title: Land Governance in Myanmar. How Powerful Actors Shape Land Use Decision-Making
Creators: name: Lundsgaard-Hansen, Lara Maria
Publisher: name: Universität Bern
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: 570 Life sciences; biology

description: Land governance in Myanmar, Southeast Asia, has seen major changes in recent decades. Civil war and the military regimes from 1962 to 2010, and the subsequent transition and reform period from 2011 to 2015, have had significant impacts on land governance and land use throughout Myanmar. Resulting land conflicts have posed considerable challenges to sustainability and peace. During the 2010s, some attempts were made towards more inclusive decision-making processes in land governance, but many obstacles still remained in place.
Land governance regulates – among other things – ownership of land, access to land, decision-making over land use, and corresponding policies and laws. With regard to land governance in Myanmar, the present doctoral dissertation investigates the collective processes whereby decisions over access to and use of land are made by various interrelating actors from different scales and at different levels. Firstly, this dissertation aims to generate a broad, yet in-depth understanding of the main characteristics of local land use decision-making, including crucial aspects of actor networks, actor agency, and power. As data collection began in 2016, the analysis mainly focuses on the period up to 2015, when Myanmar was under military rule (1962–2010) and a then quasi-civilian government (2011–2015). Secondly, this dissertation aims to investigate whether multi-stakeholder processes can support a transformation towards more inclusive land use decision-making in Myanmar. To this end, the PhD candidate accompanied a multi-stakeholder platform beginning under the democratically elected government (2016–2020), which addressed land conflicts around oil palm concessions. In pursuit of both research aims, the present dissertation mainly uses qualitative methods in the context of a case study approach in southern Myanmar.
Regarding achievement of a broad, yet in-depth understanding of the main characteristics of land use decision-making (first aim), the present dissertation reveals that uneven distribution of means (resources such as goods, financial and human capital, information, and formal land titles) between actors generally leads to unequal decision-making power. Overall, actors with more means can exclude those with fewer means from land use decision-making, the latter being predominantly smallholders. In addition, two particular characteristics appear to strengthen the position of actors in land use decision-making. First, the ability of an actor to forge alliances with other high-means actors – even over distance – increases its power. Second, having access to formal institutions – such as land titles or laws and policies which can be interpreted in favour of the actor – can strengthen the power an actor possesses. In this way, if high-means actors form a network and join forces in Myanmar, they can completely dominate other actors in local land use decision-making, especially because poorly networked, low-means actors also generally lack formal or informal institutions to back them up. Accordingly, powerful land-governance actors in Myanmar are usually either members of, or collaborators with, the country’s elite including the military. The present dissertation even concludes that the engagement of particular actors in land use decision-making has contributed to the outcomes of Myanmar’s civil war (up to the 2010s), such that land governance can represent a form of war- and/or state-making.
Regarding the transformation potential of multi-stakeholder processes in land use decision-making (second aim), the present dissertation shows that the platform under study represented an attempt of democratically elected Myanmar government representatives to become more inclusive regarding land use decision-making processes. The attempt, however, was only partially effective for a variety of reasons described. Ultimately, the most powerful actors made certain key decisions outside the platform, without consultation of platform stakeholders. While these decisions might have been well-intended, the lack of consultation sowed dissatisfaction in civil society, frustrating civil society organizations’ expectations. These results show that designing and governing a multi-stakeholder platform in a setting of entrenched land conflicts and power disparities should be done very cautiously – if at all – as it bears the risk of exacerbating conflict.
The present dissertation is embedded in land system science and contributes to a better understanding of the role and perspectives of land use decision-making in the context of land governance in Myanmar. It sheds further light on aspects of telecoupling via actor alliances over physical, social, and institutional distance, as well as on the role of formal and informal institutions, power, and tradition in land governance.