both favor TABI a d help u al Lao people. TABI s ole i fa ilitati g a ide o e satio is o ious o o e level, but halle gi g o a othe : as oted a o e, poli dis ussio s te d to e f a tu ed due to a u e of reasons, including the silo-type (root-branch) structure of the Donor Roundtable process and the competition for influence that projects (and donors) often engage in by default. Bringing together conversations about issues like resource tenure, land titling, land taxation, rural livelihoods, forest health, migration and village resettlement/consolidation is both necessary and difficult. But it is terrain where TABI (and FALUPAM in particular) is likely to shine. 1. The nine themes discussed above in Section 3.2.2 are issues in all rural development context, including but not limited to all land-use pla i g p o esses. TABI s o it e t to e gagi g with these issues in an evidence-based dialogue process can help lead the way, and can help create policy space to deal with difficult issues such as these, not only within the TABI project landscape but more broadly as well. 2. The concern about up-scaling identified in Section 3.4.5 is important to address in a timely manner. This is worth doing even the evidence is mixed, since the capacity of land-use pla i g p o esses to ha ge e isti g la d uses is i a a s the elepha t i the oo for land-use planning as a whole, given the frequency of off-the-record acknowledgments that villagers sometimes keep doing what they were doing anyway, no matter what the map says. (This was not our experience in this mission, but this is common, based on our wider experie e. If TABI is a le to sho o i i gl FALUPAM s apa it to a age upla d agriculture, this will only add to its strength as a proof of concept; if it cannot, it is unlikely that anyone else is able to do it either, and even this result would, if brought into the public discussion, be a useful contribution.
Recommendation 7. Further investigate TABI’s a ility to deal ith land concessions. 1. As discussed in Section 3.2.3, FALUPAM seems so far to have been a fairly good deterrent to land concessions, but this needs to be further investigated. Provincial government staff we spoke gave a convincing account of how FALUPAM would have changed the way concessions were given if it had been in place already; this is good, but empirical research is needed. The timing of FALUPAM implementation in relation to concessions was beyond what we had time to take on, but it could be reasonably investigated with data that TABI and CDE already have at hand. Such an investigation would not only be relevant to TABI, but also – to the e te t that FALUPAM is a ia le poli odel see a o e o p oof of o ept – to CDE s mandate to facilitate the use of concessions-related data from the DECIDE-Info project in various policy processes. The nine other TABI provinces outside Luang Prabang, including the se e e pa sio p o i es he e FALUPAM is likel to e i lose p o i it ith la d concessions (especially in central and southern Laos) are obvious places to begin. 2. Even if FALUPAM is not a fully effective deterrent to concessions, its interaction with the concession process is worth investigating. Does its presence influence the way government
44 officials allocate land for concessions, or how villagers respond to them? Does it change the way compensation is provided, given its relatively detailed collection of baseline data as well as its participatory approach to development planning? One possible case study in which to study the latter is in Phonexai district, where at least one TABI village is in the process of being affected by a hydropower dam (probably Nam Suang 2).12
Recommendation 8. Stay involved in the conversation and process around re-delineation of the three national forest categories. Figuring out exactly what is going on with the up-scaling of this process to other provinces was beyond our capacity during the mission, but we heard conflicting evidence. As noted above in Section 3.2.3, the World Bank is currently reported to be funding this process. For a few reasons (including but not limited to the restrictions that certain forest categories pla e o the issui g of la d titles, a d TABI s elati e su ess piloti g e-delineation at the provincial level), this process is worth at least following, and possibly getting involved in.
Recommendation 9. Test TABI’s central hypothesis. As suggested above (Figure 8), we came across at least a e dotal suppo t fo TABI s e t al h pothesis that di e sified s allholde p oduction based on indigenous commodities is economically superior to both large- and small-scale mono- oppi g. Phase III is atu all a good ti e to test this h pothesis ith data at TABI s disposal, su h as SPA data, DECIDE-Info data on concessions, FALUPAM village baseline data, and other data available from PAFO and DAFO counterparts, as needed. The current political moment is also a good one, given the planned revision of a few relevant laws (including Land, Forest and Investment Promotion) as well as official calls to evaluate the tu i g la d i to apital poli KPL 2016).
Recommendation 10. Help re-defi e lo g-ter e gage e t i upla d de elop e t. TABI is working in villages that are facing a range of livelihood issues that are likely to take the better part of a generation to address; this puts a lo g p oje t like TABI i pe spe ti e. During our mission, we encountered requests that the project continue beyond Phase III, in order to be around to support the types of plans the project was in the process of facilitating. While there are sometimes self- serving reasons for these sorts of requests, the wealth of data that TABI (in general) and FALUPAM (in particular) have collected makes them more difficult to dismiss, since they show just how long- term many of the issues are.
12 Lead o sulta t s pe so al o u i atio ith esea he f o the GET-LDC project, University of Helsinki.
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