The Politics of Conservation and the Complexity of Local Control of Forests in the Northern Thai Highlands

This paper argues that conflicts in the northern Thai highlands are a clear case of the politics of environmental dis- course in the sense that conservation has played a role in lending legitimacy to both government agencies and ethnic communities in their struggle for the control of forest resources. Underlying such conflicts is the official line of negative thinking about ethnic minorities in the hills by associating them with various vices, namely as enemies of the forest, opium producers, and a threat to na- tional security. The government agencies always cite ethnicity against a role in conservation, which keeps them from appreciating ethnic-specific knowledge in the management of the forest. Shifting cultivation has been distorted for having only a negative im- pact on the environment, disregarding the realities found in local practices which are varied, complex, adaptive, and quite dy- namic in many cases. The ethnic minorities, on the other hand, keep raising the issues of community rights in relation to their role in the protection of the forest. Rarely are their voices recognized until serious conflict occurs, which can be seen particularly in cases of the eviction of minorities from conservation forests. Only recently have government agencies begun to show some positive concern over the social issues of rights, as seen in the official pilot project on community forestry and the drafting of the community forest act.