Assessing Farmers' Adaptation Capacities and Land Use Changes in Response to Forest Conservation in Madagascar

摘要

In our opinion, the key failure of integrated conservation-development projects at local scale lies in their founding on a limited understanding of a primary process: farmers' adaptation capacities to cope with changing environmental, economical and political conditions. The determinants of adaptation strategies could be used as target variable to enhance farm's possible evolution in the current perspective of agriculture role in land management and forest conservation. However few theoretical worksallow to explore internal and external determinants at farm level that cause convergence or divergence between the needs of rural population and appropriate environmental policy. The objective of this paper is to provide an analytical framework for assessing farmers' adaptation capacities and subsequent land use changes in response to conservation. We assume that constraints from conservation measures impacting households vary considerably depending on i) the degree and manners that households incorporate forest resources into their livelihoods and ii) the correspondence between ecological zoning plans and territorial agricultural dynamics. From case studies in the eastern rainforest of Madagascar under community-based forest management contracts since2002, we adopted a spatial approach at farm and village territory levels, using a combination of concepts and tools from both agronomy and geography. We built the framework from empirical research focusing on livelihood strategies and land use pre- andpost-conservation, based on data collected in 2004-2007.