Abstract
In north-eastern Madagascar, maintenance of biodiversity competes with expansion of land for agriculture and mining. The concept of “telecoupling” provides a framework for analysis of distant actors and institutions that influence local land use decisions. However, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the extent of telecoupling of land governance in north-eastern Madagascar and a lack of evidence regarding its role in driving land use change and land competition. Using a descriptive Social Network Analysis, we disentangled distant interactions between actors in terms of flows and institutions. Our findings show that the domains of economic and environmental interactions are dominated by actors from different sectors that have claims on the same land but generally do not interact. Distant influences occurring via remote flows of goods, money, and institutions serve to reinforce local land competition. Balancing economic and environmental land claims for more sustainable regional development in north-eastern Madagascar requires collaboration between actors across sectors, scales, and domains.
Highlights
Global resource consumption continues to rise, affecting tropical countries [1,2], where changes in land use reflect a drive towards large-scale commercial agricultural [3,4]
We focus on Madagascar, a global biodiversity hotspot in the Indian Ocean that has been subject to various land claims by distant actors since colonial times [41,42]
According to our hypothesis that a combination of these demands would increase land competition, we classified them into two domains: the economic domain and the environmental domain, respectively, according to LU involving production or conservation [12]
Summary
Global resource consumption continues to rise, affecting tropical countries [1,2], where changes in land use reflect a drive towards large-scale commercial agricultural [3,4] These land use changes are significantly shaped by a growing number of diverse connections between local and distant actors. The expansion of commercial agricultural plantations in the global South affects land use in these regions as well as elsewhere, from the range of tropical forests to subsistence crop fields [8] These distant connections impact the economic development of the tropical countries in question [9], while potentially undermining other globally driven initiatives such as conservation [10]
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