Participatory simulation of land-use changes in the northern mountains of Vietnam: the combined use of an agent-based model, a role-playing game, and a geographic information system

In Vietnam, the remarkable economic growth that resulted from the doi moi (renovation) reforms was based largely on the rural households that had become the new basic unit of agricultural production in the early 1990s. The technical, economic, and social changes that accompanied the decollectivization process transformed agricultural production, resource management, land use, and the institutions that defined access to resources and their distribution. Combined with the extreme biophysical, technical, and social heterogeneity encountered in the northern mountains, these rapid changes led to the extreme complexity of the agrarian dynamics that today challenges traditional diagnostic approaches. Since 1999, a participatory simulation method has been developed to disentangle the cause-and-effect relationships between the different driving forces and changes in land use observed at different scales. Several tools were combined to understand the interactions between human and natural systems, including a narrative conceptual model, an agent-based spatial computational model (ABM), a role-playing game, and a multiscale geographic information system (GIS). We synthesized into an ABM named SAMBA-GIS the knowledge generated from the above tools applied to a representative sample of research sites. The model takes explicitly into account the dynamic interactions among: (1) farmers¿ strategies, i.e., the individual decision-making process as a function of the farm¿s resource profile; (2) the institutions that define resource access and usage; and (3) changes in the biophysical and socioeconomic environment. The next step consisted of coupling the ABM with the GIS to extrapolate the application of local management rules to a whole landscape. Simulations are initialized using the layers of the GIS, e.g., land use in 1990, accessibility, soil characteristics, etc., and statistics available at the village level, e.g., population, ethnicity, livestock, etc. At each annual time step, the agrarian landscape changes according to the decisions made by agent-farmers about how to allocate resources such as labor force, capital, and land to different productive activities, e.g., crops, livestock, gathering of forest products, off-farm activities. The participatory simulations based on SAMBA-GIS helped identify villages with similar land-use change trajectories to which the same types of technical and/or institutional innovations could be applied. Scenarios of land-use changes were developed with local stakeholders to assess the potential impact of these changes on the natural resource base and on agricultural development. This adaptive approach was gradually refined through interactions between researchers and the local population

Assessing the role of learning devices and geovisualisation tools for collective action in natural resource management: Experiences from Vietnam

In northern Vietnam uplands the successive policy reforms that accompanied agricultural decollectivisation triggered very rapid changes in land use in the 1990s. From a centralized system of natural resource management, a multitude of individual strategies emerged which contributed to new production interactions among farming households, changes in landscape structures, and conflicting strategies among local stakeholders. Within this context of agrarian transition, learning devices can help local communities to collectively design their own course of action towards sustainable natural resource management. This paper presents a collaborative approach combining a number of participatory methods and geovisualisation tools (e.g., spatially explicit multi-agent models and role-playing games) with the shared goal to analyse and represent the interactions between: (i) decision-making processes by individual farmers based on the resource profiles of their farms; (ii) the institutions which regulate resource access and usage; and (iii) the biophysical and socioeconomic environment. This methodological pathway is illustrated by a case study in Bac Kan Province where it successfully led to a communication platform on natural resource management. In a context of rapid socioeconomic changes, learning devices and geovisualisation tools helped embed the participatory approach within a process of community development. The combination of different tools, each with its own advantages and constraints, proved highly relevant for supporting collective natural resource management

Combination of process-oriented and pattern-oriented models of land-use change in a mountain area of Vietnam

The tools and methods developed by different scientific communities to simulate the dynamics of land use have emphasised either processes or patterns of changes. Agent-based models (ABM) belong to the former category while many spatially explicit simulation models belong to the latter. These two different modelling approaches were jointly implemented at a study site in Vietnam to assess their respective strengths and weaknesses with respect to their capacity to support the formulation of land-use policy and to influence decision-making by multiple groups of stakeholders. SAMBA is a people-centred approach combining an ABM, a role-playing game and a geographic information system. Participatory simulations help elicit the rules of the ABM and calibrate the model, while the model supports the participatory exploration of land-use change scenarios over longer time periods. CLUE-s is a spatial simulation model which explores changes in land-use patterns within user-specified rules of permissible change and rates of change. Driving factors that influence changes from one land-use type to another are defined by combining spatially explicit data on land use and supposed driving factors in a logistical regression analysis. Alternatively, the decision rules that were revealed during the participatory simulations ¿ with the role plays and the multi-agent modelling of the SAMBA approach ¿ were incorporated in the CLUE-s model to provide more realistic estimates for the varying influence of land-use drivers. We checked the respective validity of the two models by applying them at the same site and comparing their outputs. As a result, no single approach was obviously superior according to the validation statistics. The three approaches turned out to be complementary in simulating land-use patterns, while providing different types of information. Integration of the two models into a rule-based version of CLUE-s helped reconciling data-driven statistical models and process-driven agent-based models in LUCC research. This new model reinforced the overall framework by facilitating the partnership between researchers from different scientific communities and between researchers and multiple groups of stakeholders. It may also better respond to the expectations of land users at different levels of the decision-making hierarchy

Environmental Dimensions of the Agrarian Transition in the Uplands of the Lao PDR

The agrarian transition is considered as one of the most important drivers of socioeconomic transformation that has occurred over the past three centuries. While abundant, the related scientific literature exhibits significant lacunae with regard to the links between social change, ecological dynamics and environmental politics. Intended as a contribution to a better understanding and theorization of the agrarian transition, this project combines physical measurements, aimed at characterizing the state and dynamics of the ecological milieu, with surveys on local livelihood change, environmental knowledge, discourses and practices in contrasted localities of the Laotian uplands. On these grounds, a comparative analysis of local trajectories of agrarian transition is undertaken

Swidden, rubber and carbon: Can REDD+ work for people and the environment in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia?

Swidden (also called shifting cultivation) has long been the dominant farming system in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA). Today the ecological bounty of this region is threatened by the expansion of settled agriculture, including the proliferation of rubber plantations. In the current conception of REDD+, landscapes involving swidden qualify almost automatically for replacement by other land-use systems because swiddens are perceived to be degraded and inefficient with regard to carbon sequestration. However, swiddening in some cases may be carbon-neutral or even carbon positive, compared with some other types of land-use systems. In this paper we describe how agricultural policies and institutions have affected land use in the region over the last several decades and the impact these policies have had on the livelihoods of swiddeners and other smallholders. We also explore whether incentivizing transitions away from swiddening to the cultivation of rubber will directly or reliably produce carbon gains. We argue that because government policies affect how land is used, they also influence carbon emissions, farmer livelihoods, environmental services, and a host of other variables. A deeper and more systematic analysis of the multiple consequences of these policies is consequently necessary for the design of successful REDD+ policies in MMSEA, and other areas of the developing world. REDD+ policies should be structured not so much to ‘hold the forest boundary’ but to influence the types of land-use changes that are occurring so that they support both sustainable livelihoods and environmental services, including (but not limited to) carbon

Comparison of three maps at multiple resolutions: a case study of land change simulation in Cho Don District, Vietnam

Geographic modelers frequently compare maps of observed land transitions to maps of simulated land transitions to relate the patterns in reference maps to the output from a simulation model. Pixel-by-pixel analysis of raster maps at a single resolution is useful for this task at a single scale, but scientists often need to consider additional scales. This article presents methods to satisfy this need by proposing a multiple-resolution method to compare land categories in three maps: a reference map of time 1, a reference map of time 2, and a simulation map of time 2. The method generates a three-dimensional table that gives the percentage of the study area for each combination of categories at the maps' native resolution and at several nested sets of coarser squares. The method differentiates allocation disagreement within coarse squares, allocation disagreement among coarse squares, quantity disagreement, and agreement. We illustrate the method with output from a run of the SAMBA agent-based model from 1990 to 2001 using 32-m resolution pixels for Cho Don District, Vietnam. Results show that half of the overall disagreement is attributable to allocation disagreement within squares that are 506 m 506 m, which is about the average size of a village. Much of the remaining disagreement is misallocation of forest and shrub between the northern and southern parts of the district, which is caused by differences between the data and the simulation concerning transitions from the crop and shrub categories