Global discourses on interrelations between cultural and biological diversity

Biological diversity and cultural diversity have become prominent concepts in the discourses on nature conservation, development, indigenous rights, and globalization. Biodiversity conservation is widely conceived of as a prerequisite for ecologically sound relations between humans and their natural environments, while cultural diversity is increasingly recognized as important factor regarding the coexistence of human communities as well as their sustainable development. Since the late 1980s, furthermore, interrelations between biological and cultural diversity have come into the focus of academic, political, and economic interests and discourses. The interrelations between these two kinds of diversity, increasingly termed biocultural diversity,Footnote ¹ are predominantly conceptualized as mutually supportive and promising with regard to conservation and development objectives. Empirically, however, these interrelations between biological and cultural diversity predominantly appear as conflicts between the livelihood and identity claims of local communities, on the one hand, and national or global interests in nature conservation, development, and modernization, on the other hand. The case of the Karen ethnic minority communities in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary and World Heritage Site in Thailand is an example of such conflicts over biocultural diversity. Based on an analysis of the history and context of this particular conflict, the article will explore the relevance and impacts of what may be termed a ‘biocultural turn’ in environment and development discourses and policiesFootnote ² with regard to the chances of local communities to assert claims and rights to lands, local resources, participation, and self-determination.

The conceptualization of interrelations between cultural and biological diversity mainly occurred in three interdependent and overlapping discourses and problem areas: in the arguments and conflicts about the rights of indigenous peoples to lands, local resources, and self-determination; in the debates on the modernization and sustainable development of non-modern populations in developing countries; and in the context of the conceptualization and implementation of global strategies for nature conservation. Together, these re-conceptualizations of interrelations between biological and cultural diversity amount to a biocultural turn in environment and development discourses and policies.

The issue of cultural diversity on a global scale was already at stake in the ongoing disputes about the occidental roots and biases of ‘universal human rights’,Footnote ³ predominantly framed in terms of relativistic versus universalistic positions,Footnote ⁴ and frequently implying a problematic antagonism between the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘rights’.Footnote ⁵ Particular rights of groups based on cultural differences were originally peripheral and ambiguous in the context of the conceptualization of human rights with their focus on the inalienable rights of individuals, and are still disputed. However, since the 1970s, the concept of group rights as a particular field of human rights and international law has received increasing attention, not least with regard to the conceptualization of the rights of indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁶ In the arguments about ‘indigenous peoples’ and their particular rights to lands, local resources, and self-determination, cultural diversity and environmental conservation were crucial issues from the beginning.Footnote ⁷ In the context of the United Nations Environmental Conference held in Stockholm in 1972, for the first time these groups established organizations to support their claims on the international stage, which frequently referred to a special relationship to their natural environment and the land they live on. The ‘Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ was adopted in 2007 by the UN General Assembly, ‘recognizing that respect for indigenous knowledge, cultures and traditional practices contributes to sustainable and equitable development and proper management of the environment’.Footnote ⁸ Nevertheless, the concept of ‘indigenous peoples’ remains contested and the status of these groups in most countries, precarious.Footnote ⁹ Disputes focus on conceptions of the particularly sustainable environmental relations of indigenous groups, on the compatibility of universal human rights with the particular entitlements of indigenous and cultural minorities, as well as on the justification for and achievement of their claims to local resources, self-determination, and autonomy.Footnote ¹⁰

Besides the debates on indigenous rights, cultural diversity and its relationship to biological diversity also became an issue in the discourses on modernization and sustainable development. Since the 1970s, the disappointing results of modernization strategies in developing countries were increasingly related to the neglect of cultural differences on the national and local level.Footnote ¹¹ As ‘traditional’, pre-modern forms of knowledge and social organizations, these differences were at first primarily analysed and utilized for modernization purposes. It was not until the 1980s that the intrinsic values of this diversity and the opportunities it provides regarding sustainable or alternative ways of development received broader attention,Footnote ¹² frequently related to approaches advocating community-based natural resource management.Footnote ¹³ Since the late 1990s, furthermore, rights-based approaches increasingly emphasize the relevance of human rights and community rights for sustainable and equitable development.Footnote ¹⁴ Controversies regarding interrelations between cultural diversity and development are concerned with the epistemological status of local knowledge systems, the significance of cultural differences for different ways into modernity or alternative developments, as well as the relevance of such differences for policies supporting sustainable development.Footnote ¹⁵

Alongside the discourses on indigenous peoples and sustainable development, cultural diversity likewise became a focus of global debates on nature conservation. Modern conservation approaches, in the context of prevailing images of an inherent antagonism between man and nature, initially tried to restrict human impacts on ‘nature’ and to remove local residents from protected areas.Footnote ¹⁶ Since the 1980s, this ‘old conservation’ or ‘fortress conservation’ approach has been increasingly questioned and subsequently replaced by new conservation approaches that emphasize ‘community based’ or ‘people centred’ conservation and recommend ‘co-management strategies’ to account for the claims of local residents and integrate them into the management of protected areas.Footnote ¹⁷ This change in international conservation discourses went hand in hand with numerous projects in developing countries aimed at mobilizing local people for nature conservation,Footnote ¹⁸ as well as an upswing of conceptualizations of indigenous, traditional or local people and their particular knowledge as ecologically beneficial.Footnote ¹⁹ However, these changes of focus and strategy, far from being adequately implemented on a broader scale,Footnote ²⁰ are still ardently disputed, specifically regarding conceptualizations of indigenous or local people as ‘benign environmentalists’, problematic transformations of their environmental relations in modernization processes, and their significance for biodiversity conservation.Footnote ²¹

Conceptualizations of interrelations between cultural diversity and biological diversity became important only in the late 1980s, not least due to two major events in the global political discourse on environment and development. While the Brundtland ReportFootnote ²² and the concept of sustainable development—which reconciled the conflict between modernization and conservation discursively—merged the debates on conservation, development, and social justice, the Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro 1992 and the Convention on Biological DiversityFootnote ²³—which explicitly linked biological and cultural diversity—resulted in the far-reaching institutionalization of issues regarding environment and development. Against this background, ‘indigenous’, ‘traditional’ or ‘local’ people widely became conceived of as promising partners for biodiversity conservation.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, as so-called ‘biodiversity hotspots’ with high biological diversity frequently coincide with areas of extraordinary linguistic or cultural diversity,Footnote ²⁵ the protection of cultural diversity is even propagated as a strategy for global biodiversity conservation.Footnote ²⁶ Meanwhile, the decrease of linguistic and cultural diversity, alongside the loss of biodiversity, is deplored from the perspective of the social sciences and humanities.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, economic interests focus on the bioprospection of genetic resources in habitats of indigenous people based on their local knowledgeFootnote ²⁸ as well as on the appeal of areas of high biological and cultural diversity for eco- and ethno-tourism enterprises.Footnote ²⁹ Furthermore, biodiversity conservation by means of local resource control and self-determination, with a focus on community rights and the empowerment of local communities,Footnote ³⁰ increasingly conceptualized as a rights-based approach to conservation,Footnote ³¹ is propagated as a localist counter-strategy to dominant strategies of global resource management and free-market economization.Footnote ³²

These diverse conceptualizations of interrelations between biological and cultural diversity together indicate a biocultural turn in environment and development discourses and policies in which discourses on conservation, development, and indigenous peoples have increasingly merged. A common empirical core issue of these discourses refers to encounters between modern social groups and institutions with globally framed interests in the conservation, management, and use of natural resources, on the one hand, and culturally different local communities claiming lands, local resources, separate identities, and rights to self-determination, on the other hand. Encounters between modern and non-modern groups have a long, predominantly ambivalent (if not embarrassing), history in the course of the expansion of modernity.Footnote ³³ However, with the biocultural turn in environment and development discourses, the context of these conflicts has changed significantly. As ‘conflicts over biocultural diversity’ they represent a historically specific expression of ongoing conflicts at the fringes of expanding modern societies which are specifically framed in new discourses that propose, at the same time, the preservation of biological as well as cultural diversity.

In this context, non-modern local communities, and particularly indigenous peoples, have to face new challenges and threats. However, these changing discourses also provide new chances for them to defend claims on lands, local resources, different ways of living, and particular identities in highly asymmetrical power relations between local communities and external modern actors and institutions. While their natural environments and particular ways of living are still increasingly intruded upon and transformed by these external actors and institutions, their relationship to these social and political environments is changing too in the course of the biocultural turn. The transformation of these modern socio-political environments includes changing rights regimes as well as commitments and liabilities of modern actors and institutions in conflicts over biocultural diversity. The chances of local communities to demand accountability and to assert rights have most probably increased in the context of the biocultural turn. However, in every conflict these chances still crucially depend on very particular circumstances of asymmetric power relations, diverging claims and objectives, as well as diverse legislative and political environments.

From the perspective of local communities in conflicts over biocultural diversity, two major strategies seem to be promising but may be conflicting. They can try to support their claims and interests by referring to a positive public image of benign environmentalists, which is well based in international conservation policies and supported by many transnational environmental organizations. They may also try to enforce rights to lands, resources, participation, and self-determination in the context of diverse legal frameworks and rights regimes. While these two strategies may facilitate a complementary approach for local communities in conflicts over biocultural diversity, they can also be contradictory and counterproductive.

Based on the case of the Karen communities in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary and World Heritage Site in Thailand,Footnote ³⁴ this article is concerned with the possibilities and chances of local communities to assert their interests and rights in the context of changing national and international discourses, policies, and legal frameworks. After a short introduction to the history and self-image of the Karen in Thung Yai and an outline of changing forest policies in Thailand, the article reviews the implementation of Thung Yai as a protected area in the context of national and international conservation policies with a particular focus on impacts on the local communities. Starting from the interests and claims of the Karen communities in Thung Yai to lands, resources, and self-determination, the article then moves on to explore the chances of local communities to assert such claims in the context of the biocultural turn in environment and development discourses, and changing legal frameworks.

History, identity, and livelihood of Karen people in Thung Yai

Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are some 3,500 people living in the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary. Most of them are Pwo Karen and were born in Thailand, predominantly within the sanctuary itself. They generally grow rice as subsistence farmers on swidden and paddy fields. According to Karen oral history, their ancestors came to the area after fleeing political and religious suppression in Burma after the Burmese had conquered the Mon kingdoms of Lower Burma in the eighteenth century. The first written historic references to their residence in Siam's western border area can be found in chronicles of the late eighteenth century. In the early nineteenth century they received formal settlement rights from the governor of Kanchanaburi, and the Khun Suwan rank of Siamese nobility was conferred on their leader. When the status of the border area was raised to that of a muang or principality—between 1827 and 1839—the Karen leader of the muang was awarded the title of Phra Si Suwannakhiri by King Rama III. Since 1873 at the latest, Phra Si Suwannakhiri has resided in Sanepong,Footnote ³⁵ which became the centre of the muang and is now one of the Karen villages lying within the Wildlife Sanctuary. During the second half of the nineteenth century this muang—guarding as it did part of their western border with British Burma—was of considerable importance to the Siamese kings. Karen living there were consulted regarding the delineation of the border between Siam and Burma under King Rama V.Footnote ³⁶ It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, after the establishment of the modern Thai nation state, that the Karen in Thung Yai lost their former status, reappearing on the national political agenda as forest encroachers and illegal immigrants towards the end of the twentieth century.

The Thai name Thung Yai—‘big field’—refers to a savannah in the centre of the sanctuary. For the Karen, the savannah is a place of deep spiritual significance, referred to in Karen as pia aethala aethae, which can be translated as ‘place of the knowing sage’. The Karen term aethae refers to mythological hermits who, according to Karen lore, lived and meditated in the savannah. The story of these hermits is important for the identity of the Karen in Thung Yai and they are honoured. Until today, Karen seeking spiritual development retreat to this place for meditation. To refer to their community and homeland, the Karen in Thung Yai use the term thong bou tai, which refers to a specific way of life and values, focusing on the control of greed and spiritual development. These conceptions are related to the Telakho sect, a millenarian Buddhist sect which originated in the middle of the nineteenth century, possibly in or close to the present-day sanctuary, and are still influential in Thung Yai.Footnote ³⁷ All the villages in the sanctuary, as well as some Karen villages at the edge of the sanctuary, are included in this culturally and geographically determined community.

The Karen in Thung Yai conceive of themselves as people living in and of the forest, as part of a very complex community of plants, animals, humans, and spiritual beings. Within this community the Karen do not feel superior but rather as highly dependent on the various other beings and forces. Living in this community requires adaptation as well as specific knowledge about the interdependencies and rules of the community. Fostering relations with the various caretaker spirits of this ‘forest community’ is an important part of Karen life in the sanctuary. The permission and support of the latter has to be sought continuously in order to live in and use the forest and land. From a modern perspective, many of these rules and traditions could be labelled ‘ecological knowledge’. In these rules and norms, as well as in their daily livelihood practices passed on and transformed from generation to generation, a very rich and specific knowledge is conserved about the environment of the Karen.

The Karen's relations with the outside world, specifically the ‘Thai world’, have changed frequently. During the first half of the twentieth century the Karen communities were largely autonomous, even though the villages in Thung Yai were formally integrated into the Thai nation state. It was not until the 1960s, in the wake of the state's growing interest in its peripheral areas, that state institutions became increasingly relevant in Thung Yai: stations of the Border Patrol Police were established in the 1960s, followed by various state offices supporting ‘development’, as well as the Royal Forest Department and the military since the 1980s.

The permanent presence of TaiFootnote ³⁸ people in Karen villages since the 1960s, as well as the activities of government institutions aimed at assimilating the Karen into the Thai nation state, resulted in changes of the social, political, and religious organization of Karen communities in Thung Yai. These include, among others, the decreasing importance of the traditional Karen matrifocal kinship groups and the emergence of a more household-centred and patrifocal ritual system at the village level; the clash of a rather egalitarian and consensus-oriented political organization at the village level with a more authoritarian and hierarchical external political system; and the obstruction of the transmission of Karen identity to the younger generations due to the introduction of the Thai education system in the villages.Footnote ³⁹

The economic organization of most of the households remained relatively unchanged until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when restrictions on their land-use system began to threaten the subsistence economy and material well-being of the Karen in Thung Yai. Even today most of the households in Thung Yai practise subsistence farming, predominantly growing rice in swidden fields and some paddy fields. Within a territory supervised by the village community, every year each household selects a swidden field according to household size and work capacity. The secondary vegetation of a fallow area—predominantly bamboo forest—is cut, and burned after a period of drying. After being used to grow hill rice, generally for one year, the field is once again left fallow for several years, while numerous plants growing in the fallow areas are used continuously. The traditionally long fallow periods of five to 15 years or more are currently prohibited by the Thai Royal Forest Department, which considers land uncultivated for that length of time to be reforested and therefore it cannot be cleared or used for cultivation. Small supplementary cash incomes are obtained in most households by way of selling chillies, tobacco, and various other fruits grown within the traditional land-use system. Wage labour is of little importance to most households. The mean annual per capita income in 1996 was about US$50 and has remained almost constant since then.Footnote ⁴⁰

Deforestation, protected areas, and ‘hill tribes’ in Thailand

Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the relationship of the Karen in Thung Yai with the Thai state was predominantly defined by the state categorizing them as ‘hill tribes’ and declaring their living place a national forest. Profound changes to their economic organization began in the 1980s and were closely related to the follow-on effects of the declaration of Thung Yai as a Wildlife Sanctuary in 1974. The case of Thung Yai is only one example of a broader controversy regarding people and forests in Thailand (and globally), rooted in conflicting interests involving the resources of peripheral forest areas in the context of changing forest, development, and conservation policies.Footnote ⁴¹

Forest and biodiversity conservation in Thailand has focused on the establishment of protected areas that are controlled by the government. This modern approach to nature conservation gained strength in Thailand in the 1950s in a period of pronounced nationalism, and was based on a prevailing international trend of presupposing an inherent incompatibility between nature conservation and resource use by local communities. Legal provisions for protected areas were created in the 1960s and the Royal Forest Department was made responsible for their creation and management.Footnote ⁴² Prior to this approach the main concern of the Royal Forest Department had been the allocation of concessions for teak extraction, a lucrative business. After the Second World War, however, tropical forests were increasingly seen as an important global asset and swidden cultivation was stigmatized as inefficient and detrimental to tropical forest resources. By the mid-1960s, almost 40 per cent of Thailand's total land area had been assigned to concession areas and swidden cultivation was prohibited. At the same time, the demarcation of protected areas was beginning, although this proceeded slowly at first. The global spread of modernization and the expanding world market was also influencing national agricultural policies: Thailand's rapid economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s was based on the state-propagated extension of agricultural areas for the cultivation of cash crops for the world market. Alongside a fast-growing population, this policy resulted in rapid deforestation.

Despite the emergence of protected areas legislation, the forest cover in Thailand decreased from 1950 through to the early 1980s from almost two-thirds to less than one-third of the total land area, and deforestation was increasingly perceived as a problem. The Royal Forest Department then had to explain this rapid deforestation to a conservation-sensitive urban public with growing political power. It also had to deal with some 10 million rural people—about one-fifth of the total population—who were living ‘illegally’ in areas declared as forest reserves. Of these ‘forest areas’ more than one-third was being used for agriculture, constituting at least one-third of Thailand's entire agricultural area. In this situation of contested competence and growing resistance, the Royal Forest Department concentrated on implementing a Protected Area System as a main instrument of nature conservation.Footnote ⁴³

In 2002 the former Royal Forest Department was restructured into three independent departments: the National Park, Wildlife, and Plant Conservation Department, which became responsible for all protected areas; the Marine and Coastal Resources Department; and the Royal Forest Department, which was left with the responsibility for ‘forest areas’ apart from protected areas demarcated as ‘forest reserves’. In 2004 about 20 per cent of the land area was legally designated ‘protected areas’ under the supervision of the Plant Conservation Department with another 4 per cent in preparation. Furthermore, about 18 per cent of the total land area was designated as ‘Watershed Areas’ which are not categorized as ‘protected areas’ but partly overlap with them and are subject to conservation objectives too. The official forest policy targets a minimum forest cover of 33 per cent, including protected areas covering 25 per cent of the land area. Together with ‘forest reserve’ areas supervised by the Royal Forest Department, these ‘forest areas’ cover about 63 per cent of the total land area of the country.Footnote ⁴⁴

The issue of people living in forest areas became an important societal controversy, encompassing issues of social justice, resource control, land rights, and democratization.Footnote ⁴⁵ On the one hand, the Royal Forest Department—together with primarily conservation-oriented NGOs and academics—concentrated on conservation issues. For them ‘people and forests cannot co-exist’ and forest protection required the removal of human settlements from the forests. On the other hand, peasant movement groups, socially concerned academics, and people-oriented NGOs focused on the interests and problems of rural communities and the rights and interests of long-standing forest communities. They presupposed a vital interest of local communities in protecting their forests as a source of livelihood as well as for ecological and cultural functions, and pointed to a history of community conservation in the remaining forested areas.Footnote ⁴⁶ This controversy led in part to the drafting of the Community Forest Bill, which was fiercely disputed throughout the 1990s and finally approved in 2007. The final passage of the Bill did not, however, resolve the long-running conflict, and the status of communities and community forests in protected areas remains problematic and controversial.Footnote ⁴⁷

The particularly problematic issue of ethnic discrimination is rarely addressed in the debate on forest legislation: most of the people living in areas designated for the Protected Area System are members of the ‘hill tribes’, or chao khao in Thai. This term came into use in the 1950s as a generic name for various non-Tai ethnic groups living predominantly in the uplands of northern and western Thailand.Footnote ⁴⁸ The term implies a negative stereotype associated with the destruction of forests, the cultivation of opium, and dangerous non-Thai troublemakers. During the 1960s and 1970s, the move to eradicate opium cultivation and the ongoing communist insurgency dominated the government's attitude towards highland peoples. By the mid-1980s both of these issues had lost their urgency and forest conservation had risen to replace them in the public interest. Although the settlement areas of hill tribes were those areas where most of the remaining forests were to be found, the hill tribes were conceived of as being the main ‘problem group’ regarding deforestation and resettlement was the preferred solution.Footnote ⁴⁹ Members of the highland groups dislike the term ‘hill tribes’ and prefer either Thai Mountain peoples (chao Thai phu khao), more commonly used within Thailand, or indigenous peoples (chon pao puen muang), more often used internationally. At the local level as well, conflicts between ethnic Tai and hill tribe groups arose during the 1980s. Resource conflicts over land, forests, and water occurred as ethnic Tai farmers spread into the uplands while the populations of hill tribes grew and many of them took up cash cropping. Increasingly, in the late 1990s, ethnic minority groups in the uplands were arbitrarily arrested, forcibly resettled, and terrorized.Footnote ⁵⁰

Nature conservation, oppression, and eviction in Thung Yai

The idea of protecting forests and wildlife in western Thailand by establishing two wildlife sanctuaries arose in the mid-1960s among conservation-oriented officials of the Royal Forest Department. At the same time, Western biologists had drawn attention to the zoological importance of the region. By then deforestation was already increasing considerably in other parts of the country, although it was generally not perceived as a problem at that time but rather as supporting national development and security. Due to strong logging and mining interests in the area, it was not until 1972 that the first of the two sanctuaries—Huai Kha Khaeng—was established. Commercial interests in Thung Yai Naresuan were even stronger. However, after a military helicopter crashed in Thung Yai in April 1973, revealing an illegal hunting party of senior military officers, businessmen, family members, and a film star, which aroused nationwide public outrage, the area was finally declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1974.Footnote ⁵¹

During the 1960s, it was not only timber and ore that were of interest to commercial profit and national development but also the waters of the western forests as a hydroelectric power resource. Four major dams were planned in the upper Mae Klong River, incorporating both the major tributaries: Khwae Yai and Khwae Noi. Three of these were completed: Sri Nakharin was finished in 1980, Tha Thung Na in 1981, and Khao Laem (later renamed Vajiralongkorn) in 1984. The fourth—the Nam Choan Dam—was supposed to flood a forest area of about 223 km² within the Thung Yai Naresuan Wildlife Sanctuary, and sparked a widespread public debate. The public dispute lasted for more than six years, dominating national politics and public debate until early 1988 when the project was shelved in April of that year, with little prospect of it being revived. Pointing to the area's high value for nature conservation and biodiversity, national and international opponents to the dam raised the possibility of declaring the area a World Heritage Site. This prestigious option would have been lost if there had been a huge dam and reservoir in the middle of the two wildlife sanctuaries judged most promising for fulfilling the requirements for the nomination as a global heritage site.Footnote ⁵² The success of the anti-dam movement was not only a remarkable victory for conservation in Thailand, but also a milestone for the development of Thailand's civil society and the process of democratization.Footnote ⁵³

However, the Karen people living in the area to be flooded by the Nam Choan Dam never had a voice of their own in the debate. For the so-called Thienchai Committee, which was established by the government to decide on the project and predominantly included proponents of the dam, their existence was irrelevant. Their interests were partly brought to the debate by NGOs and journalists but hardly appeared as an important argument, very much in contrast to the forests and wildlife, which finally emerged as the crucial factors.

On behalf of the Royal Forest Department, the proposal for the nomination of Thailand's first natural World Heritage Site to UNESCO was written by two people who had been outspoken opponents of the dam in the Nam Choan controversy: Seub Nakhasathien, chief of the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, and Belinda Stewart-Cox, who had done research as a biologist in Huai Kha Khaeng.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Karen in Thung Yai were not included in the processes of elaborating the proposal. When the two wildlife sanctuaries of Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan were nominated together and subsequently inscribed as a Natural World Heritage Site in December 1991, the ‘outstanding universal value’ was justified by the extraordinarily high biodiversity due to its unique location at the junction of four biogeographic zones, as well as its size and ‘the undisturbed nature of its habitats’. Despite this ‘undisturbed nature’ the nomination document defined the people living in Thung Yai and Huai Kha Khaeng as a threat to the sanctuaries and announced the resettlement of the remaining villages in the near future.Footnote ⁵⁵

The lead-up to the nomination had already seen a considerable amount of coerced resettlement of communities from both Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan. Karen villages in Huai Kha Khaeng had already been removed in the 1970s when the Wildlife Sanctuary was established and when the Sri Nakharin Dam was built and later flooded their settlement areas.Footnote ⁵⁶ During the 1980s, most villages of the Hmong ethnic group were removed from the Huai Kha Khaeng and Thung Yai Naresuan wildlife sanctuaries.Footnote ⁵⁷ The resettlement of all remaining villages was stipulated in the management plans for the sanctuaries, drafted in the late 1980sFootnote ⁵⁸ and adopted by the Royal Forest Department in 1990, following an established policy of relocation of settlements from protected areas. When the nomination to be a World Heritage Site was prepared in 1990, there remained four Hmong villages in the north-east of the proposed site, some Tai villages which had only recently moved into the proposed buffer zone along the eastern border of Huai Kha Khaeng, and around 16 Karen villages in Thung Yai. The imminent relocation of all these communities was announced in the nomination documents.Footnote ⁵⁹ This was noted—but not criticized—in the International Union for Conservation of Nature's evaluation of the nomination,Footnote ⁶⁰ and accepted by the World Heritage Committee without comment when it decided to inscribe the property on the World Heritage List.Footnote ⁶¹ While the relocation of the Hmong and Tai villages was accomplished in the early 1990s, the plans to remove the Karen from Thung Yai provoked strong public criticism and forced the Royal Forest Department to reverse its resettlement scheme for the time being. Nevertheless, the objective to drive the Karen out of the sanctuary remained strong within the agency.Footnote ⁶²

The guarding of a global heritage not only brought prestige to the nation and the Royal Forest Department, but also the prospect of economic assets as well as increasing political importance for the sanctuaries. Immediately after the declaration, international organizations, in cooperation with national partners, began to plan projects in and around the sanctuaries. The most prominent and most important in terms of ‘economic weight’ was a joint project of the World Bank and the Ministry of Agriculture, designed to improve biodiversity conservation and protected areas management in Thailand. The pre-investment study for the project was criticized by NGOs in Thailand who disliked its narrow conservation perspective, its top-down approach, and the high costs of the project.Footnote ⁶³ The negotiations between the World Bank, state agencies, and NGOs focused on the controversial issue of resettlement.Footnote ⁶⁴ The study cautiously argued against resettlement in the specific case of the Karen villages in Thung Yai, although the option for resettlement was kept open and a whole chapter of the study was devoted to its implementation. The negotiations only gradually led to limited agreement, and the NGOs refused to cooperate on a project based on the pre-investment study.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even though the affected Karen people did not have a voice of their own in this debate, their interests were considered for the first time.

As resource conflicts between Thai lowlanders and ‘hill tribes’ heated up in the late 1990s, the Royal Forest Department, under its new director general, took up the offensive again in Thung Yai. On 13 April 1999 the director general himself flew into the wildlife sanctuary and landed with his helicopter at the place where the Karen had just started to celebrate an important annual religious festival supposed to last for three days. He then demanded an end to the ceremonies. Soon after, soldiers burned down religious shrines of the Karen. From 18 April to 12 May, soldiers and forest rangers went to the Karen villages, demanded that they stop growing rice, demolished huts and personal belongings, and burned down a rice barn.Footnote ⁶⁶ Throughout the following months, efforts to convince the Karen people to resettle ‘voluntarily’ continued. Military officials prohibited agricultural activities and prevented villagers from using their fields. They allegedly even confiscated identity cards and house registration papers while they raided villages, arresting people without warrants and holding them for days, and removing families without Thai identity cards. Even though the Senate Human Rights Panel criticized the incidents, the Royal Forest Department and the military continued their joint resettlement programme in November 2000, announcing further relocations of families as well as the preparation of a resettlement area for all the villages.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Karen oppose any relocation from their lands, a position expressed in detail during a comprehensive household survey conducted in 1996/1997 in which they almost unanimously expressed their wish to stay in Thung Yai in the face of ongoing efforts to evict them from their homeland.Footnote ⁶⁸

Since the Royal Forest Department had to delay its resettlement plans regarding the remaining Karen villages in Thung Yai in the early 1990s due to public pressure, it concentrated on the elimination of the traditional land-use system of the Karen by prohibiting the use of fallow areas older than three years.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the longer term, these restrictions will lead to the breakdown of the traditional land-use system, as the soils under constant use rapidly lose their productivity. In the villages where control on the part of the Royal Forest Department and the military has been most effective, people were already reporting decreasing yields in the second half of the 1990s. In 2002, the Royal Forest Department also began planting tree seedlings on swidden fields in some villages,Footnote ⁷⁰ at the same time announcing in Thailand's periodic report to UNESCO that: ‘If Karen villages inside the WH zone exert increasing demands on natural resources in the park, relocation will be conducted.’Footnote ⁷¹

The human rights implications of the resettlement programme were overlooked by both the World Heritage Committee and the International Union for Conservation of Nature during their examination of the nomination proposal in 1991, as well as during their review of Thailand's periodic report on the state of conservation of the sanctuaries in 2003. This happened even though the Thai government has never been reticent in explaining to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Heritage Committee that the involuntary resettlement of long-settled communities is part of its management strategy for the sanctuaries.

Local claims, resistance, and ambiguous alliances

Forced to choose between being charged with being forest destroyers ‘provoking’ relocation or facing severe subsistence problems, the only way for the Karen to adapt to the restrictions on their swidden system—apart from trying to conceal their fields—seems to be modernization. They can either try to increase the productivity of the fields, using fertilizers and pesticides (which most of them cannot afford), or turn to cash cropping in or wage labour outside of the sanctuary. Intensification of agriculture and cash cropping is already supported by some of the government institutions and NGOs working in the sanctuary. Most of the Karen in Thung Yai reject these efforts, however, and are trying to carry on with their subsistence farming. Furthermore, intensification of land use, cash cropping, and increasing market orientation jeopardizes their reputation as ‘forest people living in harmony with nature’ on which they have to base their claim to remain in the sanctuary.

A concept of ‘benign environmentalists’ has gained strength in international debates on environment, development, and human rights since the 1980s, which conceives of traditional or indigenous people as partners in biodiversity conservation rather than as culprits or foes. In Thailand, such an alternative image, in contrast to the still prevailing stereotype of the forest-destroying hill tribes, has come to be assigned to at least some of the ethnic groups in the uplands—prominent among them the Karen. Here, this image emerged in rising conflicts towards the end of the 1980s when an emerging peasant movement, concerned academics, and NGOs—resisting resettlement policies in forest reserves, eucalyptus plantations, illegal logging, and corruption—developed a community forest concept as an alternative perspective and a counter model to the conservation concept and commercial reforestation approach of the Royal Forest Department and big agribusiness companies.Footnote ⁷²

In Thailand, as well as on an international level, this alternative stereotype meets with reproaches from various sides as being partly fictional, over-generalizing, or in violation of people's rights to development. Regarding the situation in Thailand, academic critics of this ‘counter-stereotype’ point to its incapacitating aspects as well as to socioeconomic disadvantages in the uplands of Thailand, and advocate more equitable development opportunities for upland communities.Footnote ⁷³ In Thung Yai only a very small part of the population is interested in ‘modernization’, in particular most of the village heads in the context of the state administrative system which already had considerable interests in cash cropping and the privatization of communal lands, while the vast majority of the people were primarily interested in securing their subsistence farming and their cultural identity as Karen in Thung Yai. However, far from being a ‘comfortable’ position for the Karen, this positive image of benign environmentalists, attributed to the Karen in Thung Yai in parts of national and international public discourses, is presently the only position in these disputes to which they can relate, at least to some degree.Footnote ⁷⁴ As long as their inherent land rights to the area are not acknowledged and the legal basis for their continuing settlement is ambiguous in national Thai law, this seems to be their most important asset in the debates that will decide the future of their villages.

So far, the Karen in Thung Yai have had no chance to participate directly in the national and international discourses and decision-making regarding their homeland, including its declaration as part of a wildlife sanctuary and a World Heritage Site. In their encounters with state agencies they frequently feel powerless and without any rights. Open resistance to continuous repression and acts of violence on the part of the Royal Forest Department and military officials is difficult for the Karen, not least due to specific cultural frames of behaviour and historically grounded inter-ethnic relations between Karen and Tai. They have the impression that their rights and concerns are not relevant in the national and international discourses about their homeland. A strong feeling prevails among them that they cannot communicate their own view, that they have to use words, arguments, and ideas that are not really their own while trying to justify their claims, even with their Tai allies among the peasant movement, NGOs, and activists. The Karen conceive of these ‘communication problems’ not predominantly as language problems, even though many of the elder Karen have only limited competence in the Thai language, but attribute them to different cultural contexts.

The Karen oppose any relocation from their lands, a position expressed in detail during a comprehensive household survey conducted in 1996/1997 in which they almost unanimously expressed their wish to stay in Thung Yai.Footnote ⁷⁵ But they do take different positions towards the external influences and the resettlement threat. There is a rather small group, including most of the Phu Yai Ban (the village heads in the context of the state administrative system) which is open to ‘moderate modernization’ while trying to retain a Karen identity. The vast majority is rather more reluctant to engage in ‘development’ and ‘modernization’, preferring to ‘live like our grandparents did’ as a common saying goes. Among them there are marked differences in their reactions to the external influences. A rather large group, who could be labelled ‘extroverted traditionalists’, including many influential elders as well as young people, is trying to shape the change and resist the threats. They are doing so by trying to strengthen and revitalize Karen culture and identity as well as seeking support and advocacy outside of Thung Yai. Another group of more ‘introverted traditionalists’ is likewise focusing on strengthening ‘traditional’ Karen culture but invoking millenarian and more exclusive frames of Karen culture to a higher degree, avoiding transcultural exchange and support.

Despite these differences in position and strategy, all these groups wish to remain in their villages as well as to protect their homeland and way of life. Furthermore, they all refer to the same specific cultural frame of values and objectives regarding a decent life appropriate to a Karen living in Thung Yai. Sharpened—but not created—in the clashes with external actors and influences, this conception of specific Karen values and objectives focuses on the concepts of ‘modesty’ as opposed to ‘greed’, ‘harmony’ in contrast to ‘aggression’, as well as ‘spiritual development’ versus ‘material development’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The counterpart to these concepts is quite obvious and explicitly named by the Karen as such. It is primarily the ‘modern’ Thai society which is increasingly intruding into their traditional living places and spaces, threatening their cultural identity and physical existence in Thung Yai.

Changing discursive and legal frameworks

With regard to the conflicts over Thung Yai, the local, national, and international players are highly interdependent as well as asymmetric in power. Transformations on the national and international level involving shifting framings of the ‘problem Karen in Thung Yai’ have significantly determined the changing circumstances of the local communities.Footnote ⁷⁷ External discursive and legal frameworks, both on the national and international level, more generally delimit the possibilities and chances of local minority groups to assert particular claims and interests, while these groups are largely excluded from these discursive and legislative processes.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the economic and political interests of colonial and regional powers in Southeast Asia brought about the demarcation of territorial nation states according to Western models. In the context of this national territorialization, Thung Yai and the Karen living there were enclosed in the ‘geo-body’’ of the Siamese nation state, which at the same time became part of an international community of states primarily defined in terms of territory and economic relations, while heterogeneous social and physical spaces were merged in the modern nation state. In the first half of the twentieth century, the development of a specific national identity for this state focused on a common language, Buddhism, and the monarchy. The Karen in Thung Yai, who had been incorporated into the state spatially, were now excluded from its ‘people-body’ in the context of this nationalization process and disappeared from the political agenda. Since the middle of the twentieth century, growing international and national interests in the resources and people of the peripheral areas of the state—in the context of modernization objectives and the fight against communism—have resulted in the extension of state institutions into these areas as well as their exploitation for national economic development. The people living there were now predominantly conceived of as backward problem groups or alien troublemakers in conflict with national interests, who had to be controlled and modernized. After the environmental costs of this economic development became obvious in the 1980s, the forests of these peripheral areas were declared precious wilderness and biodiversity assets of global significance, which had to be protected against encroachments from local people in the context of a global ecologization of peripheral areas of modernity. In this framework, the Karen in Thung Yai became a disruptive factor in a natural global heritage, requiring strict monitoring for as long as their removal was not feasible.

With the biocultural turn since the late 1980s, interdependencies of biological and cultural diversity and the protection of both kinds of diversity came to the fore in environment and development discourses and policies, involving an increased appreciation of cultural diversity and new chances for local communities to assert claims to local resources and particular identities. However, as conceptualizations of biocultural diversity frequently focus on mutually beneficial prospects of this interrelation, sometimes even emphasizing an inherent link between biological and cultural diversity, they tend to lose sight of basic conflicts and competing claims regarding lands, resources, and self-determination. Empirically, interrelations between biological and cultural diversity predominantly appear as conflicts between livelihood and identity claims of local communities, on the one hand, and national or global interests in nature conservation, development, and modernization, on the other hand.

Such conflicts over biocultural diversityFootnote ⁷⁸ are widespread globally. Estimates account for some 370 million so-called indigenous peoplesFootnote ⁷⁹ who are supposed to represent about two-thirds of global linguistic diversity.Footnote ⁸⁰ Most of them are trying to protect ways of life distinct from a modern way of life in one way or another. World Bank estimates regarding people living in or close to forest areas and who depend on forest resources for subsistence are in the region of about 600 million people. Not all, but many, of these groups live in places with a specifically high biological diversity. The ideological and legal framings of these conflicts over biocultural diversity are predominantly negotiated in very heterogeneous discursive and political spheres on the national and international level. It is here that the chances of local minority groups to resist transgressions and defend their rights are determined, even though these people frequently have no access to the discourses and institutions that are framing their circumstances and opportunities. Very often, they are not even represented in any appropriate way in political processes and decisions regarding their living places. However, these discourses and legal frameworks also provide new chances for these communities to defend claims to lands, local resources, and self-determination.

Particular national politics, legal systems, and discourses determine most directly the circumstances and opportunities of local minority groups in conflicts over biocultural diversity. However, these national legislations and discourses on their part are heavily dependent on international legal frameworks and discourses which provide instruments and chances for local minority groups not only to claim and enforce rights supported in this international context, but also to improve their chances to influence or even participate in national legislative processes and discourses. International legislation after the Second World War, in this regard, at first focused on the rights of individuals in their relation to states in terms of universal human rights. Since the 1970s, efforts to conceptualize and protect minority and group rights are increasing.Footnote ⁸¹ In particular, the concept of ‘indigenous peoples’ has become a powerful idea, adopted as a legal concept or operational category by important international institutions such as the United Nations, the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank, and is increasingly acknowledged by many nation states. It emphasizes indigenous rights to lands, territories, resources, and self-determinationFootnote ⁸² and provides an appealing reference point regarding identification, compensation, and action for many marginalized peoples at the fringes of modern societies. However, the concept often provokes considerable caveats at the national level, particularly among Asian governments where—in Southeast and East Asia—only the Philippines and Japan accept the use of the term ‘indigenous peoples’ to describe parts of their populations.Footnote ⁸³

In Asia, European colonialism only rarely took the form of territorial conquest but often resulted in radical transformations of regional societies by promoting or enforcing the formation of territorial nation states and inducing modernization processes adopted and pursued by regional elites. Even though the pre-colonial Tai states never became European colonies, the formation of the modern Thai state was deeply influenced by European colonialism, which is equally true for the situation of the diverse Karen groups in mainland Southeast Asia from the first half of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries. In the case of the Karen in Thung Yai, evictions, repression, and marginalization cannot be directly traced back to territorial occupations by European colonial powers but were predominantly caused by regional powers in the wake of colonial hegemony in mainland Southeast Asia as well as the spreading of a ‘culture of modernity’ deeply rooted in European and colonial history.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, the situation of the Karen and many other ethnic minority groups in Asia calls for a ‘constructivist’ conception of indigenous peoples, based on self-identification, distinct identity, marginalization, historical continuity, and territorial affinity.Footnote ⁸⁵

Emphasizing its ‘un-colonized’ history, the Thai state is reluctant to adopt the concept of indigenous peoples and is hardly interested in recognizing any indigenous peoples with particular rights in its own territory. This is partly due to its nationalization process which is crucially based on ethnic and cultural conceptualizations of ‘Thai-ness’ alongside depreciations of non-Tai ethnic groups.Footnote ⁸⁶ It is also related to national security issues as well as resource conflicts which, until recently, induced ambiguous policies, particularly towards the so-called ‘hill tribes’, conceiving of them either as illegal immigrants to be expelled or proclaiming their total assimilation if eligible for naturalization.Footnote ⁸⁷ In a reply to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people in February 2003, the government of Thailand noted that the highland peoples were not considered indigenous peoples under domestic law,Footnote ⁸⁸ and when the World Heritage Committee considered a proposal to establish a ‘World Heritage Indigenous Peoples Council of Experts’ as an advisory body to the Committee in 2001, Thailand's representative disapproved of the idea, arguing that ‘indigenous issues are a domestic, national question, and are best handled on that level’.Footnote ⁸⁹

However, United Nations human rights bodies and mechanisms, such as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples or the Committee on the Rights of the Child, clearly conceive of the so-called hill tribes or ethnic minority groups of Thailand as indigenous peoples.Footnote ⁹⁰ Moreover, in Thailand, the Karen increasingly identify themselves as ‘indigenous’ and participate in international organizations and networking in support of indigenous rights. Several of the associations of ethnic minority groups in Thailand are members of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, including the Assembly of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of Thailand, the Hmong Association for Development in Thailand, the Inter Mountain Peoples Education and Culture in Thailand Association, and the Karen Network for Culture and Environment. Based on distinct ethnic identities, they share common experiences of discrimination and marginalization within the nation states and try to assert their rights to self-determination as well as land, territories, and resources which, since the 1980s, are being increasingly challenged by national and global claims for nature conservation.

National conservation policies and laws worldwide have long been considerably influenced by modern ideas about nature conservation and protected area management and predominantly focused on ‘fortress-conservation’ approaches. The rights and interests of local people in or close to protected areas have only recently been acknowledged, and these revisions are still contested. However, in international environmental discourses and institutions, principles of free, prior, and informed consent as well as participation and cooperative resource management approaches are now approved standards regarding people in protected areas.Footnote ⁹¹ Protected areas for nature conservation are increasingly subject to international and transnational regulations regarding stakeholders and rights-holders, World Heritage sites being a particularly prominent example. This provides new opportunities for local people by appealing to international standards, commitments, and advocacy. International standards clearly support the right of the Karen to live in their traditional and customary lands in Thung Yai and their forced resettlement is not a legitimate option. Having adopted Thung Yai as a global heritage site, concerned international organizations (including UNESCO, the World Heritage Committee, and its advisory bodies) should disapprove of the pressures and violence towards the Karen in Thung Yai and insist on their full and effective participation in decision-making processes, in accordance with their rights under international law.

Unfortunately, these international standards are often only hesitantly adopted on the national level, frequently encounter considerable national reservations, and are open to interpretation and negotiation.Footnote ⁹² Furthermore, in parts, regulations regarding UNESCO natural World Heritage sites still fall short of these standards and evoke approaches to nature conservation that assume an inherent antagonism between ‘man and nature’. However, these conceptualizations and provisions are debated and there are strong arguments for a revision acknowledging and supporting the rights of local people living in and close to natural World Heritage sites in the light of UN commitments to universal human rights and the rights of indigenous peoples, as well as the significance of cultural diversity for the protection of biodiversity.Footnote ⁹³ The establishment of the so-called Cultural Landscapes category by the World Heritage Committee reflects an awareness of some of these problems as well as a new attentiveness to interrelations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.Footnote ⁹⁴ The history of the Karen in Thung Yai and their relationship with their homeland suggest the need for a reconsideration of the status of Thung Yai, which may be better conceived of as a Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site.

In Thailand, pressure to exclude or assimilate highland peoples, including their removal from protected areas, is still strong. Even though the term ‘hill tribes’ has now almost vanished from the official political agenda since the turn of the millennium,Footnote ⁹⁵ the problems on the local level persist for the most part and the chao khao remain a highly controversial issue in public discourses, not least regarding their status in Thai society and their citizenship.Footnote ⁹⁶ In 2012 about one million people were supposed to belong to ‘hill tribe’ groups living in Thailand, accounting for about 1.5 per cent of the total population. Despite increasing efforts by the government to integrate these people into the Thai nation state, a very high percentage of them are denied full citizenship and have to face severe problems as stateless persons.Footnote ⁹⁷

However, the biocultural turn in international environment and development discourses and policies is partly reflected on the national level in the disputes about community forests and local communities in protected areas,Footnote ⁹⁸ as well as in the emergence of a so-called ‘community culture’ (watthanatham chumchon) approach to development and conservation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Not least in this context, Thailand has undergone a remarkable process of democratization and enacted a constitution in 1997 that explicitly recognized the rights of local communities to cultural self-determination as well as to the use of local resources. Even though the 1997 constitution was revoked during the military coup in 2006, the sections on community rights were incorporated in the new constitution of 2007 almost as they stood.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This may provide political space for the Karen and other ethnic minority groups in Thailand to seek a greater level of control over their future.

Unfortunately, these commitments are not always easily realizable. Furthermore, their interpretation is often contested and subject to social bargaining, whereby weaker social groups may be at a disadvantage. The Community Forest Bill and conservation policies are a case in point where these problematic asymmetries urgently need to be reconsidered and amended, specifically regarding the vulnerable position of ethnic minority groups. Presently, the possibilities for local communities to use and control forest resources as well as to participate in forest conservation crucially depends on whether these forests are classified as reserve forests under the administration of the Royal Forest Department, or whether they are located within the Protected Area System supervised by the Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation, which was separated from the Royal Forest Department in 2002. While in reserve forests the Community Forest Bill provides a legal framework for communities to establish and use community forests in a somehow participatory partnership with the Royal Forest Department administration, such community forests are ruled out in protected areas, where it is much more difficult for communities to claim rights to local forests and their resources and to participate in conservation. This is particularly problematic with regard to the ethnic bias involved in this division of administrative bureaucracies and legal frameworks.

Official estimates for 2004 suppose that 20 per cent of all villages in Thailand are located within forest reserves, with some 20 to 25 million people depending on forest products for household consumption and cash income. Another 1.2 to two million people who also rely on forests for their livelihoods are reported to live in or close to protected areas.Footnote ¹⁰¹ While the vast majority of the people living in forest reserves, where community forests are undisputed, are ethnic Tai, most of the people living in forest areas designated for the Protected Area System, where community forests are not permitted, are members of the ‘hill tribes’ or chao khao. The reasons for this bias are rather obvious. Historically many of these groups migrated over the mountain ridges and adapted their economies to these living places. Some of them were forced to retreat into mountain areas by dominant valley populations. These mountain areas are in large part the ‘watersheds’ to be included into the Protected Area System. Most of the remaining ‘natural forests’ are to be found in mountain areas as well, as the deforestation process in Thailand started in the plains and valleys, and is most advanced there.Footnote ¹⁰² After conservation forestry received priority, these remaining ‘natural forests’ were increasingly designated national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, in many instances enclosing settlement and land use areas of ‘hill tribes’.

Against this background, and in the face of the problematic history of forest and conservation policies concerning these ethnic minorities, more recent attempts by state institutions to respect cultural differences and even promote them for conservation objectives could be a positive step towards acknowledging and implementing the human, group, and community rights of these minorities. In August 2010 the Royal Thai Government approved the ‘Recovering the Karen Livelihood in Thailand’ project, proposed by the Ministry of Culture and adopted via a cabinet resolution. The resolution recognizes the particular ethnic identity and culture of the Karen people and seeks to actively support them in perpetuating this culture, including their rotational farming system and traditional land management, while deploring ‘the arrest and detention of the Karen people who are part of local traditional communities settled on disputed land which is traditional land used for making a living’.Footnote ¹⁰³

As one of four pilot areas intended to support the transmission of cultural heritage, the Lai Wo Subdistrict has been designated as a ‘special cultural zone’. Most of the villages which constitute this Subdistrict are located within the Thung Yai Wildlife Sanctuary where they comprise about 64 per cent of the Karen population in Thung Yai. Considering the close relationship of these villages to the other Karen villages in the eastern part of the sanctuary it seems desirable to include all the Karen villages in Thung Yai into this ‘cultural zone’. Furthermore, the villages in the eastern part of Thung Yai are closely related to the Karen village Le Taung Hkoo in the Umphang Wildlife Sanctuary, which is also recommended as a ‘special cultural zone’. Together, these villages constitute what the Karen in Thung Yai identify as thoung bou tai—their homeland and cultural community.

The resolution also recommends the ‘promotion of the Karen rotational farming system to become a world cultural heritage’, presumably under UNESCO's 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. This Convention explicitly recognizes the ‘deep-seated interdependence between the intangible cultural heritage and the tangible cultural and natural heritage’ and was adopted ‘Considering that existing international agreements, recommendations and resolutions concerning the cultural and natural heritage [such as the 1972 World Heritage Convention] need to be effectively enriched and supplemented by means of new provisions relating to the intangible cultural heritage’ (Preamble). If the Karen rotational farming system is indeed recognized under the 2003 Convention, Thung Yai could potentially become a ‘model’ World Heritage Site, illustrating the interaction between the two conventions (1972 and 2003).

With specific regard to the situation in Thung Yai, the Karen should be integrated into the management and decision-making processes concerning the sanctuary as well as the reporting to UNESCO. It is important to enable the Karen to participate in these processes and tasks through their own political institutions and in accordance with their own customs, which are adapted to their way of life in Thung Yai but which are not currently acknowledged in their interactions with the administrative agencies. As part of this, already existing interests and activities in participatory research, monitoring, and environmental education in the sanctuary should be supported and expanded.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The recommendations of the cabinet resolution reveal a new sensitivity to the problems and rights of the Karen communities in Thung Yai and indicate a sincere intention to approach them; however, it remains to be seen how the project will be realized.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The case of the Karen in Thung Yai, as well as the more general problem of integrating the ‘hill tribes’ into Thai society, remain controversial challenges for democratic forces in Thailand.Footnote ¹⁰⁶