Nurturing Customary Based Well-Being - An approach to Biological Human Ecology Theory

• From 1975 to 1999, Long Lan villagers lived peacefully in the Phu Sung area with their rich forest without any intervention from outsiders. Then in 1999, the government of Laos adopted three policies that unintentionally had a profoundly disruptive effect upon the livelihoods of ethnic minority communities in Northern Laos, including those in the Phu Sung area of Luang Prabang district. These policies: 1) stopping shifting cultivation; 2) stopping opium production; and 3) resettling and merging small villages, often of different ethnic identities, into one larger village in order to achieve inter-ethnic monitoring over opium production and shifting cultivation. These policies were implemented without consideration or understanding of differences in cultural characteristics, belief, norms of cultivation, kin-based forest heritage and co-governance and leadership of the Hmong, Khmu and Lao ethnic groups, as well as within the clans of the same group. Especially, the policies didn’t consider the necessity of creating specific natural spaces for each group so that they could practice their own traditional means of livelihood to continue their own traditional values in the multi-ethnic villages. Furthermore, the government’s stereotyped and inflexible control over the merged multi cultural and multi-ethnic villages showed its inefficiency due to lack of professional skills and appropriate socio-cultural governance approach. As a result, these policies had caused crisis, weakening the will and confidence of individual ethnic groups who were now living in an environment without forest for practicing their knowledge and means of using natural resources, spiritual trees and rocks for worshipping, etc. Finally, the policies had undermined their self-determination, self-governance and the possibility of any indigenous solutions to deal with the crisis. The resulting general situation was that most re-settled villagers ended up with no land for farming, and were forced to turn back to their previous locations to earn a living by harvesting traditional forest products.
  
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