People, Forests and Narratives: the Politics of the Community Forestry Movement in Thailand

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

The conflict associated with the rights of local people with regard to forests and forest resources in Thailand may be traced back to the nineteenth century. It became the subject of hot political debate at the national level in the early 1990s. The national debate surrounding the passing of the Community Forest Bill between the early 1990s and 2007 involved various political actors who held different assumptions, beliefs and knowledge regarding the relationships between people and the forest environment. In the debate, these political actors produced, distributed and used various storylines about people, forests and their relationships in order to legitimise, justify and position their political claims regarding people and forest relationships. This thesis starts with the premise that the community forestry movement cannot be separated from the storytelling of and about local people and forests. It aims to understand the politics of forestry decentralisation in general, and the politics of the community forestry movement in particular. The thesis seeks to examine the use of people and forest narratives in the context of the long debate on the Community Forest Bill. It also examines the interplays between national and local narratives about people and the forests. In particular, it looks at how local lives, landscapes and the relationships between them have been shaped by the ways in which actors employ narratives. The thesis involved narrative analysis and ethnography. Written and oral narratives about people and forests at the national and local level were obtained and analysed. Four broad narrative themes were identified at the national level. Adding to written narratives on national level narratives, seventeen key informants including policy makers, academia, policy advocates and forest officers were interviewed. At the local level ethnographies of two forest communities were conducted where interviews, participant observation and the “walk and talk” technique were employed to examine the local narratives responding to the national narratives. The thesis found that actors’ policy narratives about people and forests are multiple and diverse. The multiple narratives mirrored the multiple views, assumptions and knowledge of political actors toward the relationships between people and the forests. The storytellers deliberately assigned meanings to people, forests and their relationships by employing different terms and language. They strategically simplified stories for political reasons to mobilize political support or to destabilize policymaking assumptions. The storytellers tended to talk only about convenient issues and to deliberately hide the controversial ones. The local narratives were also diverse. In the context of resource contestations and conflicts, local people actively both produced their storylines responding to national narratives and adopted available narratives to their practices in particular the resource management practices. Although the narrative strategies helped local people to reclaim and renegotiate their rights over resources, those adopted narratives in turn became “narrative traps”, since they omitted important rights including the rights to farm and the right to harvest timber.