Rooted in Place? The Coproduction of Knowledge and Space in Agroforestry Assemblages

In much of Southeast Asia, agroforestry and related forms of tree cropping have been vigorously promoted within community-based forest management (CBFM) to discourage extensive resource uses among upland peoples. Although critical scholars have scrutinized CBFM initiatives, how and why agroforestry has emerged as a concept, strategy, and practice in changing forest governance regimes remains underexplored. Integrating assemblage approaches and coproduction, we explore how certain environmental framings are stabilized within agroforestry projects to achieve outcomes as part of increasingly post-territorial forest management in the Philippines. We do so by focusing on how the Palawan Tropical Forestry Protection Programme (PTFPP, 1995–2002)—a prominent European Union–funded forest management project on Palawan Island—extensively promoted market-oriented agroforestry as a means to arrest forest degradation and provide cash income to indigenous uplanders. We describe how PTFPP livelihood projects aimed to reform indigenous peoples' values of forest resources by foregrounding tree planting as an economically and morally ideal practice and, in doing so, limit the range, mobility, and perceived impact of swidden (kaingin) by “rooting” agriculture in place. Building on the historical analysis of policy documents, we use ethnographic fieldwork among upland swiddeners in southern Palawan to explore the practice and outcome of the PTFPP as an incremental coproduction of varied knowledges and space brokered by project officials, customary leaders, and farmers themselves. We conclude by showing how seemingly apolitical tree-based interventions could produce conservation objectives, such as the sedenterization of upland famers, in the absence of strict territorial boundaries.