Negotiating the forest - farmland interface in northern Thailand with companion modelling

Dumrongrojwatthana Pongchai, Trébuil Guy. 2010. Negotiating the forest - farmland interface in northern Thailand with companion modelling. In : RCSD International Conference Revisiting Agrarian Transformations in Southeast Asia: Empirical, Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, Chiang Mai, Thailand, 13-15 May 2010. s.l. : s.n., 16 p. RCSD International Conference, Chiang Maï, Thaïlande, 13 Mai 2010/15 Mai 2010.

Résumé : The debate about the expansion of agriculture in forest areas and the conservation or reforestation of head watersheds is still going on in montane Southeast Asia but in a rapidly changing context. Tremendous change occurred in the highland agrarian systems of northern Thailand during the past decades, leading to new farming practices, an increased diversity of stakeholders concerned by land management issues, and new relationships between villagers and national policies (decentralisation of resource management, shift from forest exploitation to conservation, etc.) and international conventions. In this context, the debate about the true participation of rural people in managing local renewable resources is taking central stage. New conceptual and practical tools to understand rural change in a more distributed, inclusive and interactive way have also emerged. System approaches relying on collaborative modelling are used to facilitate communication, knowledge sharing and the exchange of points of view among different types of stakeholders about a common resource management problem. The iterative and evolving Companion Modelling (ComMod) approach relies on multi-agent systems and makes use of the synergistic effects between role-playing games and computer agent-based models to co-construct simulation tools with stakeholders used in the joint exploration of possible future scenarios of their choice as part of negotiation processes leading to concrete action plans. In the past three years, such a ComMod process has been implemented in the head watershed of Nan province to understand the effects of recent change in forest management on the agrarian system and to mediate a land use conflict between foresters and Hmong herders. A preliminary diagnostic-analysis showed the influence of increased forest conservation efforts on the dynamics of deforestation in the local Hmong agrarian system. These land use dynamics were represented in a spatially explicit computer-assisted role-playing game. This tool was enriched and validated with the herders and foresters during a first set of gaming and simulation sessions aiming at the production of a shared representation of the problem at stake. The debate that followed identified innovative cattle management techniques to be tested and the simulation tool was modified to accommodate them. A second set of collaborative simulations tested the use of these innovations and led to an agreement on a joint experiment between herders and foresters seen as a first concrete step toward the co-management of the local forest -farmland interface. These results are discussed and the relevance of the approach, as well as the strengths and limitations of its main tools are assessed. Finally possible methodological improvements are suggested for collaborative modelling and simulation to better support the emergence of effective decentralized co-management of renewable resources in similar socio-ecological systems.

Classification Agris : P01 - Conservation de la nature et ressources foncières
U10 - Informatique, mathématiques et statistiques
K01 - Foresterie - Considérations générales

Auteurs et affiliations

• Dumrongrojwatthana Pongchai, Chulalongkorn University (THA)
• Trébuil Guy, CIRAD-ES-UPR GREEN (FRA) ORCID: 0000-0002-1370-4731

Source : Cirad - Agritrop (https://agritrop.cirad.fr/555388/)

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