While we were in Indonesia, we had several conversations with groups interested in preserving and extending the country’s unmatched old growth forests. Indonesia has almost a million square kilometers of dense forest, which also houses many kinds of fauna, as well as rare flora, many of which can only be discovered in these biodiversity hotspots.
These forests are under threat from extractive industries like mining, logging and plantation agriculture. But they are frequently also threatened by the very communities who have their lives and livelihood in the shadow of the forest. While these communities may sometimes still be hunter-gatherers, they have increasingly turned to agriculture and they have carved their farmlands out of the cinders of forest lands they have intentionally burned. In the Southwest forested region of the island of Bali, for instance, we encounter a local practice known as ngawen, which means to place a sign or mark of ownership upon the land. This involves planting crops like vanilla, banana or local flowers within the forest lands to signal private claims that can later be given the force of law. On the other hand, if the forest is to be protected, these same forest adjacent communities will be its closest and most powerful protectors, while also possibly benefitting the most from the forest’s preservation. The allocation of forest lands to community stewardship is one possible route, and this has been attempted in Bali, as well as in several other provinces of the country.
A more sophisticated approach, perhaps, would be to try and understand the local practices of privatization through ngawen or otherwise, and to explore ways in which those claims can be transformed into collective stewardship which nevertheless gives economic and food security to the individual families that make up the larger tribal group adjacent to the forest. We had exploratory conversations along these lines with Yayasan Plan International Indonesia.
We thought about leveraging their existing youth ambassadors as climate activists for community engagement and sustenance as one path forward. We would also need an actionable plan for community management of forest resources so as to ensure that the preservation of the forest is also economically valuable for the community as a whole.
Resolving complex challenges - Underperformance / Stagnation / Crisis & Distress at Linea
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