Migration, socioeconomic transformation, and land-use change in Mexico’s Mixteca Alta: Lessons for forest transition theory

Matthew Lorenzen, Quetzalcóatl Orozco-Ramírez, Rosario Ramírez-Santiago and Gustavo G. Garza

Land Use Policy, 2020, vol. 95, issue C

Abstract: The forest transition is a concept used to describe and explain the transition from a dwindling to an expanding forest area in a given region or country. Three main explanations of the forest transition have been developed. The first is the “economic development path to the forest transition”, which contends that economic development and new agricultural technologies trigger rural-urban migration and agricultural intensification, leading in turn to the abandonment of marginal farmland and eventually to a forest recovery. The second is the “forest scarcity path to the forest transition”, which argues that the scarcity of forests is a major factor that encourages commercial tree plantations, reforestations and the conservation of woodlands. A third explanation has been advanced in certain developing countries. This explanation, referred to in this paper as the “diversification of rural livelihoods path to the forest transition”, holds that rural households must adjust to outside forces, including globalization and neoliberal economic policies, and that those adjustments marginalize smallholder farming, allowing for the expansion of forests. This paper describes and explains the onset of a forest transition in the Mixteca Alta UNESCO Global Geopark, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Based on qualitative fieldwork and the analysis of official statistics and land-use/cover maps, we contend that the three paths to the forest transition overlap in our study area. This implies a fuller and more complex explanation of the forest transition, which is crucial to understand the expansion of woodlands in other regions of Mexico and the developing world.

Keywords: Rural-urban migration; Socioeconomic change; Land abandonment; Reforestation; Oaxaca; UNESCO Global Geopark (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:95:y:2020:i:c:s026483771931751x

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104580

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