From Opportunism to Resource Management: Adaptation and the Emergence of Environmental Conservation among Indigenous Swidden Cultivators on Mindoro Island, Philippines

Abstract

"This article presents the results of a long-term study of adaptive processes among Buhid swidden communities on Mindoro Island in the Philippines. Departing from a discussion of regional variations in adaptive systems, it describes the ongoing technological and institutional transformation of the resource use system in response to increasing scarcity resulting from unsustainable practices under conditions of a virtually open access to resources. Through a process of redefining and specifying resource ownership and use rights, the emerging system has come to rest on a distinction between individually and communally owned resources. The introduction of new cropping systems and the simultaneous individualisation of swidden land ownership led to a more intensive and sustainable land use. While some interior communities have eventually also developed resource management regimes for common property resources, Buhid communities closer to the lowlands are still grappling with the difficulties of establishing and enforcing common property regimes in a context of resource competition with the more powerful migrant settler society. Thus, the article will on the one hand identify conditions for and factors at play in the successful institutional and technological transformation found in some communities, and on the other hand it will point at the underlying causes of the prevailing difficulties to maintain common property management, as they are found in other communities."