PERFORMANCE OF RIGHTS OVER NATURAL FOREST AND ITS IMPACT ON LOCAL PEOPLE’ LIVELIHOOD IN VIETNAM’S UPLAND: A CASE STUDY IN HUONG LAM COMMUNE, A LUOI DISTRICT, THUA THIEN HUE PROVINCE

Tóm tắt

For the upland people, especially ethnic minorities, forest plays a very important role in daily life. However, the implementation of the rights over the forest can be formal (legal rights) and informal (right in the practice) and it always affects the livelihoods of upland people. In this context, conceptual framework of this study considers the implementation of activities based on forests as the implementation of "bundles of rights" over forests and people’s livelihood activities consist of natural resources based and non-natural resources based. This study was conducted in a Ka Non 1 village, Huong Lam commune, A Luoi district, Thua Thien Hue province, is a poor and remote area village where the Kinh and ethnic minorities (Co Tu and Ta Oi) live together. The study found out some key findings as follows: the life of a villager in Ka Non 1 still depends much on forests. Local people still carry out activities relating to natural forests (perform informal rights over forests) such as shifting cultivation, logging, gathering non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and hunting wildlife even if they do not have any legal rights (formal rights) over those forest area. Ethnic minorities carry out shifting cultivation to mainly meet food needs for daily life, while the Kinh people tend to carry out shifting cultivation in the first year, and then switch to plant forest. Other forest based activities with the main purpose is income generation, especially logging.