Links between justice and wellbeing in protected area

management in Laos

Neil Dawson

Ecosystem Services, Wellbeing & Justice: Developing Tools for

Research and Development Practice (ESPA-funded, PI Thomas Sikor)

• Study takes an empirical approach to justice, focused on perceptions of individuals living adjacent to forests in northern Lao PDR.

• Use a broad definition of wellbeing to look at wider values and motivations underpinning behaviours and claims regarding justice/ injustice (material + subjective + relational WB)

• Aim: to provide social understanding relevant for development and conservation, which can support/promote negotiation of trade-offs in ecosystem services

Insights for definitions of justice and how to study it

– 3 dimensions not easily reduced to consistent indicators (fair/

unfair, included/excluded, recognised/ unrecognised). Claims

about justice/injustice embedded in complex contextual factors

– 3 dimensions highly interrelated. Many claims do not relate

separately to issues of recognition, to influence over decision

making or distribution of benefits and costs, but a combination

of the three

– Ideas about what is equitable or inequitable differ between and

even for the same individual, depending on the situation +

forum in which they are voiced (who expressed to, who with)

– Claims may also change over time, being indirectly influenced

through social/economic change

Nam Et Phou Louey NPA, northeast Lao PDR • Established 1993

• c.100 villages, 30,000 people border forest area of 6,000 km2

• Shifting rice cultivation dominant livelihood

• Boundaries formally established only c. 2008 (controlled use and total protection zones), through consultation/ village meeting

• Formal land use planning also run in villages to determine zones and rules.

What do 3 dimensions consist of? In study site, land tenure and use also organised around complex, informal procedures among local people and with local institutions (not only formal decisions and meetings).

Last year I wrote to the NPA to let me grow rice or maize near the road and they said they don’t allow anyone to do that. They said it belonged to them and we couldn’t use it. But when someone else went and cut the trees down and planted it up they did nothing!

The NPA fined some others and we’re afraid to claim land now because we don’t have enough money to pay fines of that amount. But those who already have big lands can

become rich, the wealthy can risk to go out and claim land as theirs and the rest of us are stuck without.

Land within NPA even described as ‘booked’ by more powerful villagers.

Interrelation between 3 dimensions EXAMPLE SUGGESTS DISTRIBUTION AND PROCEDURE DIFFICULT TO SEPARATE

And recognition? Power and wealth are also related to people’s origins and ethnic groupings: Some people, especially Lao Loum, are richer than Khmu, because they have a lot of paddy

land and the ‘treasure’ of their parents.

Claims people make regarding justice are commonly linked to all three dimensions

Does the example only apply to places where rules and governance are confusing?

Perhaps not: elite capture and power relations play a role in many contexts, affecting how the benefits and costs (whether material or in terms of risk and uncertainty) are distributed.

Power relations and associated, ongoing social processes are part of decision making procedures and play a role in determining inequities in distribution.

Were 3 dimensions intended to include such complexity?

Fraser (1998): “I propose an approach that can accommodate the complex relations between interest and identity, economy and culture, class and status in contemporary globalizing capitalist society.”

Fraser, Nancy (1998) : Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition, participation, Discussion paper // Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Forschungsschwerpunkt Arbeitsmarkt und Beschäftigung, Abteilung Organisation und Beschäftigung, No. FS I 98-108

Indirect influences on justice • Program of resettlement to current villages in 1980/90s. People appear to have been

overwhelmingly in favour

• NPA supported partially because it came with promises of new opportunities through seeds/ marketing support, little of which actually materialised

• Shifting cultivation major occupation, but increasing aspirations for change. Rapid rural change - infrastructure, cash-cropping and off-farm income increasing

• People’s claims now directed to flat productive land, often where old village situated (within NPA, now more accessible) Claims dynamic, influenced indirectly by social, economic, technological, political and environmental change

• Claims to NPA land only voiced in certain situations, not in public meetings or to NPA staff methods of study important

Implications • Perceptions of equity/justice based on more than formal decisions.

Informal procedure including social processes important calls for attention to social complexity

• 3 dimensions highly interrelated. Many claims have a distribution, procedure and recognition element

• WB and justice analyses can contribute understanding towards negotiation of NR trade-offs: What claims? why have they arisen? What needs/aspirations/values are they related to? whose claims? what options or alternatives might there be to address them?

• Attention to dynamics influencing claims may aid adaptive management. conservation does not operate in isolation to rapid rural changes

• Methodological implications - how to research equity or justice:

– Like debates in poverty + impact assessment research, equity research limited if reduced to a set of consistent indicators.

Mixed methods (open to the relational, political factors) should be preferred option

– Wellbeing analyses can elicit values/ needs/ goals underpinning claims

Forthcoming international workshop at UEA, Norwich, 12-13th October 2015

Ecosystem management and environmental justice: Mapping the linkages

Call for abstracts by 31 May 2015

Keynote speakers: Neil Burgess, Tim Forsyth, Sharad Lele, Jouni Paavola, Terre Satterfield, Bhaskar Vira

We encourage short presentations for interdisciplinary dialogue and collective brainstorming, and explicitly invite work in progress and out-of-the box thinking.

Wellbeing

Agency Culture

Social relations

Economic Human

Natural Cultural

Social

Subjective goals, wants, satisfaction

Basic needs

Values

Wellbeing outcomes

Resources

“What they have, what they can do and what they think and feel about what they have and can do,” (McGregor et al. 2007)