*4.1. Political, Social, Economic, Institutional, and Ecological Contexts*

Before the end of the nineteenth century, the DFA was the traditional territory of Amis people [31,32]. Amis people engaged in slash-and-burn farming and hunting to maintain their livelihoods. After 1895, the Japanese government's policy of nationalizing all "ownerless" land completely changed the fate of Taiwan's indigenous peoples [33]. In the 1910s, the Japanese state entered and ruled the DFA. The state nationalized indigenous peoples' land and used it for commercial sugar cane plantations at the expense of indigenous people. Amis people who lived there were expelled, causing them to be displaced to marginal areas of the East Coastal Mountain Range and the Central Mountain Range. The evictions led to the disintegration of indigenous communities. Furthermore, these marginal lands are generally

vulnerable to natural disasters and have low land productivity, leading to the prevailing economic and social predicament of indigenous people that continues today [32,34].

After the 1910s, DFA land and surrounding communities were transformed from a social-ecological system with high biological and livelihood diversity to farmland growing a single commercial crop that largely depended on the international trade-oriented sugar economy. Because sugar production required intensive manpower, Han people began to settle in the area in large numbers, forming mixed settlements of Han-indigenous communities, which greatly changed the population composition of the area. Changes in the population composition also profoundly affected the attributes of the social system, including today's actors and collective actions related to governance.

After the Second World War, the Taiwanese government took full control of Japanese land and industrial assets in Taiwan and followed the same policy of state ownership of land. The de jure public land in the DFA was received by the state-owned Taiwan Sugar Company (hereafter referred to as TSC) established in 1946 [35]. Therefore, the DFA maintained the sugar-based social and economic structure that originated during Japanese rule, with a similar central government–led governance system. In the 1980s, the international price of sugar dropped significantlyand domestic production costs rose sharply, and the industry began to shrink. In 1995, Taiwan applied to join the World Trade Organization, and for this reason it removed some protection measures for the sugar industry. Sugar production finally ceased in 2002 [35], and DFA land was temporarily idle.

DFA land soon faced changes from the implementation of government policies. To cope with the impact of Taiwan's World Trade Organization membership on domestic agriculture, the Council of Agriculture has promoted the "Plain Land Afforestation Project" since 2002 to subsidize the afforestation of agricultural land. Other arguments promoting plain land afforestation include increasing the forest coverage of the plains, enhancing carbon sequestration, improving environmental quality and aesthetics, conserving biodiversity, and enhancing the potential for timber self-sufficiency [36]. DFA land thus rapidly changed from idle farmland to an afforestation area. In 2011, under the guidance of government policies, the DFA afforestation area was designated the "DFA Forest Park," one of the three largest plain forest parks in Taiwan. The main policy objectives were to provide ecosystem services and promote tourism. The Forestry Bureau of the central government is responsible for the management of the forest park, although the public enterprise TSC continues to own the land and forest property rights. Thus, central government policy over the past 100 years has determined the current characteristics of the DFA social-ecological system and the fundamental structure of its governance.
