Contested Nature: Promoting International Biodiversity with Social Justice in the Twenty-first Century

4. Wandering Boundaries and Illegal Residents: The Political Ecology of Protected Area Deforestation in South Sumatra Indonesia from 1979 to 1992

In this chapter, I use a political ecology approach to explore political barriers to effective protected area management in Indonesia. Political ecology attempts to capture multiple layers of complexity in explaining environmental degradation and the politics of resource access and control. This is accomplished by focusing on several scales or levels of analysis simultaneously, including historical events and institutional relationships that shape ecological outcomes (chapter 3). I tie together local, national, and international events and structures to better understand the complex web of interactions that resulted in increased deforestation of protected forests in the Lahat District of South Sumatra Province, Indonesia, throughout the 1980s. Forest management politics generated a number of severe, unintended consequences for both local people and forests. The management challenges for the protected forests of Lahat District can be summarized by briefly reviewing the following five points. Deforestation of these forest areas increased rapidly in the early 1980s when (1) the central government started replacing traditional local authorities with bureaucrats 59 Chapter Four Wandering Boundaries and Illegal Residents The Political Ecology of Protected Area Deforestation in South Sumatra Indonesia from 1979 to 1992 STEVEN R. BRECHIN of the modern state. This change in governmental administration diminished enforcement potential of the protected areas in South Sumatra. (2) This institutional change might have mattered little in the forest management efforts had the price of coffee not reached new highs due to two consecutive years of frost in Brazil, half a world away. Further complications arose in the local management effort when (3) national government planners unilaterally pursued “rational” actions from their comfortable air-conditioned offices in the capital city, miles away. With a stroke of a pen, they greatly expanded the country’s protected areas. Communities that were at one moment living legally outside of the protected areas suddenly found themselves residing illegally within them. (4) Institutionally, all people residing within or otherwise cultivating protected forests areas were viewed as illegal residents that had to be removed by the government. However, not all local people were victims of boundary expansions. A large number intentionally entered the protected forests to achieve greater wealth through illegal coffee production. Still others entered the forest because they had nowhere else to go to provide for their families. And finally, (5) corruption by low-level local officials in a few places complicated matters further by directly and indirectly encouraging deforestation. This case study features three kinds of “illegal” residents: (1) victims of the dramatic change in national forest boundaries; (2) local opportunists, with their nonlocal allies, attempting to create wealth from coffee production in the short term; and (3) those landless people, searching for a means of subsistence. In this context, the following questions arise. Should each type of illegal farmers have been treated the same? How should the government have responded given the complexity and uncertainty of the situation? What would have been the most just and fair action to take? What would have been the most appropriate outcome given high population densities, scarce arable lands, and limited financial and administrative capacities of the government? And finally, what institutional arrangements would have been the most effective in managing the protected forests? As we shall see, there have been some dramatic political changes in Indonesia since this case study took place that may address these questions. REVIEW OF THE REGION AND STUDY SITE The archipelago nation of Indonesia straddles the equator separating the Pacific from the Indian Ocean. The country stretches from the Malaysian Peninsula in the west to the Australian continent in the east. It is three thousand miles long consisting of more than seventeen thousand islands with hundreds of languages and cultures. Indonesia is the fourth most populated country in the world with some 204 million citizens in 1998 (World Bank 2000). 60 STEVEN R. BRECHIN Until the Asian economic and financial crises that began in the late 1990s, Indonesia, like many of the other Asian countries, was experiencing a booming economy with high rates of growth and rapid economic development. Per capita annual income in 1991, was US$592. By 1993, just two years later, this figure had jumped to US$740 (WRI 1996). As in other rapidly developing regions, the pace of growth and change was much slower in outlying rural areas. However, by the mid-1980s, an important new economic opportunity arose in South Sumatra. South Sumatra is a vast province on the large outer island of...