The Community Development and Ecological Conservation in Liguang Village

Challenges and Objectives

Liguang Village is located in Liming Lisu Township, Yulong Naxi Autonomous County, Lijiang City, Yunnan Province, and is also in Laojunshan National Park and Liming Thousand-turtle Mountain Scenic Spot. It is a rural village mainly inhabited by the Lisu minority. The whole village is rich in forest resources. Laojunshan National Park, where Liguang Village is located, is in the Three Parallel Rivers World Natural Heritage Site, with rich biodiversity and cultural diversity. In the past 20 to 30 years, due to the influence of market and policy, the ecological environment quality of the Lisu community has been reduced, which affects the sustainable development of the community, and it is urgent to strengthen ecological conservation.

Guided by the Endogenous Development Idea, the community project is to respect the subjectivity of the community and to promote self-organization in the community and its self-management, self-development, self-service, and self-learning about economic, ecological, social, cultural, and other public affairs, exploring a rural community development model organically combined the villager autonomy with the participation of NGO.

Collaboration Partners and Roles

In the project, the main collaborators are the Lijiang Institute of Health and Environment. (LIHE), Yokohama Rubber Company, UNDP\GEFSGP, Liguang Village Committee, villager-group and villagers. LIHE obtained financial support from foundations, developed a preliminary plan for project implementation, and established the implementation method of the project through communication with the Liguang Village Committee and villagers. The Liguang Village Committee is responsible for project publicity, organizing meetings, exchanges, and visits for villager representatives. Yokohama Rubber Company and UNDP\GEFSGP are mainly responsible for providing funds and part of the supervision work.

Revitalisation Activities

The implementation of the community project is within the villager group and is based on community solidarity and discussion. Public discussion helps to promote the participation of villagers in the community, promote the construction of community publicity, and then form community organizations and systems.

The project organized regular experience exchange activities by LIHE. During the activities, the experience and harvest of the project would be shared by various villagers groups. LIHE organizes community project applications to formally support the villager-groups' community development projects.

Ecological conservation is mainly the building of Community Conserved Areas. The important premise of community conserved areas is the consensus on ecological conservation from villagers in the villager group. Therefore, according to their experience before, villagers fully expressed themselves by having meetings to discuss and make regimes of forestry resource management or ecological conservation, which doesn't influence production or living and is able to achieve sustainable utilization and ecological conservation.

The establishment of the Community Mutual Fund aims to use the funds from LIHE as a lever to integrate the community capital into the collective public funds for the local community. On this basis, the community is encouraged to establish a set of self-managed and self-supervised mutual-aid systems with everyone involved and benefited.

Revitalisation Outcome

Community Conserved Areas have different effects on different villager groups. Three villager-groups can punish villagers who violate community rules and regulations and destroy forests, showing the effectiveness of village rules and regulations. Community Conserved Areas protected villagers’ forests and water for the sustainable development of the community.

In the past 8 years, the project of Community Mutual Fund has been a good sustainable development. The implementation of the project provides the villagers with funds for production or urgent needs, which are freely arranged and flexibly used by the villagers, effectively promoting the rational development of the villagers, alleviating the shortage of the villagers' simple reproduction capital to a certain extent, and increasing their income.

This is the abridged version of a case prepared by AIRI Associate Fellow Cheng Xiaofeng. For further information, please email Tsinghua University’s China Institute for Rural Studies at cirs@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn.