Page 1 of 39 Traditional Natural Resources Management Strategies of the MNong in Lak District, Dak Lak Province Report on Field Study by Luu Hung and Markus Vorpahl June 1997 On behalf of: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH and Mekong River Commission Secretariat CONTENTS Foreword and Acknowledgements ii 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Demands to the Survey 1 1.2 Methodology 2 2 MNong Culture 5 Page 2 of 39 2.1 General Features, Demographic Structure of the Villages 5 2.2 Settlement History, Changes and Present Status 8 2.3 Generalities on Authority, Decision Making Structures and Conflict Resolution 12 3 Traditional Natural Resources Management 13 3.1 Social Institutions and Traditional Natural Resources Management 14 3.1.1 The Village as Center of Social Life 14 3.1.2 The Role of Village Elders 16 3.1.3 The Role of "The Founder of the Village" and Community Land Ownership 17 3.1.4 Land Distribution and Land Ownership 19 3.2 Use and Conservation of Resources 21 3.2.1 Cultivation Conditions and Strategies 24 3.2.2 Timber "Fostering" 27 3.2.3 Popular Believes as Factors of Conservation 27 4 Natural Resources Degradation 29 4.1 Experience and Perceived Causes 29 4.2 Proposed Actions 32 5 External Intervention 35 5.1 Sustainable Management of Resources in the Lower Mekong Basin 36 5.2 Government Programs 37 5.2.1 Reforestation Program 327 37 5.2.2 Poverty Alleviation Program and Credits 38 5.2.3 Land Allocation 39 6 Recommendations 40 6.1 Reawakening of Traditional Natural Resources Management Strategies in the Project 41 6.2 Decision Making Strategies to be Involved in Land Use Planning and the Project 42 6.3 Recommendations on Confidence Building and Project Strategies 44 7 Research in Similar Socio-cultural Environments 46 7.1 Process Documentation 46 7.2 Replicability 47 Appendices 50 A Glossary and Abbreviations 50 B List of Forest Products collected in Ba Yang 52 C Relevant Literature 53 Page 3 of 39 D Working Schedule 54 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Traditional MNong-style house for one household 7 Figure 2: Conceptual changes of land use in recent history 11 Figure 3a: Cultivation and residential land in Yie Yuk 22 Figure 3b: Cultivation and residential land in Lac Dong 22 FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank all people who helped us to achieve the aims of our research. Our special thanks go to the villagers of the places visited, especially those who let us stay overnight in their houses and shared their rice with us, and all the others who spent their time talking and giving us precious information. Another very warm Thank You goes to Mei Luan, our interpreter, who spent her time with us and was of most valuable help for both of us, translating simultaneously from MNong into Vietnamese and French. She was most helpful especially when talking to people with little experience with outsiders or who did not speak Vietnamese, and she provided some insights of MNong culture. We also thank the project staff who invited us to conduct this research and supported us while we where on site, and who introduced us to the local administration, cleared the way and arranged for the foreigner the possibility to stay overnight in the villages. There are too many to name personally, but everybody who worked with us is included in our gratitude. When talking about "We", this is to talk about Luu Hung and Markus Vorpahl, the anthropologists. When talking about "them", "the villagers", "the MNong", this indicates the population of the nine villages visited, the "Target Group". If we want to speak about the MNong in general or other groups, this is indicated in the text. Another problem is the use of original terms. As anthropologists, we prefer to use "emic", or "insider" expressions. That results in an abundance of non-English words in the text. They are explained, at least roughly, at their first occurrence, and most are included in an annexed glossary. For the MNong language there is no generally recognized transcription system, so we use either phonetical notations leaning to the Vietnamese way of pronouncing written language, or to the notation used by French authors. When writing about tradition , we are generally referring to circumstances considered more or less stable until the arrival of the French colonial administration. These have changed since then, as they might have changed always during the course of history – modern anthropology considers tradition mainly as construction, and the idea of unchangeable traditional culture is considered as a concept dating from times when non-western societies where considered as societies "without history". As in all societies, traditional rules are no laws, they allow for many exceptions and have to be considered more as imagined ideal types of social structures and behavior. This leads to the use of the "ethnographic present", the use of the present tense even when writing about the past. This may include descriptions of social behavior, of cultivation or other techniques or now obsolete rules. All these concepts are part of the legacy of the MNong society, and many of them are, if not practiced any more, present in the spirit and the social organization. It is very difficult to know exactly which of the rules are no longer in vigor and almost forgotten, which are valid in the minds of the MNong but overruled by modern laws or society, and which have still to be considered "alive". So we use the present tense for nearly all descriptions, and the actual condition of the discussed item is not represented by this grammatical category. We are conscious that this is criticable in social science and especially anthropology, as it enhances the impression of "people without history" and reduces exactness. Due to the fuzziness of the farther MNong history and owing to the readability of this report, we see it as the best solution. 1 INTRODUCTION The research was conducted between June 3 and June 26 on the pilot sites of the Sustainable Management of Page 4 of 39 Resources in the Lower Mekong Basin (SMRLMB) Project of the Mekong River Commission. The project is active in the four riparian countries Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. The project has selected three pilot sites that total nine villages in the District of Lak, Dak Lak Province, in Tay Nguyen, the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The rivers in the project area are tributaries to the lower Mekong River. Two of these sites, three and four villages, are in Dak Phoi Commune, one with two villages is in Krong No Commune. The two sites in Dak Phoi are adjacent, but Dak Phoi and Krong No are separated by a hilly area. Walking through the hills is possible and exchange takes place – we met people from Dak Phoi villages in Krong No. Two ethnologists went on site: Luu Hung, Head of the Department for Research and Collection on the Central Highlands at the Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi, and Markus Vorpahl, Ph.D. student at the Institute of Ethnology, University of Hamburg, Germany. The aim of the research was to identify and analyze social and cultural structures determining the use of natural resources by the MNong ethnic minority resident on the pilot sites, and their significance for the project. Special attention was given to the possible reawakening of some of these structures or parts of them to support project activities. 1.1 Demands to the Survey The project considered it necessary for its work to know more about the socio-cultural bases of the use of land and other natural resources (natural resources were defined as soil, vegetation and water), or Traditional Natural Resources Management Strategies. Therefore, two ethnologists, one Vietnamese and one German, were asked to provide the necessary background information: "systematic documentation of decision making structures and conflict resolution mechanism with respect to land use and NRM" and "potential of resurrection of Traditional Natural Resources Management Strategies through the project" . This led to several separate main aspects of the survey: identification and analysis of the Traditional Natural Resources Management Strategies and its social and cultural embedding, analysis of awareness, perceived causes and proposed solutions for environmental degradation, elaboration of possibilities to integrate traditional structures into project strategies and further land use planning (for details, see Terms of Reference). The first aspect demanded the identification of decision making structures, traditional ways of land distribution, regulations of access to land and other forest resources, and conflict resolution. This demands the description of domains of the natural environment perception: the definition of forest and other concepts according to the understanding of the group. The second aspect demanded the identification of changes in the natural environment, the identification of perceived reasons and consequences of these changes for the Target Group and for the environment, and asking for solutions they consider feasible and having a positive impact on the environment and their living conditions. The third aspect demanded a combination of propositions pronounced by the villagers, and results of our own analysis based on the situation perceived by us, i.e., the results of the first two aspects, and information added by the project staff. 1.2 Methodology The different questions to be answered made it necessary to collect information on three different levels: oral history, by discussion with old people, traditional and modern rules, by interviews with traditional and modern leaders, today’s implementation of these rules, by participant observation and interviews. For the study we went to the villages; met with focus groups and conducted in-depth interviews.