The potential of social learning for a land governance transformation in Southern Myanmar: Multi-stakeholder platform for the review of oil palm concessions

Abstract

During the military regime of the past decades, the Myanmar government decided to become independent on palm oil imports. As a consequence, more than 700,000 ha of land in Tanintharyi Region in Southern Myanmar had been put under oil palm concessions, sometimes regardless of the population and their livelihoods. With the election of the recent government in 2015, the new Tanintharyi Chief Minister announced to redistribute the legally occupied but still unused oil palm lands to the local population. As a result, a multi-stakeholder platform has been established in 2016 to review the concessions. This research accompanies this platform asking: «How does social learning take place in the multi-stakeholder plat-form (dimensions of social learning)? And what framing conditions and outputs foster or hinder the social lear-ning process?»