CAPRi Workshop on Collective Action, Property Rights, and Conflict in Natural Resources

1 Community forests (CFs) in northern Burma have been gaining momentum since the mid-2000s, spearheaded by national NGOs, mostly in response to protect village land from encroaching agribusiness concessions. While the production of these new CF landscapes represents the material resistance against state-sponsored rubber, in effect it produces contested state authority by formalizing control of former customary swidden hills under the Forestry Department. The CF land management plans mirror state land classification schemes that delineate between „forest‟ and „agriculture‟ land uses, in stark contrast to traditional land management practices. For instances of post-war zones with continued contentious state authority, as is the case in Burma, rebuilding statesociety resource relations and institutions present new challenges beyond the more narrow environmental conflict framework. This ethnographic case study challenges the “subsistence wars” premise, calls for in-depth area studies to understand the deep historical and political conflict driving so-called resource wars, and argues against the tendency to „aboralize‟ and „tribalize‟ indigenous people through collective forest management interventions. Overall this paper challenges several assumptions with advocating for collective property management as a conflict mediation strategy, and underscores the importance of development projects taking into account new forms of power and authority in post-war/conflict zones.