Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 124, August 2021, Pages 348-359
Geoforum

Recalibrating burdens of blame: Anti-swidden politics and green governance in the Philippine Uplands

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.024Get rights and content

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, the presence of cleared and burned forests has long evoked deep emotions, symbolism and representations that powerfully inform the governance of forests and upland peoples. In particular, the palpable visibility of shifting (swidden) agriculturalists ‘slashing and burning’ forests has fuelled centuries-old political agendas to criminalise swidden farmers for supposedly destroying swaths of forests valued for timber, biodiversity and now ecosystem services. Swidden farmers who regularly clear and burn forests, have endured a disproportionate burden of blame for investing in and maintaining an old livelihood practice into the 21st Century. Drawing on Hall’s politics of representation, we examine the contrasting political frames, management and practices of clearing and burning forests among upland farmers, state and non-state actors who govern forests on Palawan Island, the Philippines. We describe the social, economic, and biophysical character of swidden clearing and burning among the indigenous Tagbanua of central Palawan, whose livelihoods and landscapes are impacted by green governance and enclosures. Informed by several years of ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how and why Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn forest despite state and non-state actors criminalising these practices for decades. We argue that, despite sustained vilification and reduced fallows arising from governance policies and enclosures, Tagbanua farmers continue to clear and burn knowing well that, despite the practices being illegal, levels of tolerance and leniency toward swidden is the local norm, rather than exception—highlighting the importance of what we call ‘atmospheres of consent’. Ethnoecological understandings of clearing and burning in the uplands, we argue, are crucial to recalibrating the burden of blame placed on poor farmers whose agriculture is deemed destructive by the region’s burgeoning sustainability discourse.

Introduction

State, private sector, and civil society actors now work to govern and transform agrarian landscapes throughout Southeast Asia into ‘higher value’ modes of production under the guise of sustainability (Corson et al., 2013). Typically devolved subnationally, community-oriented schemes aim to modify the behaviour and livelihoods of upland farmers with incentives and sanctions to curtail extensive land uses and intensify commodity production (e.g., from tree cropping to agro-industrial production). Aligning with and fueling such agendas, broader green governance and sustainable development agendas have expanded throughout insular Southeast Asia. Donor organisations, national agencies and civil society have combined older and newer rhetoric, branding and practices for the greening of rural sectors with initiatives that aim to mitigate greenhouse gases, conserve forest landscapes and reduce poverty in the uplands (The World Bank, 2012, UNEP, 2011). Diverse actors reproduce environmental governance discourses and practices by invoking new concepts and ideas—particularly market-based initiatives—that aim to draw financial value from ‘intact’ nature or exploit ‘renewable’ nature (Corson et al., 2013). However, no matter the initiative, such rural policy ambitions aim to turn upland farmers into modern subjects (Dressler, 2019).

Long castigated and criminalised as ‘backwards’ and ‘destructive’, swidden farmers (or shifting agriculturalists)—people who practice intermittent clearing and burning of forests for cultivation followed by a longer period of fallow—have much to lose at the intersection of environmental governance, conservation and development in Southeast Asia (Conklin, 1957, Fox et al., 2009, Mertz et al., 2009).1 In the Philippines, in particular, state agencies have criminalised swidden for centuries (Dressler, 2009, Dressler and Pulhin, 2010). Since the Spanish and American colonial era, state forestry departments have viewed swidden farmers as primitive ‘anti-citizens’ who, by virtue of ethnicity, location and agriculture, occupy a liminal, distant realm where modern rights are slow, if ever, to emerge (Agamben, 1998, 75). Colonial anti-swidden discourses and practices today fuel powerful sentiments against clearing and burning forests, which inform varied governance agendas in the Philippine uplands. As a result, burdened with the blame for shifting agriculture, swidden farmers must negotiate punitive sanctions against escape fires and greater responsibilities to manage agricultural burns. The semantics and sentiments of these long-sustained associations were, for example, heightened during the recent El Niño drought event in 2015–2016 that diminished rainfall activity in Southeast Asia and resulted in widespread fires throughout the Philippine archipelago (Mallari and Cinco, 2016, Mier, 2014). Several large fires broke out in prominent forested mountain ranges including Mount Apo in southern Mindanao, Mount Pulag in the Cordilleras and several areas of Palawan Island. In relatively recent media coverage, emotive imagery and language conflated these burns with swidden fires ravaging scarce and valuable forests in the uplands of Palawan. In 2015, for example, the front page of the national Philippine Inquirer read “Summer not all beach in Palawan; it is the season to burn forests”, with the main body citing the anti-swidden rhetoric of a local environmental NGO:

“Last week showed ‘an alarming increase in the incidence of slash-and-burn farming,’ as poor families take to the forests to clear areas for planting [and] “every year it [kaingin] gets worse […with] forests [bearing] the ugly scars of freshly burned patches”.

https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/684378/summer-not-all-beach-in-palawan-it-is-the-season-to-burn-forests

Far from neutral, such language and imagery informs governance perceptions and actions (see Dressler, 2009). Juxtaposed against seemingly more environmentally benign and economically productive activities such as tourism and palm oil cultivation (Montefrio and Dressler, 2016), swidden (kaiñgin) and particularly fire continues to be represented in policy discourse and media as the main cause of deforestation and extensive burns, implicating indigenous peoples who live in these areas as the primary culprits of such destruction (Anda, 2015, Quitasol, 2016). However, despite a long history of state and non-state discourses and practices representing swidden as primitive and destructive, many uplanders continue to farm for life and livelihood (Dressler and Pulhin, 2009). As we show on Palawan, swidden farmers clear and burn forests with complex ethnoecological knowledge and practices informed by livelihood needs, social relations and forest ecology. As much as state bureaucracies and environmental NGOs continue to draw on discourses and practices that vilify and control swidden, one still finds upland farmers drawing on and investing in the shared meanings and practices necessary for swidden agriculture.

Our paper focuses on the discursive representations and socio-material practices involving swidden among Tagbanua farmers and forest governance in Palawan Island, the last forest frontier of the Philippines. The public and private sector actors orchestrating the island’s green governance vision consider acts of clearing and burning forest as a direct threat to lowland plantations (e.g., palm oil), forest conservation (e.g., biodiversity and ecosystem services) and green aesthetics on the island (Dressler, 2014). Reflecting a ‘political economy of ignorance’ (Dove, 1983), this range of governance ideals and interventions criminalises and rejects the ethnoecological benefits of swidden clearing and burning (Conklin, 1957, Kull, 2004). Our aim therefore is to detail how the social and biophysical functions of burning are central to swidden-based livelihoods and, how cautious burning practices enacted through a complex body of local knowledge stand in contrast to mainstream representations dominated by careless and wasteful burning (Therik, 2000, Rambo, 1983, Therik, 2000, Conklin, 1957, Nigh, 2008). In doing so, we move beyond the binary of state (and non-state) actors criminalising upland farmers for engaging in primitive swidden-induced forest burning and valorising lowland farmers for engaging in fixed-plot (low fire use) agriculture as productive and aligning with conservation. We detail an intermediate context in which the illegality of swidden reproduces a sense of risk, unease and hesitancy toward fire, and where local moral economies mediate its enforcement, enabling ‘slashing and burning’ to persist as a tolerated crime (see also Thung, 2018). By emphasising this complexity, our paper aims to reaffirm the value of bridging critical political economy with ethnoecological analysis in political ecology more generally (see Haenn, 1999, Nazarea, 1999, Dove, 2011).

Our paper begins by outlining colonial and post-colonial governance policies that criminalise swidden farmers, and aim to curb swidden clearing and supress fire in the Philippine uplands. Focusing on the Palawan case, we then examine how recent governance policies and strictures ban, constrain, or marginalizing the use of fire, reduced fallows and limited forest cover in the context of the spatial constraints of enclosures, and broader prejudice against the use of fire. We contrast these governance interventions with an emic ethnoecology of firing practices to show how burning remains the most effective and efficient means to clear debris, replenish soils, and produce crops among poor upland farmers. Highlighting the role of local brokers, we show how clearing and burning remains a tolerated crime, where tolerance and leniency toward swidden remains the norm rather than exception.

Section snippets

Methods

This paper draws on field research carried out by the lead author in Barangay Cabayugan and in Puerto Princesa City (totalling 13 months across 2004–2011, 2013, 2019), central Palawan. Mixed-methods involved participant observation, key-informant interviews and oral history discussions. In both areas, we interviewed (4) NGO and (2) state and (5) municipal representatives about forest governance practices, swidden management and fire suppression strategies. NGOs consisted of one indigenous

Recalibrating the ‘burden of blame’: valuing indigenous clearing and burning practices

The socio-material character of the clearing and burning process makes it an intractable, incendiary political and ecological issue (Pyne, 1997, Kull, 2004, Thung, 2018). The social, political and economic character of clearing and burning forests intersects with complex, multifaceted governance processes that inform contrasting representations and meanings of the value, use and place of swidden agriculture. Upland farmers clearing and burning of forests and fallows involves social, economic,

Histories of swidden clearing, burning, criminalization and blame

In much of Southeast Asia, the criminalization of swidden agriculture has long been informed by imagery and language emphasizing the potency of felled forests and the red flames that char and blacken tropical forest landscapes. The loss of timber through clearing and burning has, for centuries, occupied a central place in the minds of state foresters and efforts to eradicate swidden agriculture in the region (Boomgaard, 2007, Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). In the Philippines, colonial and

Suppressing swidden, atmospheres of consent, and a burning persistence

Since the late 1980s, Palawan Island has emerged as a biodiversity hotspot with forest cover subject to green governance, enclosures and rising extractivism (Eder and Fernandez, 1996, Eder and Evangelista, 2015). In the early 1990s, national government agencies devolved authority over resource management to the City (municipal) Government of Puerto Princesa, and in time, established the Strategic Environmental Plan (SEP 1992) headed by the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development (PCSD) and

Swidden persistence: clearing and burning ethnoecologies

The perspectives and practices of park rangers, DENR and local brokers, which ambivalently position clearing and burning as a source of degradation, are challenged by farmers themselves. In contrast to the anti-swidden discourses circulating in buffer zones and elsewhere, Tagbanua farmers hold complex ethnoecological knowledge about clearing and burning that mediates anti-swidden enforcement and sustains swidden agriculture (see Peters and Neuenschwander, 1988). In this sense, what farmers do,

Discussion and conclusion

As poor uplanders clear and burn forests for life and livelihood, a sense of fear, anxiety and criminality resurfaces in the broader public imaginary. Despite recent efforts by civil society to recalibrate the burden of blame placed upon uplanders, in much of Southeast Asia, state and non-state actors uphold colonial anti-swidden discourses that criminalise clearing and burning practices through varied governance policies and practices. Under the ‘green economy’ rubric, regional conservation

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Wolfram H. Dressler: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Will Smith: Writing - review & editing. Christian A. Kull: Validation, Writing - review & editing. Rachel Carmenta: Validation, Writing - review & editing. Juan M. Pulhin: Validation, Writing - review & editing.

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