Lao Wisdom on Land and Forest Use:
Rethinking Principles of Environmental Governance
KONO Yasuyuki
Land and water resources management
Associate Professor
Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Kyoto University
Japan
Abstract:
Contemporary environmental policies and regulations are threatening people’s
livelihood in Northern Laos, particularly of shifting cultivators. It is not
solely because shifting cultivation is going to be banned. There seems to be a
big gap in fundamental understanding on the concept of property right of land
access to ecological resources such as land and forest. The outsiders including
the government introduce simplified, mapped and fixed property right and access
regulations, while people’s livelihood has been based on overlaid, temporal and
spatially-buffered land and forest use. Although changes in environmental
governance from an ad hoc basis to transparent ones may be a process of
modernization, our experiences in the contemporary world told us that it was not
always successful. Lao way of land and forest use may give us a clue to new
solutions of harmonizing our life with nature.