The (In)Ability of a Multi-Stakeholder Platform to Address Land Conflicts—Lessons Learnt from an Oil Palm Landscape in Myanmar

Oil palm landscapes are often characterised by land conflicts. Multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) may be a promising means to contribute to conflict resolution. However, the merits of MSPs are limited in contexts with strong power imbalances and entrenched conflict histories. This study analyses an MSP from Myanmar. We developed an analytical framework based on literature on MSPs and social learning and used qualitative methods such as participatory observation and interviews. The study investigates how the MSP was designed and governed and whether it was effective in addressing the land conflicts around oil palm concessions. The study discusses several promising factors of the MSP for being effective, such as adequate inclusion of stakeholders, secured resources, or effective facilitation. However, the analysis also reveals how hindering factors such as lack of a clear mandate, goal, and decision-making competences of the MSP, insufficient communication, or lack of legal and land governance expertise contributed to only limited effectiveness of the MSP. Further, we discuss whether the MSP was a suitable approach in the given context of nontransparent land governance mechanisms, persisting power disparities, and longstanding conflict history. We conclude that designing and governing an MSP in such a context needs to be done very cautiously—if at all—and recommend paying special attention to ten specific points

The making of land use decisions, war, and state

During a civil war and its aftermath, rival powerholders frequently engage in decision-making over land use, for example, via land acquisitions or legal reforms. This paper explores how powerholders influence land use decision-making and what their engagement implies for territorial control. We analyse three cases of land use changes in Myanmar’s south between 1990 and 2015, where the Myanmar state and an ethnic minority organization fought over territorial control. We gathered qualitative data with a mix of methods and visualised actor networks and institutions. Our analysis reveals that the state managed to increasingly control decisionmaking over local land use from a distance by employing actor alliances and institutions such as laws and incentives, whereas the ethnic organization lost influence. We conclude that engaging in land use decisionmaking plays a crucial role in influencing the outcomes of a civil war and that it represents a form of war- and state-making

The cash crop boom in southern Myanmar: tracing land use regime shifts through participatory mapping

Tropical forest landscapes are undergoing vast transformations. Myanmar was long an exceptionto this trend–until recent policy reforms put economic development at the forefront. Underambiguous land rights, commercial agriculture has spread rapidly, causing an unprecedentedloss of biodiversity-rich forest. In south-eastern Myanmar, where land tenure is highly contesteddue to several decades of conflict, scientific evidence on these complex social-ecological pro-cesses is lacking. In the absence of past satellite data, we applied a participatory mappingapproach and co-produced annual land use information with local land users between 1990and 2017 for two case study landscapes. Results show that both landscapes have undergonea land use regime shift from small-scale farmers’shifting cultivation to plantations of rubber, betelnut, cashew, and oil palm. These changes are likely to have long-term impacts on land users’livelihoods and the environment. We call for a reconsideration of land governance arrangementsand concerted land use planning that respects the rights of local land users and strengthens theirrole as environmental stewards. Applied with careful facilitation, participatory mapping could bean important tool to engage communities in the highly challenging process of transforming landgovernance to achieve more sustainable outcomes in this post-conflict context

Sustainable Development Under Competing Claims on Land: Three Pathways Between Land-Use Changes, Ecosystem Services and Human Well-Being

Competition over land is at the core of many sustainable development challenges in Myanmar: villagers, companies, governments, ethnic minority groups, civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations from local to the international level claim access to and decision-making power over the use of land. Therefore, this article investigates the actor interactions influencing land-use changes and their impacts on the supply of ecosystem services and human well-being. We utilise a transdisciplinary mixed-methods approach and the analytical lens of the social-ecological systems framework. Results reveal that the links between land-use changes, ecosystem services and human well-being are multifaceted; For example ecosystem services can decline, while human well-being increases. We explain this finding through three different pathways to impact (changes in the resource systems, the governance systems or the broader social, economic and political context). We conclude with implications of these results for future sustainable land governance

Sustainable Development Under Competing Claims on Land: Three Pathways Between Land-Use Changes, Ecosystem Services and Human Well-Being

Competition over land is at the core of many sustainable development challenges in Myanmar: villagers, companies, governments, ethnic minority groups, civil soci-ety organisations and non-governmental organisations from local to the international level claim access to and decision-making power over the use of land. Therefore, this article investigates the actor interactions influencing land-use changes and their impacts on the supply of ecosystem services and human well-being. We utilise a transdisciplinary mixed-methods approach and the analytical lens of the social-eco-logical systems framework. Results reveal that the links between land-use changes, ecosystem services and human well-being are multifaceted; For example ecosys-tem services can decline, while human well-being increases. We explain this find-ing through three different pathways to impact (changes in the resource systems, the governance systems or the broader social, economic and political context). We con-clude with implications of these results for future sustainable land governance

How context affects transdisciplinary research: insights from Asia, Africa and Latin America

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been developed to generate knowledge that effectively fosters the capabilities of various societal actors to realize sustainability transformations. The development of TDR theories, principles, and methods has been largely governed by researchers from the global North and has reflected their contextual conditions. To enable more contextsensitive TDR framing, we sought to identify which contextual characteristics affect the design and implementation of TDR in six case studies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and what this means for TDR as a scientific approach. To this end, we distinguished four TDR process elements and identified several associated context dimensions that appeared to influence them. Our analysis showed that contextual characteristics prevalent in many Southern research sites—such as highly volatile socio-political situations and relatively weak support infrastructure—can make TDR a challenging endeavour. However, we also observed a high degree of variation in the contextual characteristics of our sites in the global South, including regarding group deliberation, research freedom, and dominant perceptions of the appropriate relationship between science, society, and policy. We argue that TDR in these contexts requires pragmatic adaptations as well as more fundamental reflection on underlying epistemological concepts around what it means to conduct “good science”, as certain contextual characteristics may influence core epistemological values of TDR

Assembling Drones, Activists and Oil Palms: Implications of a Multi-stakeholder Land Platform for State Formation in Myanmar

Amid Myanmar’s political transition and despite its new government’s discourse of inclusion and dialogue, land conflicts have increased across the country’s ethnic-minority areas. We argue that land plays a central role in the complex interplay of state formation, armed conflict and international development in Myanmar’s con-tested borderlands and that land conflicts can provide an entry point to make sense of these dynamics. We use ethnographic data and a framework combining Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages with Foucault’s conception of power to pro-vide a detailed analysis of a multi-stakeholder platform (MSP) addressing land dis-putes in Myanmar’s south-east. Analysing the platform’s discourses, practices and technologies, we argue that, despite its emphasis on inclusion, participation and dia-logue, it is the operation of power that upholds this inherently conflictive assem-blage. The platform opens spaces for agency for less-influential actors, but it equally produces de-politicising and exclusive effects. While scholars have typically used assemblage thinking to analyse how state authority is disassembled by the grow-ing role of non-state actors, we aim to further post-structural reflections on state formation and international development by arguing that the central state in Myan-mar actually expands its reach into the borderlands through assemblages such as the MSP. This happens at the expense of the authority of quasi-state formations of eth-nic armed organisations. Thus, this process is reminiscent of how the Burmese state expanded its reach through assemblages of land and resource extraction during the ‘ceasefire capitalism’ before the transition