Evaluating land use systems from a socio-economic perspective

Forests continue to fall, mainly for agricultural purposes, throughout the humid tropics. This forest conversion process has immediate and potentially large consequences for climate change and biodiversity loss. These issues are of key interest to one group of stakeholders in forest conversion debate - the international community. Some of the actors directly responsible for forest conversion, i.e. the small-scale farmers, fell trees to meet food and/or cash income needs. These are the issues of urgent interest to them and they constitute another very important group of stakeholders. National policymakers make up a third group of stakeholders in the debate on deforestation. They must consider the objectives of small-scale farmers and balance these against the international interest in the global public goods and services supplied by tropical rainforests and other policy objectives, and then decide on courses of action. In lecture note 2 we discussed a conceptual framework that could be used to identify the land-use systems which have the best chance of attaining the multiple objectives of the different stakeholders in the debate. The framework allows us to quantify any trade-offs among these multiple objectives, using a matrix1. In this lecture note we will focus on the methods that we can use to assess the various aspects of different land-use systems from a policymaker’s and from a small-scale farmer’s point of view.

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