'Fixing' the forest: The spatial reorganization of inhabited landscapes in Mae Tho National Park, Thailand

This dissertation addresses the problem of growing park-people conflict and related land-use change in the populated highland forests of Northern Thailand. It examines a case in which the Royal Forestry Department (RFD) is trying to establish a national park by piloting a land-use model that encourages a transition from swidden to permanent cultivation and from communal to private land ownership. This model takes a landscape long managed through flexible, dynamic and overlapping patterns of use and proposes to manage them using simple fixed boundaries. The dissertation identifies a process of spatial reorganization that plays a central role in the transition experienced by mountain landscapes in Northern Thailand, and arguably in many populated forested areas where control over natural resource management is shifting from local to state institutions. This transition has implications for livelihoods, forests, management institutions, cultural practices and social relations. The dissertation investigates the spatial reorganization by documenting the knowledge and perspectives of local people and forestry staff, mapping the different spaces produced by local and state management practices, and analyzing the results of a shift from one spatial organization to another.; I collected data in two Karen ethnic minority villages at different stages of the spatial re-organization and with RFD staff over a sixteen-month period from February 2001 to July 2002. I made use of a range of methods and analytical tools including focus groups, key informant interviews, participatory observation, household surveys, ecological transects, participatory mapping and GPS/GIS. The research finds that while there was a slight increase in forest cover, most households suffer from rice shortage and have difficulty selling any produce. Meanwhile the fixing of once flexible management systems into statically bounded land-use units has contributed to less community cooperation and choice in farming activities, increased inter-community conflict and the erosion of community institutions for land allocation. Consequently, villagers seek to re-establish old territories, thwarting government efforts to establish a National Park. The dissertation concludes by exploring how understanding the spatial dynamics of local resource use (e.g., boundary demarcation and gendered activity patterns) might inform different, less conflict ridden and more equitable, conservation mechanisms.