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“Nothing Is Like It Was Before”: The Dynamics between Land-Use and Land-Cover, and Livelihood Strategies in the Northern Vietnam Borderlands

Land uses are changing rapidly in Vietnam’s upland northern borderlands. Regional development platforms such as the Greater Mekong Subregion, state-propelled market integration and reforestation programs, and lowland entrepreneurs and migrants are all impacting this frontier landscape. Drawing on a mixed methods approach using remote sensing data from 2000 to 2009 and ethnographic fieldwork, we examine how land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) has occurred across three borderland provinces—Lai Châu, Lào Cai and Hà Giang—with high proportions of ethnic minority semi-subsistence farmers. After a broad examination of regional land-use changes, we select three case studies to further analyze the underlying relationships between specific LULCC and local livelihood diversification strategies. These include specific patterns of urban growth due to a range of political decisions in Lai Châu and Lào Cai Provinces; reforestation due to non-timber forest (NTFP) product cultivation in the west of Lào Cai Province; and a stable landscape that restricts government attempts at refashioning upland livelihoods in the east of Hà Giang. Our findings point to the difficulties of completing LULCC maps for this highly heterogeneous region and the complexity of LULCC and livelihood interactions and relationships examined on the ground.

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စာတမ်းအမျိုးအစား Reports, journal articles, and research papers (including theses and dissertations)
စာရွက်စာတမ်း၏ ဘာသာစကား
  • အင်္ဂလိပ်ဘာသာစကား
ခေါင်းစဉ်များ
  • Ethnic minorities and indigenous people
  • Land classifications
  • Livelihood rights
  • Urban development trends
ပထဝီဧရိယာ (spatial range)
  • ဗီယက်နမ်
မူပိုင်ခွင့် Yes
ရယူခြင်းနှင့် အသုံးပြုခြင်း အကန့်အသတ်များ

© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

ပြင်ဆင်ချက် 1.0
ခွင့်ပြုချက် CC-BY-SA-4.0
ဆက်သွယ်ရန်

Sarah Turner, Department of Geography, McGill University, 805 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montréal, QC H3A 0B9, Canada E-Mail: sarah.turner@mcgill.ca; Tel.: +1-514-398-4955.

ပူးတွဲရေးသားသူ (တစ်ဦးချင်းစီ) Sarah Turner and Thi-Thanh-Hiên Pham
ISSN နံပါတ် 2073-445X
ထုတ်ဝေသည့်နေရာ Switzerland
ထုတ်ဝေသူ Land
ထုတ်ဝေသည့်ရက်စွဲ 2015
စာမျက်နှာခွဲ 30
အထွေထွေ မှတ်ချက်

Land 2015, 4, 1030-1059; doi:10.3390/land4041030 www.mdpi.com/journal/land/

အဓိကစကားလုံးများ land use and land cover,Livelihood diversification,cardamom
တင်ခဲ့သည့်ရက်စွဲ မတ် 8, 2018, 09:01 (UTC)
ပြန်လည်ပြင်ဆင်သည့်ရက်စွဲ မတ် 8, 2018, 09:03 (UTC)