Land system regime shifts and their impacts on human well-being in forest frontier landscapes of Madagascar and Myanmar

Abstract

Landscapes on forest frontiers in the humid tropics provide powerful examples of the challenge to reconcile human development with increasingly evident planetary boundaries. These social-ecological systems (SES) not only have to meet the immediate livelihood needs and the broader development aspirations of their local populations. They are also expected to ensure the complex mix of ecosystem service (ES) flows that support human well-being locally and provide environmental benefits worldwide. Driven by demands for commercial agricultural production, carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation among others, distant socio-economic and environmental influences are becoming increasingly entangled, triggering not only rapid land use change processes at the local scale, but also unchaining multi-directional spill-over and feedback effects affecting other SES. Land science experts refer to these socio-economic and environmental interactions between distant SES as "telecoupling". In such contexts, managing land use to ensure both desired ES flows and human well-being - i.e. sustainability transformation - is often seen as a "wicked problem"

The forest frontier contexts of Madagascar and Myanmar illustrate the abovementioned sustainable development challenges. Both countries have experienced a transformation of their subsistence based small-holder shifting cultivation systems towards commercial agriculture. Spatially distant actors and their claims on land have contributed to highly dynamic local land use changes and overall land system regime shifts. To date, however, there is little understanding of their impacts on ES and human well-being in local SES. Yet this understanding is crucial to the negotiation of trade-offs between economic development and maintaining bundles of ES between actors at different scales. We have therefore collected empirical data on the impact of land use changes on human well-being via a methodological approach including gender-separated focus group discussions and individual semi-structured interviews in the two countries. Here, we propose to present first results of a comparative analysis regarding 1) the most important aspects of human well-being in each context; 2) interviewees' capabilities to achieve different well-being aspects; 3) the contribution of ES to different well-being aspects; 4) and how the capabilities and contribution of ES have changed over the last 20 years. Although both countries have experienced similar land use change trajectories, the impacts on well-being differ, which highlights the importance of context specifity in well-being assessments.