Understanding local action and its consequences for global concerns in a forest margin landscape: the FALLOW model as a conceptual model of transitions from shifting cultivation

Much of the international debate on natural resource management in the humid tropicsrevolves around forests, deforestation or forest conversion, the consequences it has and theway the process of change can be managed. These issues involve many actors and aspects,and thus can benefit from many disciplinary perspectives. Yet, no single discipline canprovide all the insights necessary to fully understand the problem as a first step towardsfinding solutions that can work in the real world. Professional and academic education isstill largely based on disciplines – and a solid background in the intellectual capitalaccumulated in any of the disciplines is of great value. If one wants to make a realcontribution to natural resource management issues, however, one should at least havesome basic understanding of the contributions other disciplines can make as well.Increasingly, universities are recognising the need for the next generation of scientists andpolicymakers to be prepared for interdisciplinary approaches. Thus, this series of lecturenotes on integrated natural resource management in the humid tropics was developed.The lecture notes were developed on the basis of the experiences of the Alternatives toSlash and Burn (ASB) consortium. This consortium was set up to gain a betterunderstanding of the current land use decisions that lead to rapid conversion of tropicalforests, shifting the forest margin, and of the slow process of rehabilitation anddevelopment of sustainable land use practices on lands deforested in the past. Theconsortium aims to relate local activities as they currently exist to the global concerns thatthey raise, and to explore ways by which these global concerns can be more effectivelyreflected in attempts to modify local activities that stabilise forest margins.The Rio de Janeiro Environment Conference of 1992 identified deforestation,desertification, ozone depletion, atmospheric CO2emissions and biodiversity as the majorglobal environmental issues of concern. In response to these concerns, the ASBconsortium was formed as a system-wide initiative of the Consultative Group onInternational Agricultural Research (CGIAR), involving national and international researchinstitutes. ASB’s objectives are the development of improved land-use systems and policyrecommendations capable of alleviating the pressures on forest resources that areassociated with slash-and-burn agricultural techniques. Research has been mainlyconcentrated on the western Amazon (Brazil and Peru), the humid dipterocarp forests ofSumatra in Indonesia, the drier dipterocarp forests of northern Thailand in mainlandSoutheast Asia, the formerly forested island of Mindanao (the Philippines) and the AtlanticCongolese forests of southern Cameroon.

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