This dissertation examines the nature of land use change in a contemporary shifting cultivation landscape, its complex causes, and its outcomes for well-being, socio-economic differentiation and socio-ecological vulnerability. Using an interdisciplinary research approach, I seek to understand, map and explain these transitions occurring in the landscape and society as well as their consequences in South Asia that are poorly understood using West Garo Hills district of Meghalaya in Northeast India as the study site – a remote and poorly understood region of India on account of social, ecological, cultural, political, and historical dimensions.

The dissertation addresses fundamental questions about the pertinent but often neglected aspects regarding shifting cultivation such as its extent, land use intensity and its correlates. To do so, I conceptualise a rigorous methodological framework to map shifting cultivation landscapes using two-season satellite image analysis explicitly attending to issues of land use definitions, land cover/land use distinctions, and normativity. I find that shifting cultivation is the dominant land use even today, even as the vast presence of horticulture plantations in the landscape is observed. The land use map highlights high land use intensity of shifting cultivation, short cultivation-fallow cycles, that fallow periods are negatively correlated with tree plantation expansion, and very little old growth forest remains. The mapping revises our understanding of the existing estimates of shifting cultivation as well as old growth forests simultaneously pointing to problems in earlier mapping protocols and the grossly wrong notions guiding land management of these landscapes.

The nature of land use change examined using a village-level study in Asumpara in West Garo Hills district shows that intensification of shifting cultivation and expansion of plantations are the central constituents of land use change. Using an ‗effects-to-causes‘ research approach called Abductive Causal Eventism (ACE) and drawing on multiple bodies of theoretical work, this dissertation examines the causes of land use change during the last century to show that population increase played a significant role in intensifying shifting cultivation that led Garos to engage with the market leading to a widespread innovation in local land tenure from communal clan lands to private and inheritable land to accommodate cash crop plantations. The intensified hill landscape is today split nearly half-and-half by shifting cultivation and plantations from what was earlier a landscape with exclusively shifting cultivation. However, the land use change observed was motivated by ‗deeper‘ causes such as cash income needs to meet food security, ensure cultural reproduction, and to meet modern aspirations. The historical market trade of the Garos with non-Garos and the social capital it created over time mediated and secured market engagement for new cash crop-based livelihoods required to ensure livelihoods through the many difficult periods of scarcity. Furthermore, unlike many other shifting cultivation landscapes in the world, Garo Hills enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy in rural life and land management as a result of legal protection granted under the Constitution of India to maintain their customary laws and practices resulting in the flexibility of land tenure with population increase and other endogenous changes in the village. Thus, the trajectories of land use change reveal a dynamic interplay of theoretically well-known as well as context-specific explanations.

The transformation of the landscape had important consequences for livelihood strategies beyond those based on land alone. Using the Sustainable Rural Livelihoods (SRL) framework, I point out that the category of the ‗shifting cultivator‘ belies the occupationally diversified personalities of Garo households into both farm and nonfarm livelihoods that display site fidelity to the village environs. Areca plantations have become the new symbol of wealth even as income from wage labour, small businesses, and state-supported rural employment guarantee scheme and food subsidies aid cash income generation and food security taking all households above the poverty line. Amidst these changes, the adaptive capacity of the Garos using their kin-based social capital has played a key role in continuing shifting cultivation in diverse, albeit sub-optimal forms. Firm interlocking with the areca nut and cashew nut market economy has enabled all families to attain enough well-being as families now have time for leisure and newer social involvements that further scaffolds their social capital. But the land use change also reflects a social landscape that mirrors the Garo societal structures and social differences. The matrilineal seniority of the Garo heiress households provided them a head start in capital accrual in the form of plantations and wet rice cultivation lands that reproduces socio-economic differences in society. However, the Garo moral economy obviates runaway differentiation preventing exclusion of kin by the income-rich and elites. Significantly, however, these redistributive practices that reproduce the Garo social order simultaneously legitimises the socio-economic differentiation currently manifesting in society.

Even though most families see themselves as living a good life and are more content now from a food security and income generation standpoint as well as having more time for leisure, the landscape of Garo Hills and Garo livelihoods appears to be carefully poised from the point of view of ecological and livelihood sustainability since they reveal an element of precarity. The ongoing conversion of fallows to plantations poses a short- and medium-term ecological risk especially for local water availability and biodiversity. While the agricultural diversity along with the social capital the Garos possess to obtain land from kin might showcase resilience, rising income needs, firm entrenchment into the plantation economy and signs of deskilling among the youth increase socio-ecological vulnerability for the medium-term. Future landscape and livelihood changes will most likely be driven by market prices for commodities, aspirations for children‘s education, cultural affinities to shifting cultivation, and changing visions of progress.