FoxHershockMappingCommunities

tree cutting and animal grazing in the forests.
The two villages' headmen told us that in October 1999,
these two villages asked the county forestry bureau to provide
them with seedlings. However the county forestry bureau told
them that they could not do it in 1999 since the tree
plantation season was over, but they agreed to provide them
with seedlings in year 2000. In June 2000, Shang Shapu
Village received 5,000 seedlings of Chinese fir from the
county forestry bureau. The village cadres organized to plant
trees on the collective forest land. The reason they planted
trees on collective forest land together was that the seedlings
could be planted on individual households' private forest land
only if they allocated seedlings to each household.
We then probed the current situation for the seedlings
planted. Villagers told us that the survival rate was around
50 percent, which was very low compared with the provincial
standard which is over 85 percent. The villagers cited the
major reasons as (1) the poor quality of seedlings and (2)
that seedlings were eaten and destroyed by animals. See
the following diagram the villagers analyzed for us:
We may understand from the tree plantation in Shang Shapu
that the MIGIS mapping activity catalyzed villagers'
awareness of environmental degradation caused mainly by
poor
quality
of
seedling
VERY LOW SURVIVAL RATE
bad quality of seedlings
long
distance
transport
lower
living rate
seedlings
eaten and
destroyed
by animals
poor
management
no payment for
forest guards
deforestation. They realized the importance of forest
protection and tree plantations and also started to put them
into action. Moreover, this was a collective decision making
process through villagers' meetings so that we may say that
the mapping process was empowering local communities.
However, from a long-term perspective, most villagers also
thought that management was a key issue. The core of the
issue was the management mechanism. Some villagers
noted that the village had different professional
administrators from long before such as forest guards,
irrigation water source takers, and even an animal herder.
They made no cash payments, and only the beneficiaries
shared some grains with the administrators. It is difficult to
ask households to pay them in cash, since most households
are very poor. The government also cannot make payments
for the villagers.
Formulation and implementation of villagers' regulations
and rules. A long time ago, there were no regulations and
rules on paper in these two villages and only some
customary oral agreement among villagers. In 1991, the
villagers' committee sent people to these two villages and
helped them formulate some rules on paper. However they
were not implemented very seriously since the regulations
and rules came from village cadres rather than the majority
in the villages, who saw little need for these kinds of rules. In
Shang Shapu Village, we asked all the eleven villagers who
participated in one group meeting if there were villagers'
regulations and rules, and only the two village cadres said
there were. They also said that the papers had disappeared.
The other nine ordinary villagers had no idea of the rules.
We then asked these two village cadres details about the
regulations. They could only cite the following two:
households must pay all the cost if their animals ate or
destroyed any other household's crops, in addition to
paying a fine of 20 RMB Yuan per head of animal per
incident; villagers would also be punished 300 RMB Yuan
per incident if they stole any other household's animal. 10 In
Xia Shapu the village headman told us that it was difficult to
organize villagers' meetings and wondered how we might
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