Whose Agency Counts in Land Use Decision-Making in Myanmar? A Comparative Analysis of Three Cases in Tanintharyi Region

Abstract

Myanmar has experienced profound transformations of land use and land governance, often at the expense of smallholders. Empirical evidence on the agency of actors included and excluded in land use decision-making remains scarce. This study analyses who influences land use decision-making, how they do this, and under what circumstances smallholders are included. Comparing three land use trajectories in southern Myanmar, we analysed actors’ agency—conceived as the meanings and means behind (re)actions—in land use decision-making using data from focus groups and interviews. Results showed that uneven distribution of means can lead to unequal decision-making power, enabling actors with more means to exclude those with less means: smallholders. However, this only applies in the case of top-down interventions with mutually exclusive actor interests regarding use of the same land. Where interests are compatible or a mediator supports smallholders in negotiations, actors are likely to develop a collaboration despite unequal means, leading to smallholders’ inclusion in decision-making. Transformation of current land governance towards sustainable development could be promoted by providing mediators to actors with few means, ensuring equal access for all to formal land tenure, engaging with brokers in the land governance network, and improving access to knowledge and financial capital for actors with few means.

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

“…(3) At the same time, participatory mapping can serve as a way of bringing to the fore the voices of local land users, who are often marginalized by external investors or government actors who have substantially more resources for defending their claims (Lundsgaard-Hansen et al 2018). Some participants in the village of Ein Da Rar Zar appreciated the participatory mapping process especially because it confirmed, in a spatially explicit way, that the military-owned oil palm company had occupied land that had previously been used by local farmers.…”

“…Tanintharyi Region in south-eastern Myanmar is one of the country's contested territories where state control was long limited due to conflictin this case, a civil war between the Karen National Union and the Myanmar government's military (Lundsgaard-Hansen et al 2018). Many agribusinesses have been granted concessions in the region, mainly for the production of palm oil and rubber.…”

Integrating Analytical Frameworks to Investigate Land-Cover Regime Shifts in Dynamic Landscapes

“…We recognise that attempting to explain annual processes with a narrative is infeasible due to varying systematic transitions year on year, which is even further constrained by the limited literature available at sub-regional to local levels. While we used a narrative perspective in this study, participatory approaches carried out at the local scales (e.g., village, household) such as those employed in other studies on land-system regime shifts [8,15,82] provide an agent-based perspective that is focused on understanding how the agency of actors involved in and excluded from land use decision-making shapes both short-and long-term land-system transformations [85]. The integration of perspectives is therefore essential in understanding land-system change since each perspective deals with specific organisational levels and temporal scales of coupled human-environment systems [49].…”

Understanding How Smallholders Integrated into Pericoupled and Telecoupled Systems

“…In placing these case studies under the lens of intercoupling, we increase the solution space and opportunities for smallholders' sustainability to the intercoupled systems and reveal the potential impacts from smallholders to linked systems and vice versa. For instance, in order to increase smallholders' share of the benefits from international trade, the specific flows that connect them with actors at different scales were studied to ensure the power balance associated with the flows [68,69]. Moreover, we discovered several trends.…”

“…While in the Myanmar case land areas were largely controlled by the military power. With strong government ties, military companies were able to obtain formal concessions and institutional means to exclude smallholders' land use possibilities [68,69].…”