The Salween Peace Park is a community-led initiative that strives to revitalize traditional knowledge, practice and customs to empower communities to assert rights to manage their territories and resources. Located in Mutraw District in northern Karen State, the 6,000km2 Salween Peace Park encompasses the customary territories, or Kaw (as they are known in S’gaw Karen language) of 270 communities. Each of these territories is complete with its own set of traditional institutions and knowledge systems, which have been used for millennia to protect and sustain rivers, forests, and biodiversity. The Salween Peace Park brings together these territories along with Karen protected wildlife sanctuaries and reserved forests, into one indigenous conserved landscape.
| Topics | Agroecology, Biodiversity, Commons |
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| Case Report | Volume 1: "Stories of Regeneration and Resilience" |
As well as marking the harmonious relationships that indigenous Karen communities have with their surrounding biodiversity, the Salween Peace Park is also a symbol of the unremitting resilience, ingenuity and determination of the Karen people. While harboring some of the world’s most vulnerable plant and animal species, Mutraw District has been subject to over seventy years of armed conflict and military oppression at the hands of the Burmese army. Furthermore, it is being affected by the growing impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts, and insect infestations. The Salween Peace Park is an attempt by indigenous Karen communities to build peace from the bottom up, ending protracted cycles of violence and realigning relationships between people and nature through an expression of indigenous self-determination.
This case study shows how the Salween Peace Park is building innovative forms of resilience against conflict, displacement and the climate crisis, while also generating transformative alternatives to decades of conflict and environmental plunder.
The Salween Peace Park: A Landscape of Indigenous Resilience in the Face of Conflict, Climate Change, and Military Dictatorship
The Salween Peace seeks to restore food, political and cultural sovereignty through the revival and revitalization of traditional knowledge systems and cultural practices. This struggle for indigenous self-determination is set against the backdrop of intensifying armed conflict and growing onset of climate change.
Mutraw District has been the subject to over seventy years of armed conflict. Standing at the center of what has become ‘the world’s longest civil war’, indigenous Karen people in Mutraw have suffered hugely human rights violations and displacement as a result of protracted conflict and militarization.
Since the military coup on February 1st 2021, conflict has once again intensified across the Mutraw District. During this period there has been in excess of 174 aerial attacks on the Salween Peace Park, a majority of which have targeted civilian homes and settlements. This has resulted in the displacement of over 104,000 people into the surrounding forests.
Resilience Through Reciprocity
The resilience of indigenous communities in the Salween Peace Park to the intensifying impacts of climate change and conflict are underpinned by values of reciprocity. Reciprocity here is expressed both between community members, who share agricultural tasks and pool resources, and between the community and the surrounding forests, rivers, lands, and spirits through local taboos, knowledge systems and collective action conservation initiatives.
Community members perform agricultural work together, each house helping the other to plant rice and vegetable in ku (swidden) plots. After tilling each household’s lands together through collective labour, community members have meals and wine to celebrate, maintaining the communal unity and cohesion which underpin local forms of social resilience.
In response to the pressures of climate change and pest infestations that are increasingly causing shocks and stresses, as well as intensifying armed conflict and displacement, communities in the Salween Peace Park have established a network of 99 rice banks. In each rice bank, households deposit part of their annual rice harvest, pooling resources so that households can withdraw rice in the case of shocks, stresses and emergencies, paying back the amount of rice taken from the following harvest. Where rice harvests are destroyed during conflict, or where communities are displaced, other rice banks contribute shares of rice to ensure local food security.
Apart from pooling rice, community groups have also established saving funds, pooling financial resources together for those with emergencies to withdraw, or to use for local community development initiatives. The pooling of resources in the Salween Peace Park has helped to create a local system of mutual aid in which communities are able to flourish during shocks and stresses from the pressures of climate change and armed conflict.’
Maintaining Reciprocal Ecological Relations
Community members also take care to maintain reciprocal relations with their lands, forests and rivers, and the spirits that guard over them. In this way, the community protects the forest, and in turn, the forest protects the community. These relations have resulted in the sustenance of rich and biodiverse forests and wildlife, as well as thriving indigenous communities.
One example of this reciprocal relation is the revitalization of fish conservation zones in the Salween Peace Park. Fish conservation zones have long been a traditional practice that through long periods of conflict and displacement had started to decline. Within these ‘community established sanctuaries’, usually located in deep fish breeding grounds in streams and rivers, fishing is prohibited and areas of forest around these areas are protected. The careful management of fish conservation zones helps to maintain clean water, healthy fish populations, and rich forests.
Communities across the Salween Peace Park have now established a network of 41 interlinking fish conservation zones that are helping to protect fish populations, as well as water bodies and surrounding forests throughout the area. Since the revival of this practice, communities report that fish populations are thriving, with populations increasing in streams and rivers across the area.
By maintaining reciprocal relations with the surrounding environment through community-driven conservation initiatives, Karen communities maintain amicable and reciprocal relations with spirits which guard over land, forests and streams. Kaw ka’sa, or the master of the kaw, is responsible for maintaining good relations with spirits, ensuring that lands, forests and rivers are well cared for by performing seasonal ceremonies and managing agricultural cycles.
When a community member cuts trees within a watershed area, or pollutes local water bodies, these relations are disturbed. Indigenous Karen people believe that this will have detrimental impacts on their physical health, resulting in sickness or even death in their household. Local shamans (suda kada) are called in these instances to ask for forgiveness from spirits and mediate remuneration with the spirits for damage caused. In this way the health of the environment and the community are directly interconnected, and the maintenance of good relations with spirits and the resources they guard over sustains healthy and thriving communities.
Food Sovereignty Through Biological Diversity
Indigenous communities in the Salween Peace Park have managed to maintain food sovereignty despite the growing pressures caused by climate change and armed conflict. Communities sustain food sovereignty by maintaining high levels of diversity, both in their ku (swidden) fields, and within the forest and rivers that they steward. The maintenance of biodiversity is central to local food sovereignty, underpinning healthy food systems that are resilient to changing conditions and are supported by strong ecosystems.
Communities in the Salween Peace Park practice seed saving, maintaining a great variety of crops to plant within ku (swidden) plots. This ensures that even if some crops fail due to climate pressures, there is enough variety for fields and communities to continue to flourish. Indigenous knowledge research conducted by communities within the Salween Peace Park has shown that people commonly grow in the range of 200 species within their rotational farms.
Communities in the Salween Peace Park often supplement their agricultural harvests with vegetables, medicines, fish and other nontimber forest products from surrounding forests and streams. Through carefully implemented community conservation initiatives and traditional practices, communities in the SPP have managed to sustain a huge diversity within surrounding forests, streams, and plains. Community members have identified, for example, over 106 mushroom species, 200 herbal medicine species, and 121 orchid species. These rich and healthy ecosystems support sustained food security and sovereignty in the areas, providing an abundance of nutrients to local communities.
Key Lessons
The Salween Peace Park is a community initiative that seeks to restore reciprocal relations with the land, forests, rivers and wildlife. Through these reciprocal relations communities have been able to rebuild their resilience to emergent threats such as the impacts of climate change and continued armed conflict. The Salween Peace Park shows us that the relations of mutual support and care within the community, and between the community and nature are vital for the survival of the people and the planet.