Abstract
On the island of Hainan, China, the provincial government has recently committed itself to sustainable development, which requires the integration of social, environmental, and economic factors in decision making. However, while Hainan’s recent Eco-province designation establishes environmental and economic factors as the basis of policy development, it overlooks the equally important social component of sustainability, in which social needs and values are key considerations. This paper presents the results of a study on Hainan in 2002, with government officials, forestry workers, and the Li, an indigenous minority group, and places the province’s situation within the context of both the larger changes underway in China, and the theory and practice of sustainable forestry. The research results show that the government of Hainan has not yet been able to manage both social welfare and environmental and economic issues, demonstrating the difficulty of implementing sustainable forestry and of balancing short- with long-term goals. The inclusion of Li communities in forestry-related decision making could reduce tensions between local communities and forestry management and also improve the sustainability of the government’s forestry practices.
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Notes
We gave the local authorities two sets of village selection criteria based on best-case to worst-case scenarios. We tried to explain a selection procedure based on highest-quality, highest-quantity and lowest-quality, lowest-quantity of forest, but this option confused the translators. Instead, dividing the options between quality and quantity of forest provided a higher level of comprehension. The division led to two options for village selection:
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Three agricultural villages with three different quantities of forest: village one is surrounded by forest; village two has some forest; and village three has little or no forest.
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Three agricultural villages with three different qualities of forest: village one is surrounded by healthy, diverse primary or old second-growth forest; village two has healthy plantation forest (of limited species types—maybe 1–2 types of tree); and village three has either no forest or degraded forest.
In the end, villages were chosen on the basis of the first alternative, where village one is Shuiman Shang, village two is Chong Men Tou, and village three is Fang Long.
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“The interview responses from Li people are coded by village name: Fang Long village (FL), Chong Men Tou village (CM), Shuiman Shang village (SM) - with little, more, and plentiful forest, respectively - and Ding Si village (DS); at the Wuzhishan Nature Reserve and Jianfengling Park by job title: the Wuzhishan station agent (WS), two rangers (WR1 and WR2), a policeman (WP), a forestry graduate student (WG), a forest technician (WT), a Jianfengling policeman (JP), an assistant policeman (JA), and a forestry expert (JE); with the government officials by governmental level: a provincial official (PG), and a local official (LG); and with the foreign forestry expert by name: F. Flashe (FF).”
We do not mean to imply here that the establishment of plantations for economic and environmental purposes must necessarily fail. However, authors do describe problems in combining the two, in terms of biodiversity and local welfare, and from the perspectives of overall legality, in the case of Hainan, and property rights, in the case of Yunnan (Grinspoon, 2003). See Coggins (2003) for an interesting description of how poverty, insecure land use rights, and bamboo plantations are related. He argues that insecure property rights and poor enforcement in nature reserves increase the spread of bamboo, an economically important species, into natural forests.
Financial shortfalls are, however, a real issue. Zheng et al. (2001, p. 16) report, for example, that in 1999 “forest enterprises generated net losses of RMB 610 million yuan [roughly $76 million USD]... and 68% of the enterprises are in the red.” Recall, too, that local (township) governments “rely primarily on generating their own operating funds” (Lieberthal, 1997, p. 5), and that logging bans reduce their revenues.
Ouyang et al., (2001) state that Hainan’s 72 nature reserves fit into three categories based on their ecological significance: five reserves are national level, 22 are provincial level, and 45 are county level. The reserves are managed by the HLER (36), Forest agency (23), Agricultural agency (11) and Water Conservation agency (2).
Note, however, that these views were not unanimous. A few Li villagers argued that forests have no economic benefit, saw no connection between environmental and socioeconomic conditions, and questioned the necessity of park and nature reserve establishment.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank people on two continents for their help with this research. At the University of Waterloo, Geoffrey Wall and David Wood provided sound advice and financial support for the field research. At Qiongzhou University, on Hainan, we are indebted to George Zhang and Prof. Chen, and to our translators, Wang Yufei and Yu Wenjie; Wang Yufei helped not only with the research, but also helped in understanding China a little better—to her, we are truly grateful. George Wu and Zheng Wei, of the HLER, and Zhang Zhong, an official in Shuiman Xiang, set up visits with government officials and nature reserve personnel, and generally smoothed the way in China. Many thanks also go to Frank Flasche, who was so helpful throughout the research. Finally, we wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), of Ecoplan China and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and of the Department of Environment and Resource Studies at the University of Waterloo. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of the first version of this article, who have helped to broaden the focus of the subsequent version and to improve its content and conclusions.
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Davies, E.G.R., Wismer, S.K. Sustainable Forestry and Local People: The Case of Hainan’s Li Minority. Hum Ecol 35, 415–426 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9097-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-006-9097-y