ASEAN-Swiss Partnership on Social Forestry and Climate Change

REDD+ projects are being implemented in forested areas across Southeast Asia and many of these projects are located in areas where shifting cultivation or ‘swiddening’ is widely practiced and where ‘shifting cultivators,’ often minority groups, have traditional rights to land and resources. Swidden landscapes often include areas of forests and fallows that are managed for their contribution to livelihoods, basic food needs and as safety nets, and which generate multiple ecosystem services. These along with many other forms of formal and informal social forestry systems have long existed throughout Southeast Asia and they are often managed under diverse local governance structures. Understanding how the different social forestry regimes can lead to different sets of social, cultural, environmental and development outcomes can help to inform the design of mechanisms such as REDD+.

However, forest and land use practices are changing fast as economic and demographic transformations sweep across the region. Markets, capital flows, and in- and out-migration of communities create dynamism in these social forestry regimes that is often ignored in prescriptive policies that tend to reinforce generalized assumptions and models of homogeneity. Improving the understanding of these dynamics and their inclusion into social forestry programs and policies can support an adaptive and reflexive policy process that enables more effective, efficient and more equitable outcomes.

CIFOR’s and partner's research in the ASFCC Phases I and II has delved into the swidden landscape as a social forestry system to understand how swidden communities are managing and using their land and forest resources, how they participate in the social networks that are within their broader social-economic-political contexts, and how migration has influenced and impacted on land and forest use. In parallel, we have also assessed the national social forestry and REDD+ policy arenas. A common finding across our research suggest that unless the political-economy and information access constraints are addressed, and diverse resource management systems are appreciated for their diversity and dynamism, social forestry policies and REDD+ projects can only achieve sub-par outcomes.

In Phase III, CIFOR and partners will expand our research on livelihood risk and coping, adaptive governance and adaptive capacity in response to climate change and other emerging drivers impacting on ASEAN landscapes, leveraging on the longitudinal data collected from field sites and at national level in Indonesia, Vietnam and Lao PDR over Phases I and II. These analyses will generate evidence for design of policies and incentives on social forestry, climate change and development at the national and sub-national levels that can support livelihood and forest resilience. CIFOR will extend our policy analyses of at the national-level to understand the different enabling factors and constraints to effective, efficient and equitable policy design and implementation, and generate insights for assessing policy performance and outcomes for social forestry and climate change mitigation and adaptation. We will include Myanmar in our study.

We will focus on consolidating and sharing knowledge to address policy questions at all levels, including the ASEAN policy community, while maintaining strong relationships to national and subnational actors and AWG-SF focal points. The engagement of national and sub-national partnerships will help the project to build sustainable pathways for knowledge uptake and capacity development beyond the end of the project. We will expand on the scope of our work and increase the depth and relevance of the research-to-policy knowledge sharing platform to AWG-SF country focal points, and other national and regional policy-makers in forestry and climate change.