Human Security

PublishedThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Cambridge University Press via the link in this record.

Recalibrating burdens of blame: Anti-swidden politics and green governance in the Philippine Uplands

In Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. In particular, the palpable visibility of shifting (swidden) agriculturalists ‘slashing and burning’ forests has fuelled centuries-old political agendas to criminalise swidden farmers for supposedly destroying swaths of forests valued for timber, biodiversity and now ecosystem services. Swidden farmers who regularly clear and burn forests, have endured a disproportionate burden of blame for investing in and maintaining an old livelihood practice into the 21st Century. Drawing on Hall’s politics of representation, we examine the contrasting political frames, management and practices of clearing and burning forests among upland farmers, state and non-state actors who govern forests on Palawan Island, the Philippines. We describe the social, economic, and biophysical character of swidden clearing and burning among the indigenous Tagbanua of central Palawan, whose livelihoods and landscapes are impacted by green governance and enclosures. Informed by several years of ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how and why Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn forest despite state and non-state actors criminalising these practices for decades. We argue that, despite sustained vilification and reduced fallows arising from governance policies and enclosures, Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn knowing well that, despite the practices being illegal, levels of tolerance and leniency toward swidden is the local norm, rather than exception—highlighting the importance of what we call ‘atmospheres of consent’. Ethnoecological understandings of clearing and burning in the uplands, we argue, are crucial to recalibrating the burden of blame placed on poor farmers whose agriculture is deemed destructive by the region’s burgeoning sustainability discourse

REDD policy impacts on indigenous property rights regimes on Palawan Island, the Philippines

Several Southeast Asian states have been working feverishly to design and implement REDD policy frameworks to fulfil their commitment to global climate change mitigation. In doing so, state agencies will be challenged to design REDD plus policies that value and conserve forest carbon in ways that align with national policies and local priorities for managing forest landscapes defined by complex property rights regimes. However, as with other market-based policies, the expeditious delivery of REDD could bypass critical analysis of potential interactions with national tenure regimes, customary property rights, and local livelihoods. Drawing on the case of Palawan Island-a forested frontier island in the Philippines-we examine how nascent REDD policies can articulate with state sanctioned tenure, customary tenure, and forest uses in changing livelihood contexts. This paper draws on research among Tagbanua and Pala'wan people to illustrate how complex and changing tenure structures, commodity markets and livelihood dynamics may influence how REDD plus interventions affect indigenous customary lands and forest use. We argue that the ability of indigenous forest users to maintain stored carbon and improve livelihoods is contingent upon the 'socio-material' form of carbon-a commodity defined in relation to the resources and social processes of which it is part