This document summarizes research on smallholder agroforestry and forestry systems in hilly and mountainous landscapes across Asia. It finds that while agroforestry plays an important role in livelihoods, smallholders are a diverse group with varying needs, characteristics, and practices. Governments and organizations promote interventions on slopes for environmental and development goals, but research lacks attention to sociocultural and political contexts. Incorporating social science can provide a more nuanced understanding of smallholders and the complex relationships between people and landscapes to improve agroforestry interventions.

1. Understanding diversity of smallholder agro-forestry and
forestry systems in hilly and mountainous landscapes:
Regional comparisons in Asia
Kiran Asher, Peter Cronkleton, and Louis Putzel.
CIFOR, Bogor, Indonesia

2. CIFOR/ICRAF SLANT (Sloping lands in transition)
scoping study
Country profiles: China, India, Indonesia, Thailand,
Nepal & Philippines, Vietnam

3. Sociopolitical trends and upland farm-forest
landscapes in Asia (Fox et al. 2009)
 Six trends affecting the practice of swidden agriculture in
Southeast Asia (China (Xishuangbanna), Laos, Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia.
• classifying swiddeners as ethnic minorities within nation-states
• dividing the landscape into forest and permanent agriculture
• expansion of forest departments and the rise of conservation
• resettlement
• privatization and commoditization of land and land-based production
• expansion of markets, roads, and other infrastructure and the promotion
of industrial agriculture

4. Smallholder agroforestry: some observations
 Agroforestry systems and forests play an important
role in providing or supplementing the livelihoods of
small holders living on sloping lands.
 Smallholders manage these systems in ways that
sustain their livelihoods and the biophysical and
ecological integrity of these lands.
 “smallholders” are not an unitary group. Rather,
they are as diverse in terms of their needs,
characteristics, motivations, and management
practices as the agroforestry systems they depend
upon.

5. Small holder farm,Dzongu, N. Sikkim

6. Interventions on sloping lands in Asia: Selected
observations
 Governments and non-government agencies
promote policies for reforestation,
afforestation, forest management, and
agroforestry on sloping lands to:
• Mitigate soil erosion, water loss, land
degradation,
• Enhance specific ecosystem goods and
services (often for people downstream),
• Conserve biodiversity
• Promote sustainable development

7. Examples of interventions…
• China: Conversion of Cropland to Forest
Program (CCFP)
• India: dam building, cash crop production
in the North and northeast, biodiversity
conservation in the south and southwest
• Thailand: Water provision for lowland rice
cultivation
• Indonesia: Reforestation for PES, timber
production

8. Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP)
in China
 Response to flooding in 1998 blamed on deforestation,
over-logging, & forest-agriculture conversion on sloping
lands

9. Teesta River, Sikkim and West Bengal

10. Dieng, Wonosobo, Indonesia

11. Smallholder forest management in Leksono,
Wonosobo

12. Water for Rice Production, Thailand

13. Our claims
 While often sophisticated in terms of attention to
the ecological and biophysical characteristics of
agroforestry research is not sufficiently attentive
to the sociocultural and political economic
context of smallholder agroforestry and
interventions on slopes.
 Social science approaches can focus attention to
the often blurry line between the nature and the
social, and the implications of such blurring

14. Ecosystem services
specific to sloping lands
Provision of water
Purification of water
Erosion control: conservation of soils
Flood prevention
Conservation of soil nutrients
Maintenance of habitats
Carbon sequestration
Maintanence of regional
precipitation patterns
Human-centered values and services
Others?

15. Why social science tools and methods? The
functional reasons
 Enable an understanding of the diversity of
smallholders and their resource management
practices,
 Analyze success or failure of projects targeting
sloping lands, e.g. incentives vs. restrictions,
 Provide inputs for better agroforestry
interventions (to improve soil and water
management, biodiversity conservation, better
production of cash crops, income generation,
and payment for services.

16. Rice paddies on terraces, Sikkim, India

17. Why social science? The analytical and political
reasons
 Analyze the arbitrary and dynamic definitions
of agroforestry, slopes, smallholders that
govern such interventions,
 Implications of generalizing across what are
diverse interests, practices, and intents,
 Contradictory, contingent and co-constitutive
nature of linkages and relations (agro and
forestry, people and products, etc)

18. Thank you