Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia (review)

Dutch colonial rule, the question of weighting may occur. Touwen uses the terms "Pax Neederlandica" and "liberal period" without explanation (although in fairness these sorts of terms are used throughout the literature). Although the Ethical Policy may have been a departure from the time when Dutch governors like J. P. Coen used force and serfdom to construct an empire, in spite of notable reforms it was still a failure in many respects. For example, the majority of Indonesians still failed to gain access to education, which was reserved for a tiny élite. Indonesia may well still be suffering as a direct result of this outcome. Touwen explains that: "The Ethical Policy was an unprecedented phenomenon in the annals of the colonial administration" (p. 275), and prefers to see its failure to bring about economic development in the Outer Islands as due to "lack of funds rather than by a lack of good intentions" (p. 281). One has to concede that the Dutch empire was largely bankrupt during the "liberal" period, particularly after several decades of bitter warfare to subdue Aceh had drained the coffers. Therefore Pax Neederlandica was indeed much like Pax Romana — accept imperial law or else. Extremes in the Archipelago is a rich text, and well worth reading and retaining as a source book. It is not light reading, but this is precisely because it is gleaned from a mountain of archival material and other research — buttressed by a large number of useful graphs and tables. Touwen pens a value book about a difficult topic, and is ultimately convincing in his interpretation of the importance of the Outer Islands in late colonial Indonesia. ANTHONY L. SMITH Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Hawaii Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia. By Michael L. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 237. A concern for tropical deforestation in three Southeast Asian countries: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak) has led Ross to chronicle the policy failures of governments in these countries, drawing from new institutional economics and the theory of rent seeking to explain the paradox of resource booms and accompanying institutional breakdown. According to Ross, post-boom failures have arisen because politicians have engaged in a form of rent-seeking behaviour, introduced and appropriately termed by Ross as "rent seizing". Rent seizing is defined as effort by public officials to seek the right to allocate rents to others (p. 33). In seeking this right, institutions are reconfigured to favour and safeguard the interests of such rentseizing officials and politicians. In what may seem to be a complex intermingling of political economy issues involving corruption, cronyism, over-exploitation of natural resources, and weak governance, Ross's strength lies in linking timber windfall gains with rent-seizing activity and subsequent policy failures (systemic abuses of natural resource management in these countries). Ross argues that changes in the independent variable — windfall timber revenues due to a boom — have led to the causal mechanism of rent seizing by officials which in turn produced negative changes in me dependent variable (breakdown of forestry institutions and policies). Eight chapters set out the problem of natural resource mismanagement in a political economy context, to investigate this interesting and challenging topic in a detailed and very methodical manner. Chapter 1 introduces the issues pertinent for understanding timber booms and the attendant breakdown of forestry institutions and policies. The next chapter then lays out the scope of the problem of resource booms in a very general manner by examining resource booms in countries within and outside Southeast Asia. A workable definition of resource booms, and measurement of institutional performance are provided in this chapter. A resource boom is defined as a sharp financial gain arising from the export of an unprocessed commodity, while institutional performance is measured by the ability of the state to protect resource windfalls from pressures of ASEAN Economic Bulletin 305 Vol. 20, No. 3, December 2003 overharvesting. The theory of rent seizing is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. The methodological approach used for examining resource booms and policy failures is also laid out in this chapter, ending with a discussion of the case study format to be used...