Forest Conservation and Sustainability in Indonesia

A Political Economy Study of International Governance Failure

Bernice Maxton-Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000048629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écologie

Despite carefully constructed conservation interventions, deforestation in Indonesia is not being stopped. This book identifies why large-scale international forest conservation has failed to reduce deforestation in Indonesia and considers why key stakeholders have not responded as expected to these conservation interventions.

The book maps the history of deforestation in Indonesia in the context of global political economy, exploring the relationship between international trade, the interests and ideology behind global sustainability programmes and the failures of forest conservation in Indonesia. Global economic and political ideologies are shown to have profoundly shaped deforestation. The author argues that the same forces continue to prevent positive outcomes. Case study chapters analyse three major international programmes: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+), the Norway-Indonesia bilateral partnership, and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Indonesia. The findings provide insight into the failures of global climate change policy and suggest how the book's theoretical model can be used to analyse other complex environmental problems.

The book is a useful reference for students of environmental science and policy, political theory, international relations, development and economics. It will also be of interest to forestry professionals and practitioners working in NGOs.

1
Conservation of Indonesia’s forests in historical and political context

It can be tempting to explain deforestation in terms of poverty and population pressures, and indeed, these are important: natural resource extraction like logging, timber exports, pulp and paper processing, as well as mining for fossil fuels and metals, has been a keystone to Indonesia’s economic development. Indonesia has 263 million inhabitants, and although the country is very large, most people live on a handful of islands, particularly Java. Population density is encouraging forest clearance as people move to other islands like Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi, some in search of fertile farmland, some as labourers on palm oil plantations. The failure of forest conservation in Indonesia to provide a viable and sustainable alternative to deforestation cannot be understood purely in these terms, however. The struggle to conserve Indonesia’s rainforest is complicated, not only by domestic political history and economic development, but by the relationship, attitudes, and expectations of Western countries towards Indonesia and vice versa.

The mistake of mainstream conservation has been to focus on a few technological factors – who owns the land, how much corruption there is, whether some people are trying to disproportionately enrich themselves through resource extraction – but these questions miss the bigger structural, long-term picture. Complexities around data also complicate understanding of forest conservation in Indonesia: in 2014, for example, new data showed that Indonesia had moved into first place globally for deforestation, ahead of Brazil. Three years later, several sources, including the Indonesian government, claimed the data were flawed, because the definitions of forest and deforestation on which the research had been based had been wrong. In historical data, some years show very high deforestation and forest fires.¹ Other years, often those immediately following a deforestation spike, show much lower rates of forest clearance. It is important not to get distracted by short-term data when trying to understand the bigger picture of forest conservation. It has become easier in recent years to monitor and track information on rates of deforestation and on different forest categories,² thanks particularly to improvements in remote sensing technology and techniques and to the availability of those data on public websites. Nonetheless, arguments continue about the methods and definitions used.

Arguments about data, definitions, and agendas are the key to Indonesia’s conservation political economy. Understanding why deforestation happens and why conservation has been (at best) disappointing, requires unpicking disagreements about how much forest there is in Indonesia, how it should be quantified, what maps are valid, how the land should be used, and what value forests have to Indonesia and to the world. This requires a political economy exploration of socio-political hierarchies and interactions which goes far beyond simple economic questions. Why did district heads historically have the right to produce, and base resource decisions on, their own reference maps? Why do teams of Western conservationists regularly find that the local representative they have been working with, and built a relationship with, is replaced so that relationships and understandings have to be rebuilt from scratch? Why do forest community representatives agree to leave land marked for protection by a state-endorsed conservation enclosure, while other forest community groups violently resist attempts to enforce the agreement? All these questions require understanding of historical, political, cultural, and social context.

This chapter analyses the history of deforestation and forest conservation in the context of Indonesia’s development story, through the lens of the ‘common sense’ of free-market capitalism. It explains the origins of the market-based conservation ‘settlement’ (the acceptance of society and authorities or society and ‘elites’ about the norms, practices, and structures in which to live). It analyses the framing of conservation and development in the context of historical political economy events and processes in Indonesia and explains how these constructed political and environmental subjectivities (assumptions, understandings, expectations) between Indonesia and the West. This analysis maps the histories, geographies, economies, cultures, and politics which have created a trajectory, rather than arguing about the relative success of one sub-model versus another sub-model of conservation interventions.

The chapter first analyses the assumptions, rhetoric, and values which frame the way in which deforestation and forest resources are seen by major stakeholders. It explores how environmental NGOs encountered a crisis of legitimacy which encouraged closer allegiance with commerce, as the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism spread outwards from the US, weakening environmentalism’s allegiance with the left. It then describes the historical political, economic, and ideological conditions that cemented Indonesia’s post-independence, post-Sukarno, and post-New Order eras and shows how Indonesia’s forest policy institutions and subjectivities are connected to resource demands and the Global North’s need to maintain political and economic hegemony. By drawing on accounts of capitalism in Indonesia, regional resource extraction, and political economy studies of networks of power, patronage, and legality, a picture emerges of the mix of interests which moulded the framework in which resource extraction, and consequent conservation efforts, unfolded in Indonesia.³ This framework⁴ has adapted to a new neoliberal era based on authoritarian and patrimonial foundations, complemented by changing capitalist relations at all levels of society, resulting in a complex cluster of proximate drivers of deforestation and resistance to forest conservation, particularly at the core of the global capital elite structure.⁵ This and the following chapters pose some fundamental questions: is Indonesian rainforest a problem or not and if so, for whom? How does the framing of the ‘crisis’ of deforestation and its solutions replicate existing imbalances, and whose interests does this serve? What is this struggle actually about?

Framing the conservation world view: the hegemony of neoliberal ‘common sense’

The way a subject is framed has a fundamental effect on how people understand the issue. Framing also plays on people’s subjectivities (see Box 1.1).

Box 1.1 Subjectivities

Subjectivity is a way to describe a way of being and a world view, beyond mere identity. Subjectivity starts with the way people see themselves and their identity and includes the interactions of other people and of day-today lived experience. Subjectivities are a bundle of all the abstract, intangible, and emotional elements on which ideas, attitudes, understanding, and expectations are based. They form a world view which builds and reinforces expectations of the system in which we experience life.

People have political subjectivities which involve their understanding of, assumptions about, and experiences of politics, including other people’s narratives directly and through media stories, which tell them what to expect from politics. They have inter-cultural subjectivities, built on their direct experience of people from other cultures or countries; media stories; stories from parents, grandparents, friends, and neighbours; and experiences of foreign products. People also have environmental subjectivities, based on their own experience of nature, stories and experiences of nature when they were children, images of nature portrayed in the media, and public artworks. One person’s environmental subjectivity may be completely different from another’s depending on his or her bundle of experiences, emotional triggers, and ideas of nature. The way one person’s environmental subjectivities interact with another’s will also contribute to the mix of assumptions, understandings, and expectations. All subjectivities are constructions which can potentially be manipulated in order to guide behaviour: this has been the great success of commercial marketing.

The way conservation is approached by international conservationists in Indonesia is profoundly influenced by the environmental, political, and economic subjectivities of many groups of people from different backgrounds coming together and, in the context of current and evolving circumstances, deciding how to frame ‘the problem’ of deforestation in Indonesia. Framing an issue involves decisions about what details or context to include, which also involves a decision to exclude other details or context. Framing a discussion about what to have for dinner involves suggestions about what is in the fridge or easily available in the shops as well as what diners feel like eating. It might leave out the fact that someone finished the potatoes and forgot to replace them. The way different actors with different amounts of power and influence have framed the problem of Indonesia’s deforestation has involved decisions about what context to include and what to leave out. That framing included details about population pressure on resources, corruption, and the theory that resource-rich countries tend to over-exploit them (the ‘curse of natural resources’ theory).⁶ Institutional deficiency...