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Abstract:
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"There has been a shift in both Myanmar and Bangladesh in the governance of forest commons away
from top down, state led management, towards a more community oriented approach incorporating
local knowledge. However, in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, the Rohin gya have been actively excluded
from hybrid governance regimes, undermining their agency in managing the resources upon which they
depend. The Rohingya are subjected to two different regime types of hybrid governance. In Myanmar,
the Burma Citizenship Law of 1982 excludes the Rohingya from, among other things, the 2017 New
Community Forest Instructions, which transfer the rights to forest land to local communities and give
communities rights to commercially sell timber and non timber forest products. Across the border in
Bangladesh’s Teknaf district, Social Forestry (SF) programmes have been set up to improve rural
livelihoods and alleviate poverty among forest dependent people by managing afforestation to mitigate
the rampant rate of deforestation. Seventee n stakeholder groups were identified in relation to their
governance in a study by Islam and Sato (in Tani and Rahman, 2018). None of them, however, include
the Rohingya or their representatives. Due to the acute need for building makeshift shelters and us ing
biomass for fire, more than half of the 15 year old SF programme forest has been cleared by the
Rohingya. This case highlights that the exclusion of the Rohingya from hybrid governance regimes
predisposes SF programmes to a failure by premature and uns ustainable use of the forest commons.
While being mindful of the critique t hat indigenous users of forest resources are just as capable of their
over utilisation, the exclusion of forest users from key decision making renders SF programmes
incapable of sup porting local rural livelihoods. Without the Rohingya, prospects for sustainable forest
governance in both Myanmar and Bangladesh cannot be realised. The Rohingya’s social traditions of
forestry resource organisation needs to be negotiated with the wider g overnment community regimes of
governance. Due to the difference of topography between the flat Rakhine state and the hilly Teknaf
district, the Rohingya’s indigenous knowledge of forest use is inadequate, as demonstrated by the
practice of pulling out tre e roots, which in hilly areas increases the chance of landslides during
monsoons. The inclusion of Rohingya would therefore have the much needed effect of exchanging
localised knowledge to address unsustainable practices like roots pulling. In this way, re presentatives
from the Rohingya and Teknaf communities could cooperate to produce collective ecological knowledge
of sustainable and efficient use of the forest commons, suited to Teknaf’s topography. The case of the
Rohingya highlights the importance of i nclusive and participatory hybrid governance regimes, which are
needed to ensure that transboundary forest commons traversing the Myanmar Bangladesh border are
governed sustainably and equitably."
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