Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Mindy Kinnard: I hope you guys are enjoying your lunch. Happy Friday. Welcome to today’s sustainability series talk featuring our very own School of Sustainability Assistant Director Candice Carr Kelman. Our next Sustainability Series speaker will be on Tuesday, October 2nd at 11:30 a.m. also here in this room. We will be featuring Peter Bike, who is the director and producer of the movie Carbon Nation. Peter will be giving a talk on clean energy and energy efficiency, so please go to our website to RSVP for that event as well as all of the other great events we have coming up.

Now, to introduce our speaker, Dr. Carr Kelman studies policy dimensions of sustainability issues such as how to manage the tradeoffs and foster synergies between biodiversity conservation and human development. She has studied integrated conservation and development projects in Indonesia and national parks, the global trade in electric wastes and the regulation of electric utilities in the U.S. Her current research involves analyzing how the solar energy industry is handling the electronic waste issue. Two major themes in Dr. Carr Kelman’s research are the complex relationship between environment and development and the role of governance policy and institutions in creating more resilient socio-ecological systems. She has taught courses on environmental politics, corporate responsibility and green business.

Today we’re excited to welcome Candice Kelman.

Candice Carr Kelman: Thanks. Well, thank you for the kind introduction, Mindy. Today I’m going to talk about what was my dissertation research at the University of California Irvine. These are—integrated conservation and development projects was the topic. I looked at two projects in East Kalimantan and two projects in Sumatra. Today I’ll only get into the projects in East Kalimantan because each one of these was a case study, and so it was very rich and really you can’t talk about all four of them at once. It’s just too much. The conclusions that I will discuss are common to all four of the projects that I looked at.

It was sort of a misadventures in conservation and development because these projects are sort of an experiment in a way, and so I’d like to talk about that a little bit first, a little bit about the history of the debate. There was a debate, I think it’s ongoing, it’s been worse than it is now, I think, but there’s this debate about people versus parks. On one hand you have the concern about what effects people are having on our wilderness areas, on national parks in particular, but in general on nature. What effect are we as humans having on nature? On the other side you have kind of what effects are parks having on people, so the designation of parks and the existence of parks, what are the social and cultural ramifications of the existence, the designation and the maintenance of these parks.

This important book, I think, Conservation Refugees, by Mark Dowie in 2009, points out that this is the story of good guys versus good guys. Those who wish to protect nature and its beauty and those who would like to see the rights of people upheld, so it is a complex debate and that’s why I was drawn to it because it’s kind of difficult. There’s really a lot of tension there and yet so important. To me a lot of what we talk about across the spectrum in sustainability in the space of rain forests or wilderness, it’s what is that balance between nature and development or between conservation and development and how do you make that happen. This debate goes all the way back to—can anyone tell me who these folks are? Who’s this guy here on the left? Okay, who’s the guy on the right?

Audience Member 1: John Muir.

Candice Carr Kelman: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot. Way back in the mid-to-late 19th century this was a fierce debate not uncommon to some of the debates we see today, but in a bit of different context. As you are probably aware, John Muir is a champion of wilderness and wilderness preservation, and this is a reaction against industrialization, against the reach of human influence on the ecosystems that he was seeing. He really wanted to preserve nature in a pristine state away from the effects of man. Untrammeled nature was the goal.

Now, at first Pinchot and Muir were friends until they realized that they actually had quite different visions when it came to conservation. In that era conservation and conservation to Gifford Pinchot, who was the founding chief of the U.S. Forest Service in the Roosevelt administration at the time and was very much a prominent figure, his version of conservation was a way of using resources that did the most good for the greatest number of people for the longest time. Does that sound familiar to anyone? What does that sound like to you? Sure, it’s the national parks. To me it sounds like sustainable development. That’s what I hear a lot. When I hear the words sustainable development I think, gosh, we’re talking about the most good for the most people for the longest amount of time.

Now, Muir said that’s very human focused. What about leaving nature for itself, but in actuality he was quite human focused himself because really what he wanted was those cathedrals of nature for the urban person to go enjoy, unspoiled nature. While he was a champion of wilderness there was ultimately that human enjoyment of it as the goal. They weren’t quite to deep ecology yet. The intrinsic value of nature was in its formative stages. That debate to some extent continues today, but I think it’s interesting to consider whether this debate is really—whether these opposites if you will are really all that dissimilar. When you consider that—well, what is left out of the picture that we usually see of Yosemite National Park?

Audience Member 2: People.

Candice Carr Kelman: Exactly. The Miwok Indians were removed from Yosemite, and we don’t really think about that much when we visit it. They address it to some extent there in their experience of the park if you go and look at the displays and everything, but usually we see the Ansel Adams portrayal of Yosemite, which is the poster child, where national parks began. There’s Ansel Adams up there taking famous shots, and it in some ways is very much a white man’s view of what the purpose of wilderness was at that time and conservation, what that was really for because there were people who were not considered in this process. This was a model that was then replicated around the world, so you see national parks starting to pop up throughout the 19th century and the 20th century. They were not always done in a way that even considered at all the existence of the native people, and if they did it was to remove them most of the time or say hey, this area is not going to be used as a game park or a game reserve.

I think the most extreme examples may be in Africa where the highlands of British East Africa, winter home for aristocrats. You have these drawings of a train, so you have development for conservation and this very colonial context in which this happened in Africa and many other parts of the world. You have the British domination. You have the continent of Africa, and some British colonial officers sort of hanging out. To this day you can go hunting in game reserves, but it’s definitely a continuing legacy for the practice, the implementation of conservation around the world really. I don’t think that this necessarily is what John Muir had in mind, but he himself was a product of colonization in the sense that he was an advocate for removing the Miwok from Yosemite. He was apparently repulsed by some of their practices and thought they should be taken away so that people could enjoy Yosemite in peace, so a product of his time. It’s hard to sometimes extract conservation from its colonial legacy, but we try. We try.

We would like to protect the biodiversity that exists, right? I mean, we can’t just say okay, well then can that idea. This is something—this is an ongoing evolving process, and so what we have now are projects that aim to consider people’s welfare in the practice of conservation, that aim to integrate development projects in conservation projects. You had the emergence of community based conservation projects and integrated conservation and development projects, which are very similar and sometimes just grouped together.

This is village of Long Mi Dong in Kayan Mentarang, which is one of the parks that I studied that we’ll get to in a moment. I want to first tell you what the larger questions were behind this research. I’m trying to get at how the practice of tropical biodiversity conservation can be socially just and meet its goals of species conservation, habitat conservation and learn what lessons there are here for the practice of sustainable development more broadly because I think that a lot of these lessons are not going to be specific to parks. My more specific research questions are what are the lasting impacts of these selected integrated and conservation projects and what are the lessons learned.

I chose four projects. I had a book about 25 different integrated conservation and development projects in Indonesia, and so I chose four different parks. Two are in East Kalimantan and two were in Sumatra, one up here and down here in Kerinci Seblat in southwestern Sumatra. These are the two I’ll focus on today, the parks of Kayan Mentarang and Kutai, a tiny little coastal park here, and Kayan Mentarang is the largest park on Bornea, which is the entire island.

This part, by the way, are the Malaysian provinces of Sarawak and Sabah, and that is the Sultanate of Brunei, a tiny little country right there. This is the Indonesian portion of Borneo, the British name for the whole island. This over here is looking at how threatened are these parks to illegal activities, so Kutai very threatened, Kayan Mentarang only a medium threat level.

I’ll start with Kayan Mentarang. It’s way up in the mountains there on the border as you can see, so over here is the Malaysian province of Sabah. You can see there are these borders drawn within the park there. Those are what are known as [foreign word]. They’re the different ethno linguistic areas where there are tribes within the park, so people have been living here for hundreds of years and have managed to keep this area a very forested area. As you saw in that photo of Long Mi Dong they do have rice fields. They have long houses and they have developed to a certain extent in the sense that they’re comfortable. They live there, but there are no roads going into the park from outside. There are several airfields now at this point along the way, but most of their transport is by river.

Here are the rivers that come into the park. That’s really the majority of the traffic in and out of the park is by boat. It’s very long. It takes days to get in there. It’s not easy access, but it’s very interesting. It’s an area that is considered fairly well protected. There were some threats from illegal logging, which have largely actually been curtailed at this point. These are just some of the carvings in the rocks. This is actually at a place where boats can pull up from the river. This just shows us the people connection to the place, and they’ve been there for a very long time and rather successfully.

They live relatively traditionally in the place that they are, but they are also aware of the modern things. There are cities around them on the coast, for example, that they may go to and buy packaged goods and that sort of thing. They do have some challenges with waste disposal and that sort of thing when they bring packaged goods back into the park. There are also trails that go over to the Malaysian side, and it’s actually much easier to buy packaged goods. It’s not quite such a long trek over to the Malaysian side of the border. They grow much of their own rice here, right here in their valley in Lon Peloets. This is in Kuang, which is a different area within the park. This is an example of travelling by boat up one of the rivers.

One of the things that was really interesting about this project and the reason that I chose to focus on this project is I wanted to learn more about how they did this. One of the lessons from Kayan Mentarang, I think, is that they really focused on governance. The beginning of the integrated conservation and development project was an anthropological research project that took about four years or so. It started in 1994, and it was several anthropologists, mostly from Rutgers University, but they were working with the World Wildlife Fund. They wanted to learn more about the people who lived here, or who live there, and the ways in which they manage their resources, and so they studied it for a long time.

In that process they got to know the people. Some of the anthropologists were not planning on staying there, but at least one and for a while several of them ended up staying and working with the people in a longer term project. One of them, Christina, is still there. She runs the World Wildlife Fund project that has been the ICDP. It is called the Kayan Mentarang Project, and it is mainly focused on working with the local people and really creating institutions for managing the land as a park.

At first people didn’t even know that they were living in a place that had been designated as a park. It had been recently designated when the anthropological project started, and people were shocked to find out that wait a second, the government says what about where we live because they weren’t even consulted or told. No one bothered to let them know about the legal status of their land, so they were initially reacting to that and saying, “No, we want to start a logging operation. We don’t want to listen to these rules from the government that really has never paid any attention to us or helped us.” They were not happy about it, and so it was World Wildlife Fund that worked with them and worked with the government in Jakarta to try to adjust the rules a little bit about what would be allowed in the park.

The designation that it was originally given didn’t even allow people to live in the park, not even realizing that people did live in the park or at least not seeming to care. They created a designation that said it’s okay for people to live here. It’s okay for people to fish and farm a little bit, but here are the parameters. Then they created an institution for the people to actually help manage the park, so co-management institution. They created the Fordham so the traditional people’s forum that is a place for people to come and meet and talk about the kinds of rules that they want to see and the kinds of interactions they want to have with the outside world, and so now that is an integral part of the management of Kayan Mentarang National Park. The people were consulted with respect and eventually they sort of bought into the idea that hey, there could be something in this for us. This could be helpful.

That was the idea of the integrated conservation and development project. That’s how that fits in there is well, Wildlife Fund said, “Yes, conservation is our goal. We also want to make sure that the people are supported and happy, so what do you want to see.” They worked with them to define some goals that were compatible with conservation.

One of the things—we were looking at these rice patties around Lon Peloets. Well, they grow an organic rice strain that they then sell locally, and apparently Sultan of Brunei is their biggest customer. It’s this unique strain of rice that is this organic, locally grown and they find that they can sell this for a higher price than your average rice on the market. They’re able to provide a unique good for that.

They also want to do more ecotourism. They would like to have people there kind of on their own terms and be able to educate them about how they live and of course, create some income for themselves to do that. Now, the challenge with both of these forms of development is access because they are very remote and there are not roads that go into the park, and if there were then we’d probably see a lot more impact to the park. They are transporting it by river and foot trail, and so far so good. It would be pretty difficult to scale that up though and getting people into the park and the advertising and working on all those issues has probably been their biggest obstacle with the eco-tourism part, really finding those ways to let people know that hey, this is something you can do. Getting a flight into the park is very difficult, so they would rather do the river trips and that sort of thing.

They have challenges, but they have a basis now for creating development that is both positive for the people and compatible with development because they worked with the people and they formed institutions that are multi-scaler. Now, what I mean by that is from the local to mid-ranges they work with NGOs laterally to other organizations that are local, and they also work with local governments and regional governments and then the federal government in the form of the Ministry of Forestry. That’s what I mean by multi-scaler. It’s these different scales of governance including the local. The local is perhaps the most important piece when it comes to that integration and creating institutions that could work for local people.

The other piece that I think is really key when talking about Kayan Mentarang is that long-term commitment on the part of WWF, much easier to say than W-W-F. WWF is how you say it in Indonesian, so that long-term commitment, they’ve been there since ’94, and the people think of them as the people that they work with. Those are the conservation people that we work with. They’re the people that helped us get that respect from the government and get this co-management institution off the ground. They’re helping us with development, so it’s a partnership. It’s not a project in the sense it is a project, but it’s a really long-term project. They’ve gone through multiple stages of funding because Christina and her team will go through and—okay, maybe we can get funding from the World Bank. Maybe we can get funding from Duneda. Maybe we can funding from whoever they can that can really give the scale that they need to be able to really work with the people and get the type of buy-in that they need from Jakarta.

Not to be overlooked the importance of social science research in this project, that anthropological project that was long-term made a big difference for understanding the people. They did a lot of community mapping, looking at how people understand and work with and use the land around them. That was a key piece of this. There are also tradeoffs when it comes to conservation and development. It’s not easy for them to get their product to market or get people into their area because of the challenges with access because they’re very remote. There are some tradeoffs there, but they’re not in conflict right now. They’re just working it out together, so I think that’s the key difference. Welcome to—sorry, do you have a question?

Audience Member 3: Yeah, when you talk about the multi-scaler governance, what does that look like on the local level? Who represents them and how often do they have meetings? Is it kind of a government structure like our government that we think about? How is it insured that they get heard?

Candice Carr Kelman: Right, it’s representative. It’s a community council. They’re elected by their own tribes, and then they represent those. They actually meet at the WWF office in Malinow, which is the closest city. They also have meetings in the park, but when it comes to interfacing with local government they’ll come to Malinow and meet with them.

Now, funny enough, there was only a national park office built in 2008. They didn’t even have a park office before then. It didn’t exist, so that level of involvement from Jakarta wasn’t there until you had these institutions happening from the partnership between WWF and the local people. They did the best that they could to make sure that it was perfectly acceptable to locals and democratic. Does that answer your question? Okay, great.

Okay, I’m going to move on to Kutai. Kutai is that coastal park that’s very small. Do you see any trees? [Laughter] This is the challenge right now as it stands in Kutai National Park. This sign says you are in a protected national park nature protection area. You are not allowed to cut trees, burn, settle here or destroy the forest, but sadly all those things are tolerated. This is a banana tree. People have been planting these things. They’ve been cutting down the trees that were there, so there are a lot of challenges. It’s a small park, but there’s an Indonesian saying about the park, [foreign words]. It’s small, but it’s there. [Laughter] I think that saying applies more widely as sort of an Indonesian saying, but it’s very true for Kutai because this is some of the biodiversity that they have.

There is an amazing diversity of biodiversity within the park because there are a number of ecosystem types that are covered in the park. There’s a coastal ecosystem with mangroves, and then there are a number of different types of forest that extend into the park. There’s a hilly area, a grasslands area, so these are just some. The Tarsierp is always one of my favorites. [foreign name] we have—it’s one of the orangutan reserves and just really unique plant life. This one is only found in Kutai, so there’s a lot of biodiversity in this small area. It’s an area that is boxed in.

Really quickly I’m just going to go to this, and then I’ll come back to that other picture. This is a map of the park, and these dots are industries. These are not all of the industries, but they are industries that are involved in helping trying to protect the park at this point. We have logging, palm plantations and fertilizer. Pertamina is the nationally owned oil company, coal mining, Kaltim Prima Coal. There are natural gas production and fertilizer and extractive industries. They’re kind of boxed in because all of these over here are also forestry projects or concessions, so they’ve been limited in terms of the biodiversity and where it can go. They’re here, and they can’t go out there because it’s not forested anymore, at least not with the native forests. That’s a challenge, and people have settled all along the coast of the park since the 1970s.

You had settlers escaping political turbulence in Sulawesi, and some of them came to seek their fortune on the untrammeled coast of Borneo. They settled in small enclaves starting in the 70s, through the 80s, and then some trickled in later on too. They were quite limited and small for a long time. Now, this is your average settlement along the roadside and this is just constant the whole way through on the road through the park. People have built houses, and no one has done anything about it. This is the road by the way. This road comes through like that. It’s the Trans-Kalimantan Highway.

It’s interesting, you see the settlements are really like right along the road for the most part. The settlements are these yellow areas and there are some in here too. These are proposed settlement areas, so there have been a lot of debates about how to handle this situation. It was a protected area before people started moving in, but people started coming and no one did anything about it. Then it became designated as a park and still there was debate about well, do we let the people stay. They’re really not bugging anyone. They have some farming areas. They did a lot of fish farming where they would destroy mangroves, so that was a little disruptive.

The Ministry of Forestry, local officials, rangers and stuff, at that point they said okay, like could you not like destroy the mangroves. Maybe you can do something else, and so in many of those settlements they stopped. They said, “Okay, we’re not going to destroy that further. We’ll listen to you because we don’t want to get kicked out of here. We know it’s now designated as a park and we’d really like to stay, so we’ll be nice.” That was fine, but they didn’t really work with the local people.

When ICDP started it was a project of some U.N. organizations and they came together with the companies. They first engaged these companies that are these red dots here and said we want to do something to preserve this tropical forest heritage here. It’s considered world forest heritage, world heritage site, so they said well, okay, what can we do? They formed something called Mitra, which roughly translates to Friends of Kutai National Park.

With these companies in partnership with the funding from these U.N. agencies they gave more funding to the park officials to make sure that they were able to be well equipped because that was one of the problems they said they faced when they were asked why are you not enforcing the rules with the park. They said well, we don’t have enough resources. We don’t really have the vehicles and that sort of thing, so they said okay, we’ll help buy the equipment that’s needed for the park, and then maybe we’ll form some kind of group to provide livelihood alternatives for people.

They worked with these companies to create some NGOs and they funded these NGOs to provide alternative livelihoods for people, and people were able to start their own businesses. They were able to then have an income because maybe they’re making shrimp crackers or having some kind of a fish raising operation in a more sustainable way. They have some that were not as resource based, some were a little more resource based, but they were giving them something that they could do that wasn’t logging or destroying the mangroves and these sorts of activities. They provided these incentives essentially, and the assumption was okay, if we provide people with alternative livelihoods then they won’t do the things that we don’t want them to do. They won’t cut trees and build lots of houses and destroy the park and that sort of thing.

It has helped to raise the standard of living for people who live in the park, but they’re seeing more and more cars, more and more motorcycles, more and more of the types of resource extraction that they didn’t want to happen and no enforcement on the part of the local rangers. The local rangers are just freaked out because they go out to try to enforce and it’s ten to one and other people have just as many weapons as they do perchance, and they are just not interested in trying to enforce. Many rangers have been beat up, so they don’t have the institutional backing to go and enforce the rules because there is no support for conservation from local governments because this ICDP didn’t go and make any institutional arrangements with the local governments. They didn’t try to create a buy-in around conservation with the local people. They didn’t work with them. They didn’t create any local institutions other than Mitra which is with these companies, and now Mitra is kind of stuck.

They’re saying okay, we’ve created these alternative livelihood plans and opportunities and those seem to be working okay, but we’re getting a lot of criticism because the park is not quite what it used to be. This is typical. It looks like this all the way through the park. It used to be dipterocarps right up to the sides of the road. Orangutans could swing across from one tree to the other, and this is even just maybe eight, six years ago or so. You could actually see—it was forested even though there was a road coming through there. There have been several waves of destruction that have happened. I think it’s an ongoing story. No one is completely sure exactly what has happened, and we need more research to understand exactly what has occurred there, but there’s an idea of some of the things that have played into it.

I talked about all the resources around the park and the companies that are making up Mitra are companies that have developed those resources, but people know there’s a lot more coal under that park that isn’t being mined, and there’s a lot more oil under that park too that’s also not being mined. It’s there and local governments have—they see the possibility for that. They don’t have many incentives to support conservation right now. They see more incentives to exploit resources, and so the local people are kind of in the same boat. They don’t see a lot of reasons to support the existence of the park in many cases.

Mitra then is conflicted and has this challenge, so they have lots of kind of select marketing and they sponsor foot races through the park to try to get people’s enthusiasm up. “Look, isn’t it pretty? Look, we have a park,” but it’s kind of hollow, empty, because the political wheel is not there to support the existence of the park. There have been these waves of destruction and you wouldn’t have a partimini gas station in a national park without some kind of government support on some level, so the institutional support is not there. Electrification, also provided by companies and governments, so this is not exactly in line with the conservation goals of the park, but it really is in line with providing people with what they want and need.

I think one of the biggest lessons from Kutai is that incentives are great, but they’re not enough. It’s inadequate. It really needs some kind of rule enforcement. You need somebody saying okay, these are the rules and this is what we’re going to do. Now, that doesn’t have to be a top down affair. That can be people policing themselves because they really agree and buy into it, and really what is missing here is that multi-scaler institutional commitment. You have some rules that were created by somebody in Jakarta, but there’s no buy-in locally from government, from local people and even to some extent from the companies that are doing something quite different than conservation all around the park even though they have Mitra and support financially from some economic development activities.

The road has also had an effect on the existence of—or the waves of encroachment. The fact that there’s a road there gives very easy access, so this is one of the things to consider as well. There’s no buffer zone around the park. It’s surrounded by industry, and there’s a road going right through it, so access is a lot easier. I don’t think it really explains the problem. I think the problem is much more institutional in nature, and so it’s interesting to look at the outcomes comparing the two different ICDPs, conservation outcomes, economic development outcomes and governance outcomes.

With Kayan Mentarang I think it’s safe to say the conservation outcomes are good. They have co-management and this multi-scaler governance that has created a way to conserve with each other. There’s not conflict around it, and the park is not impacted by the development and the people living there. In Kutai the conservation outcomes are quite unacceptable. There’s a lack of rule enforcement, and it’s really created a chaotic situation in the park where you have people just burning land claiming an area. That’s how they do it. They just burn it and say okay, that’s mine now. It’s basically speculation for the mineral resources underneath the land there.

In terms of economic development outcomes, providing something for the people, in Kayan Mentarang it is moving forward slowly after these years of institution building. They have some solid foundations on which to start more ecotourism ventures and that sort of thing in partnership with the locals. In Kutai all of those economic development offerings that were created by various NGOs funded by Mitra are also now impacted by the lack of good governance.

I talked to some of the people who run some of those NGOs and they really want to see a resolution to the chaos that is there because they find that it’s very threatening to the mission of their work, trying to raise a standard of living for people, trying to give people a sense of independence and a livelihood that is sustainable. There is a pervasive sense of uneasiness because no one ever knows exactly what’s going to happen with the park. It goes back and forth and local governments will say, “Let’s abolish the park entirely,” and the federal from Jakarta says, “No, we’re not doing that. There’s no precedent. That’s not happening. You have two choices, and now we have to decide if we’re going to kick everyone out or create enclaves.”

They’ve known from the beginning this would be a very difficult choice either way because if you kick everyone out that’s not exactly just, and especially the progress that Indonesia has made to being a more democratic nation is really positive in many ways. They’ve moved away from authoritarianism, and they’ve moved away from a very sort of pliantalistic method of doing things. There’s still some of that left, but where they’ve made the most progress is in the rights of people. It would be going back on that a bit to just kind of kick everyone out and say there’s been too much destruction here.

There’s the enclave option as the only option left, and I’ll just go back quickly to that slide with the map on it. These are actually the enclaves. These yellow areas are the proposed enclaves. This is actually a proposal map that says okay, we could just make those areas human settlements. This is the forest area, and then this is the core area. This is supposed to be forest. This is largely impacted now because of the burning and the claims that have gone on, and then this is more intact forest.

The problem with the enclave idea is how do you know that people are in fact going to stay in those enclaves? How do you keep them from easily going into this forest area or even the core area and conducting illegal activities? If they have such a problem with law enforcement now why would it change? What institutionally has changed to have that shift from a free for all to yes, we’re going to stay here in our enclave because this is where we’re allowed to be even though the resources that they may want to access are further into the park. This enclave option is not necessarily satisfactory. None of the options they have are all that great looking right now. This has been a debate for 20 years now, and it’s continuing to be destroyed while there’s sort of a lack of action.

These NGOs are also feeling that sense of urgency to make a decision because they don’t know if they’re getting kicked out, if their people are feeling that the enclave option is not a good option. No one really likes the enclave option for a variety of reasons, so the economic development is impacted by that lack of good governance.

In Kayan Mentarang the governance outcomes, I think, are exemplary. I think this could be used as a model for co-management for people and biodiversity being able to work in harmony, especially having that social science study in the beginning to really learn from the people and not just going in and saying okay, we’re working with you, how’s it going, okay, here’s what you’re doing. Rather saying how do you do things, how do you use your land, so having that learning process and working with people I think serves as a great example.

In Kutai the governance outcomes are unsatisfactory and frankly embarrassing. The head of the park told me he’s embarrassed by what goes on. He feels stuck. There’s not much he can do. His hands are tied. His rangers won’t go out in the field. He doesn’t have support from local governments. If they go arrest someone they could put them into the court system, but they won’t be convicted because they don’t have the support in the judicial system to convict a local person of cutting down a tree. That’s a very difficult place to be as a law enforcement agency if you don’t have support from the judicial piece. There are some problems institutionally there. It’s ultimately unsatisfactory.

Overall conclusions from both of these case studies, and this is not a comparison of these case studies, it’s just sort of what comes out of both of them and also comes out of the other two in Sumatra as well is that institutions are more important than incentives, I think, for the maintenance of both biodiversity and social justice. Institutions, I think, have to come first. Incentives are great, but they don’t work if that’s all there is because why would somebody limit themselves to an alternative. People are opportunity maximizers. They will say yes, I’ll take that new job, but I’m still going to be able to go and hunt or cut a tree and make another few dollars there, so it’s not quite enough.

There have to be the proper institutions to support both the production of biodiversity and the well-being of the people and the offering of those incentives for them in the alternative livelihood program. For example, telling people that these things are allowed is not quite enough. By the way, you’re not allowed to cut trees. By the way, you’re not allowed to burn the forest just somehow isn’t working.

Audience Member 4: You at least say by the way.

Candice Carr Kelman: Right, might as well. [Laughter] No, it’s all very strict formal language, which it makes it even funnier somehow. It’s sad but true.

This is right along the road in Kutai. This area has obviously been destroyed, and this is the name of the person that did that. That’s a claim, basically. This person is saying, “I hear that someday we might mine this place, and this one is mine so I’m going to get the royalties because this area, I just claimed it,” me, Sally Wong. This is really interesting and I think deserves more study because this is almost a return to traditional land management, traditional institutions for how to claim land. This is not within the modern way of doing it in the Indonesian system, but this is in some areas a Dayak tradition and it’s become—okay, so one of the more recent waves has been Dayaks from other places. Dayak is a really general term for all the different tribes that exist in Borneo. There are hundreds of different ones, and sort of the really general rather Colonial term that was given to them. Oh, they’re all Dayaks.

Some of the more recent waves of speculation have been Dayaks from elsewhere in Borneo, and this is one. This is a return to a different type of land management institution because, by the way, as an aside in the 80s and 90s we heard a lot of bad things about slash and burn because on a large scale it’s terrible, but in the Indonesian rainforest and perhaps others on a small scale it’s sustainable. Really if you’re not very many people there’s no way to farm in the rainforest without making a little room, and there was a lot of forest farming that would go on.

The soil is such that—so all the biodiversity in the rainforest, all of the richness in the ecosystem is above the ground. The soil is not very rich. In a temperate forest there’s a lot of richness in the soil. In a tropical rainforest it’s all cycling above the ground, so when you burn it down all those nutrients go into the soil, and you can farm it for a few years and you can get something out of it, but after that not much so you have to move on. You’ve farmed this area for a while, you move on and it regenerates in however long, 50 years maybe or maybe less. In the tropics things cycle really fast, so as long as it’s a small area it can recover.

If it’s a huge area like that it’s a little tougher, so it’s sort of like what scale are we talking, what technology are we talking, but traditionally a slash and burn approach and a nomadic lifestyle is perfectly sustainable in Borneo. That’s just an aside. It’s a completely different case sort of to contrast with that method.

The institutions that exist are both cultural and then now working with those people and their culture to create something that can be used both to sustain their culture and their environment has been much more successful in Kayan Mentarang, so that was the first point. Incentives are not enough. The second is quite linked to that; it’s the other half of that piece.

Multi-scaler governance may be a promising approach for conservation organizations. Usually conservation organizations have done a project approach where they kind of come in and they say okay, we’re going to do conservation here. Now, it’s gotten much better in recent years in terms of trying to do community-based conservation, trying to work with people, but frequently that participation lacks authenticity. It is more of an okay, we got your comments, kind of like—do you know how like when federal agencies want your comments on their plans they put forth four options. They’re like okay, which one do you like and why, and then you send them all your comments and they do something, and you’re not sure if they took your thing into account or not. It can be like that sometimes in terms of how much participation are we talking about here. Are we talking about actual engagement, working with people, really putting their concerns into practice, or are we talking about taking their comments and getting back to them later.

Multi-scaler governance, I think, is—that’s the term that I’m using and there are perhaps different ways to put this. Cross scale institutions, perhaps, is one that I’ve heard, things that link both laterally and horizontally to various organizations and levels of power, of hierarchy, to really integrate all those concerns and how people actually work together on the same page. That includes planning, so you have your GIS people working together with the local groups and international organizations, the BINGOs, the big international NGOs, so that you have these longer-term relationships. You can even look at them as networks that are creating a stable context for conservation, so not just in a project approach.

Here’s one of the reasons you’d want to do that. These are some of the kids in—I think is in Kalabit that are benefitting from the linkage and the relationships that are formed. I really hope that Kutai with their incredible biodiversity will be able to find a solution. Perhaps it’s not too late to create some sort of multi-scaler institution in Kutai.

Third, I think the existence of the social science research makes a huge difference, and it’s still not integrated as much as it should be in the practice of conservation. It’s getting better, but usually conservation is seen as a biological endeavor where you have these certain criteria that need to be met and species that need to be saved. It’s now becoming clear that really we need more of a focus on how people interface with their environment, so a greater emphasis on social science research and project planning is needed. Like I said, it’s happening but it could be bolstered further. We need to know how people are using the place already, how they’re using it but also what they would like to see, what they do need and what they want for the future.

This is yet another burned area in Kutai that—it’s interesting because they did some social science research at the outset in Kutai. They had some anthropologists do—and actually interestingly I think they were also from Rutgers University. They did some studies, but they were sort of the secret kind of studies where they had someone who was from that ethnic group in Sulawesi coming to the settlements of the folks from Sulawesi and finding out more about what they do and how they live and that sort of thing. They did their—it’s ethnographic research that way, but it never really got used because what was presented made the picture so much more complex that it just sort of bewildered everyone further.

Do they want to be resettled? Yes, but here are the very nuanced reasons why they don’t. How old are their pepper plantations? They need to know that they can grow their peppers until the pepper plantation isn’t going to produce anymore, and then they might be willing to move on. If people had been worked with perhaps they would have been amenable to relocating if they were given something that they would have wanted to move to.

One of the options for relocating them was to a place where they had also—I don’t understand this at all. For some reason they had relocated some prostitutes out to this area and so no one wanted to go there. They’re all very devout Muslims. They have no interest in going out to a place that is even stereotyped as having some kind of a negative vibe that way. They were totally not interested unsurprisingly. If better thought had gone into this, better planning and consulting with people, maybe we wouldn’t have the state of Kutai as it is today.

I think it does bring up some interesting areas with regard to access to parks because clearly Kutai is easier to access and has no roadless areas or buffer zones. I don’t think this explains what the difference is obviously, but we must find ways of supporting these remote economies without roads. It’s a challenge because that is the one point of contention right now in Kayan Mentarang is that people do—some people, not everyone, would like to see roads. They don’t want to have to fly or take these really slow boats out of the park all the time. They would like to have a road, but all the ecological information we have points to that would be really damaging creating an incentive—not incentive, but an availability of logging for people. Roads just do that, whereas now they are much more likely to travel by river and perhaps this even helps sustain cultural traditions for them. That’s an evolving story as well.

Both of these parks are evolving stories, but Kayan Mentarang, I think, has a lot to offer as a case study both in terms of working with the people, but also the long-term commitment of that organization. That WWF is still there I think says a lot for the ability of those institutions to endure. That’s sort of another point to make because even though those corporations are around the park there was no local institution in Kutai that had any sort of longevity other than Mitra. There was no place for the people to come together and make decisions about how they were going to use resources, so a free for all. That’s what it looks like now.

I think this larger question is worth considering with regard to all of this. What forms of development are truly sustainable and compatible with a conservation context, so there are some examples from Kayan Mentarang of some things they’ve done, but I think it’s worth considering on a larger scale what sorts of development—what should we call development.

I think one of the things that we could consider is is improved governance a type of development. Well, I think that it is, so if that’s considered development then an integrated conservation and development project the first thing they would do, improve governance, you’re already working on development. It’s not necessarily just about economic development, but improved governance can also support a wide variety of purposes for that place. I think for that reason the concept of development should be considered in a more nuanced fashion by conservation organizations.

There’s often an assumption right away that development means economic development, and so yes, we want to provide for people, but really if we support their rights by providing a forum for them to organize and create institutions then perhaps that in itself is that type of development and perhaps the most important type of development.

That concludes my presentation on that today. I’d be happy to take your questions. [Applause]