Sustainable Sloping Lands and Watershed Management Conference How Do Farmers Make Decisions in a Land Degradation Context? A Case Study from

Stemming from a three-village case study in northern Vietnam, this paper examines how farmers have coped with and adapted to land degradation in the uplands. Following a qualitative approach based on anthropology and institutional analysis, it assesses how policies and research programmes implemented in the area have affected local determinants, namely farmers ’ perceptions of the environment and local rules, and how in turn the latter impacted individual and community behaviour. Results suggest that the research projects implemented in the case study area have had little impact on farmers ’ perceptions of land degradation. The effects of policies have been much more powerful in in-fluencing farmers ’ beliefs. However, institutional analysis showed that the shift from annual cropping to tree plantations in the area was not the result of farmers ’ new beliefs regarding forests. The collapse of local rules governing land access and land use, due to a combination of soil fertility decrease and change in land tenure, was the decisive factor in land-use change. This paper contends that when natural resources are managed by local users, local studies integrating acute models of individual behaviour have marked benefits over meso- or macro-scale studies. Though a powerful tool for analysing the contribution of aggregated or macro-scale factors at the regional or national level, the latter might miss decisive factors that are only observable at the community level. It is argued that, when seeking to explain human behaviour, using a socially constructed view of nature is a necessary approach to assessing the relative impact of external forces on individual decisions. Lastly, the analysis showed that when examining common management, individual decisions should be analysed together with community dynamics. In the present case study, collective determinants were as much responsible for land-use changes as individual strategies