Executive summary

Introduction

Shortly after the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, armed resistance to the new State Administration Council (SAC) – the military junta – started up in areas previously firmly under the control of the Government of Myanmar (GoM), generally taking the form of “People’s Defense Forces” (PDFs). Since then, PDFs have gained control of much of Myanmar.

With GoM administration no longer operational in areas controlled by PDFs, an important question is how this vacuum has been filled. With this in mind, we conducted research in PDF-controlled parts of three townships in Magway to understand land and natural resource (NR) governance there. In doing so, we have focused on areas under control of PDFs and civilian administration organizations aligned with the National Unity Government (NUG).

We have been able to identify five main elements of NUG’s system for land and resource governance. Through examination of governance on the ground in the three townships we are able to assess how effectively this system is being implemented. We can also assess governance outcomes from the perspective of good land and NR governance in general.

Methods

The research focused on three townships in two districts in Magway Region, which we will call Townships A, B, and C. Main methods used were semi-structured interviews conducted remotely and archival research (review of media articles, official NUG documents and statements, etc.). Interviewees included members of newly established civilian administration bodies at village and township levels, members of People’s Defense Teams (PDTs) and PDFs under NUG’s Ministry of Defense (MoD), community members, a civil society organization (CSO) member, and NUG officials. 

Background

MoD has consolidated brigade-level PDFs under its chain of command (CoC) and established PDTs at township level to protect and maintain security in areas already controlled by PDFs. Various armed groups (typically calling themselves PDFs) have remained outside of MoD’s CoC, including many at local level who are aligned with NUG PDFs as well as others that do not cooperate with NUG PDFs.

Civilian administrations have been set up around the country in areas controlled by PDFs and PDTs. They include township-level People’s Administration Teams (PATs) that are accountable to NUG’s Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration (MoHAI) and that are the lowest level of civilian administration under NUG. Various PAT members are accountable to different NUG line ministries. The PATs are supposed to collect revenue (mainly taxes and fines) based on NUG guidelines, to be allocated in fixed percentages to local and Union levels, and each PAT has a Tax Collector who is responsible for collecting this revenue. There are also village-level PATs that township-level PATs engage but do not control.

The research area in Magway region extends from the Ayeyarwady River in the east to the hills at the border of Chin State in the west. One of the three townships (“Township C”) includes a sizable Yaw population and part of the Yaw territory. SAC forces control only a small part of each township. Many people from the three townships have become internally displaced persons (IDPs), and there are many long-term IDPs from Chin State in Township C. Crude oil (produced in “Township B”) and logging in Township C have been especially significant natural resource uses.

Township-level PATs are active in all three townships. The Yaw Defense Force (YDF) and Yaw Army (YA) generally do not cooperate with the NUG PAT and play administrative roles themselves, and an independent PDF in Township A does not allow local PATs in its area to cooperate with the NUG PAT in most sectors.

Overall picture of land and resource governance

Overall, as in other sectors, NUG has not introduced reforms in the land and natural resource sectors and has maintained the GoM legal framework. The key NUG ministry for natural resource governance is the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MoNREC), whose main roles relate to management of forests and mineral resources. The Ministry of Electricity and Energy (MoEE) is responsible for governance of crude oil. NUG has generally not touched the question of land tenure (who has rights to land) in its own announcements and policy instruments.

The township-level PAT is the main body within the NUG administration responsible for land and natural resource management. In the three townships, PAT members who are key to land and NR governance include members for natural resources, agriculture and livestock, energy and electricity, and justice affairs as well as Tax Collectors. In Township C there are a Township Administration Body for Natural Resources (TAB-NR) and Land Management Committee under the PAT, and there are Justice Affairs Committees in Townships A and C that serve as courts.

Land and NR management as practiced by the NUG PATs consists mainly of seizing illegal timber, collecting taxes and fines, resolving disputes, and (to a lesser extent) raising awareness of the need to protect the Permanent Forest Estate (PFE). PATs and the committees under them have few other land and NR management mechanisms and there is no patrolling by the PAT or TAB-NR. In the absence of other management mechanisms, management is left mainly up to communities and village-level PATs. PDFs generally operate far from villages, where neither community institutions nor township-level PATs exercise any effective management, and they generally control resource use in those areas.

Specific land and resource uses

Examining specific cases of land and resource uses helps to further clarify land and NR governance in the NUG system. The roles of different institutions, the degree to which reforms have been introduced, and the nature of management differ between different uses.

Timber extraction: Commercial timber extraction is prohibited by MoNREC during the interim or revolutionary period, and TAB-NRs have the role of preventing and stopping illegal logging. In general (not specifically in Magway), it is PDTs or PDFs who deal with illegal logging in practice. Initially after the coup, logging associated with PDFs was intense in Township C. Commercial logging appears to have decreased significantly since, though it continues unsustainably, while members of local communities are able to log for their own use more or less freely.

Government plantations: Though it appears that currently no one is guarding the various government plantations established in the past, some steps have been taken to protect them – mostly just telling people to stop logging there. After the coup, community members in Township A cut large numbers of trees in various fuelwood plantations to sell. The PAT then issued a prohibition on the cutting of trees there and it more or less stopped. In Township B, some community members cut trees in a plantation for fuelwood; when others reported this to the PDF, it asked them not to cut anymore and they stopped.

Collection of non-timber forest products (NTFPs): MoNREC’s policy and standard operating procedure (SOP) forbid all large-scale extraction of NTFPs while allowing people to collect NTFPs freely on a small scale. The TAB-NR or PAT is supposed to impose fines if large amounts of NTFPs are transported. In practice, large-scale NTFP extraction is widespread. In Township C, large amounts of bamboo are cut and the cutting is clearly unsustainable.

Crude oil production: Within NUG, MoEE is directly responsible for crude oil production. It interacts with PAT members responsible for energy and electricity, who are responsible for crude oil production locally. In 2021 MoEE issued regulations for crude oil production, according to which taxes would not be collected on wells. No new licenses for wells are being issued and, in practice, the requirement for licenses is not enforced. In Township B, local businesspeople have continued to operate hand-dug wells, leasing farmland and other land from local landowners using informal agreements as well as operating wells in an area that had been acquired by the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) in the past. There is a PAT member for energy and electricity in Township B, but in practice, oil production in the township is controlled by a member of the township PDT (who is also leader of a local PDT). Crude oil provides the main source of revenue for the township PDT. Crude oil production is driving the local economy in oil producing areas in the township. Before the coup, people from other parts of the country moved into these areas to produce oil, work as laborers, and support the local oil-centered economy. More people from other places have moved in since the coup.

Other extractive industries: The main smaller-scale extractive industries have been sand mining and gold panning, both in rivers in Township A. NUG allows small-scale sand mining and gold panning and has not imposed regulations or taxes on either. However, both result in river bank erosion, and the PAT in Township A has restricted gold panning and is considering how to control sand mining in order to manage erosion.

Agriculture: The change in agriculture following the coup that is most relevant to land and NR governance is that in Township C, there has been a reduction in cultivation of dry cropland (ya) and rice paddies and expansion of shifting cultivation. Driving factors include that shifting cultivation does not require costly inputs as do other forms of agriculture, restrictions on shifting cultivation imposed by the Forest Department in reserved forests have been lifted, the risk of airstrikes is less in shifting cultivation areas than in other areas because of the low population density, and IDPs from Chin State are able to practice shifting cultivation.

Use of land for military purposes: Land is not being used for commercial purposes, but it is being used for military purposes such as PDF camps and agricultural land for PDTs. In some cases, people have reportedly voluntarily loaned their land temporarily for these purposes.

Management of land tenure

Three categories of land to which NUG has paid attention are the PFE (managed by MoNREC, and located mainly in Township C), the oil production area in Township B that MOGE acquired in the past (now managed by MoEE), and national heritage sites in townships A and B (overseen by the Interim Board for Heritage Administration). NUG considers all of this land to belong to the state. There is little management of any of these categories of land in practice.

Outside of these areas, NUG has not paid attention to what land belongs to the state and what land people can have individual rights to or use in different ways. In areas used by communities, land rights are determined largely through community or customary systems or by village-level PATs. Township-level PATs and a new township-level land committee in Township C generally play little role in administering these rights. In the GoM system, the question of who owns land is especially important and contentious with regards to vacant, fallow, and virgin (VFV) land, but NUG and township-level PATs appear not to have paid attention to VFV land or to have weighed in on whether it belongs to communities and their members or the state. There have been no new leases of VFV land or allocations of VFV land for public purposes.

NUG does not have a land registration system and recognition of land rights is now done mainly by local communities themselves. Township-level PATs consider land use certificates (Form 7) and Form 105 (an intermediary document in the process of obtaining Form 7) to be proof of ownership, but if these documents do not exist, they rely on local communities to determine who owns what land. As before the coup, land transactions and dispute resolution happen mainly through community or customary systems. In Townships A and C, where Justice Affairs committees (“courts”) exist, the PAT can refer cases to them. There have been changes in women’s access to land rights to the extent that they are recognized and protected differently in the GoM system and customary systems, as it is now almost completely determined by customary systems.

Short-term IDPs may continue farming in their home villages (fleeing temporarily when necessary), while long-term IDPs may buy, lease, or borrow farmland from local people. In Township C, Chin IDPs have been able to clear forested land to cultivate, and some continue to tend farms in their home villages. There are no formal documents or agreements and leasing or borrowing land happens through the local system. MoNREC has issued an instruction stating that IDPs can temporarily use land in the PFE, following certain conditions. Some IDPs in Township B have taken up livelihoods such as operating small shops while others who have not been able to acquire land work as daily wage laborers.

Conclusion

Land and NR governance under the NUG system in the research area is characterized by a lack of strong governance institutions and shaped by the real needs of different institutions (PATs, PDTs, PDFs, MoPFI, etc.) for income from resources. Key flaws in the GoM systems for land and NR governance have not been addressed, but some noteworthy reforms have been implemented.

As noted above, we identified five main elements of NUG’s system for land and NR governance – what NUG is trying to do with respect to land and NR. These different elements have been implemented to different degrees: 

1. Civilian control of land and resources: NUG has aimed to keep land and natural resource management in civilian hands, with PDFs and PDTs playing only a supporting role to civilian institutions. There has, in fact, been significant progress made over the past four years in limiting the involvement of armed groups in natural resource use and management but the civilian administration’s role remains limited geographically and in terms of functions. Local armed groups that MoD does not control continue to operate checkpoints of their own.

2. Land and NR management at township level: The township is the lowest level in the NUG structure, and NUG has tried to build institutions at this level for NR governance. The main institutions, the TAB-NR in Township C and PATs in all three townships, are functioning. Overall, however, their capacity remains limited and PATs’ role in land and resource management is minimal, limited mainly to collecting taxes.

3. Empowerment of communities to manage land and natural resources: NUG aims to strengthen local level governance. Communities are allowed to be more involved in land and natural resource management than they were in the past, and in fact they are more involved, especially in areas near villages. However, authority has not been formally delegated to them and what areas are under their control has not been specified.

4. Sustainability of large-scale resource uses: NUG policy is, generally, to not allow unsustainable large-scale resource uses. It has not issued new VFV permits or authorized logging. However, crude oil production is allowed even though regulations are not being enforced and NTFP collection on a large scale is allowed as long as fines are paid. Control of logging has also only been partially successful.

5. Effectiveness of taxation: NUG aims to collect revenue through taxation. With regard to natural resources, this is mainly taxation of the transportation of crude oil. Fines are also collected on NTFP extraction. There is some abuse of the taxation system, and groups operating outside of NUG’s system (such as local PDFs) also collect tax.

Another important question is the extent to which the current system is able to deliver good land and natural resource governance. We consider three main dimensions:

1. Sustainable use of land and natural resources: Immediately after PDFs took control of the areas, resource use was extremely unsustainable. There has been significant improvement over the past four years but we are unable to say definitively how sustainable current use is.

2. Equitable use of land and natural resources and protection of rights: Land and natural resource use is significantly more equitable than it was pre-coup and, in general, we did not find any significant violations of people’s rights to land and resources. Taxation-related abuses are the main concern for land and resource users. 

3. Management of resource- and land-related conflicts: There are relatively few land- and resource-related conflicts. However, we cannot attribute the lack of conflicts to active management; the lack of economic pressure, especially on land, was probably an important contributing factor.

Considerable progress has been made in the past four years. NUG continues to develop its administration at the township level and strengthen its ability to support local administration by building up higher-level (district and regional) structures. There are increasing opportunities to address the concerns identified here.

Recommendations

1.     Strengthen land and natural resource governance systems for the interim period:

·   Establish institutions at the level of the Magway federal unit to promote decentralization and bring governance closer to the people.

·   Improve regulations on crude oil production to be consistent with the current institutional context, and strengthen enforcement of the regulations.

·   Enforce NUG’s taxation system (eliminating unauthorized checkpoints) and restrictions on logging (eliminating armed groups’ involvement in logging).

·   Strengthen PATs’ capacity for land and NR management beyond tax collection, including by building skills and financial and human resources for land use planning, patrolling, strategic planning, etc.

2.     Develop new land and natural resource governance systems for Magway Region:

·   The current period offers the rare opportunity to develop new legal and institutional frameworks for land and natural resource governance in Myanmar. It is important to begin the process of developing future systems now. In order for local people to be able to participate in such a process for Magway, their capacities should be strengthened to be able to think critically about new, alternative systems.

·   In developing future governance systems, it will be necessary to ensure that measures are designed to build the capacity of local institutions to implement the new systems.