Background/Question/Methods Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh is inhabited by eleven indigenous communities. Traditionally, these indigenous communities have been practicing indigenous agroforestry, such as shifting cultivation, for their livelihood. The Bawm indigenous community brought a new dimension in their land use system with agroforestry management practices which have made them economically self-sufficient. This study’s goal was to fully understand the complex management practices of the Bawm, the way the community reached decisions on such practices, and the amount of social capital present in the community.
We conducted a study to explore the indigenous agroforestry system practiced by the Bawm community. The study also analyzed and assessed all the indigenous agroforestry components and activities, historical trends and adoption processes, livelihood patterns and economic conditions. The study included the collection of primary data, which were been collected from a full census of the households in the community as well as agroforestry farms through different participatory observations, and semi-structured interviews.

Results/Conclusions

We found that the Bawm community is practicing a unique agroforestry system in their land, which is called Bagan agroforestry.  This agroforestry system is centered on jhum cultivation, which is the main feature of land use in the study area.  The study revealed that the Bagan system integrates agricultural crops with trees, which allows the continuous sustainable harvest of crops from one unit of land continuously for 30 years. The Bagan system represents an indigenous, community-led, agroforestry system that has shown remarkable resilience and potential for the local community that developed it. Some of the drivers of this successful system are a strong leadership, a tight knit community, the independence of the community and the high level of social capital among system participants. This community’s interest in marketable crops also provided them with opportunities to gain from their well managed natural resources. Other indigenous communities in Chittagong Hill Tracts have started to replicate the agroforestry practices of the Bawm people. This study is the first to formalize and systematically document a successful bottom up participatory approach to resource management that could be replicated in other parts of the South and South-East Asia.