3. Marco Conceptual
3.1. Referente a la cultura Aymara
Reformasi
The fall of the Soeharto-regime in 1998 was caused by a severe economic crisis and took away all remaining political support for the regime. However, this change in regime did not reduce the dominance of the sustainable development discourse in Indonesia. But in the post-Soeharto era, stories that hitherto had to be told low profile surfaced and gained dominance in the public debate. One such story was about the corruption, collusion and nepotism (In.korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme, generally referred to as KKN) conducted by the New Order regime. Solutions were generally framed in a reformist and democratic rhetoric which certainly also influenced the conservation policies.
15.1 POLICY
Thus, in 1999 the state policy (GBHN) and development plan (now called
Program pembangunan nasional, abbr.Propenas) pleaded for ‘just treatment for the whole population’ and equal rights regarding the use of natural resources,1
which calls to mind the concept of ‘pemerataan’ of the New Order discourse. However, contrary to ‘pemerataan’, the public discourse, due to an increasing lobby ofadatcommunities (see below), now specifically referred to the need to reconsider the rights of traditional communities. They were to be given a say in the management of natural resources. This change in approach resulted in the fact that swidden farmers or other actors were no longer singled out and named as the main or only target group for control or information pro- grammes.
A second change came in the approach, namely that the plan identified poverty as one important cause for the destruction and overexploitation of natural resources, including the plundering of forests and conservation areas. Though earlier plans implicitly made the same point by stating that the direct benefit of the forest for the people living in and around them might help increase their ‘feeling of responsibility’,2this plan had become easier on the
people by explaining their behaviour through causes outside themselves. However, this new approach changed nothing about the overall tendency to
1 Government of Indonesia 1999, p. IV11, X1-12, MPR 1999, p. 65.
146 Sustainable development discourse under Reformasi
blame ‘the people’ without further specification. Therefore the term could include all layers of the Indonesian society. Still, the policy documents create the impression that it is still primarily poor people living in and adjacent to the forests that are being held responsible for destruction and overexploita- tion.3
Many people in Indonesia interpreted the Reformasi rhetoric as a new possibility to legitimise their non-compliance with the existing legal regulations. They sawReformasias a well-deserved chance to better their economic situation after, as they would argue, the political elite had done so for the last 32 years. In press reports and government reactions, however, such people were por- trayed – just as in the past by the colonial, Sukarno and Soeharto govern- ments – as ‘wild occupants’ (In.perambah liar), ‘wild loggers’ (In.penebang liar), ‘wild miners’ (In. penambang liar) and ‘wild inhabitants or occupants’ (In.
pemukim liar).4
In addition, organised crime continued and increased its illegal logging operations in national parks and other places. Obviously such criminals kept themselves far from the public debate so it is unclear what kind of arguments they would have used to justify their operations. In any case, their behaviour reflected that they thought that the forests existed for exploitation and eco- nomic profit rather than for any other purpose.
The fact that the respect for national park boundaries nearly vanished from 1999 onwards led to many cries for more and better enforcement of the existing rules.5 This shift towards a renewed emphasis on law enforcement is also
reflected in macro-policies. In 1999, the programme dealing with conservation areas attached to the development-plan aimed at increasing and continuing the life-sustaining function of the forests. This is to be achieved through no further specified development (In.dibina dan dikembangkan).6Of this, only the
security aspect was dealt with in more detail. The programme urged to ‘imple- ment integrated forest security with the active participation of society and related agencies (In.instansi terkait), in co-ordination with the local security
3 It is interesting to note that there has been, just as in the international discourse, little
attention paid to the role of the consumers in other countries with their ever increasing demand for, among other products, tropical timber.
4 For instance,Banjarmasin Post13 November 2000, ‘Supremasi Hukum Lemah, Peti Marak.’,
Banjarmasin Post9 November 2000, ‘Lima Tahun Lagi Hutan Kalteng Habis.’,Kompas31
January 2001, ‘TN Kutai Sulit Diselamatkan’,Kompas13 October 2000, ‘Tragedi Kehancuran
Hutan Kaltim’.
5 For an overview see Wilshusen, et al. 2002. For Indonesia see, for instance,Newsgroup Pela
4 December 2000, ‘Deklarasi Senggigi’,Suara Pembaruan1 February 2001, ‘Emil Salim: Jangan
Gegabah Eksploitasi SDA; Keruskan Taman Nasional Makin Memprihatinkan’,Pikiran Rakyat
7 February 2001, ‘Kondisi Terumbu Karang Hampir 50 Persen Rusak, Habitat Ekosistem
Pesisir Makin Memprihatinkan’,Kompas19 June 2002, ‘Pelestarian Orangutan Di Indonesia
Terkendala Penegakan Hukum’.
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apparatus’.7 The policymakers have thus left the emphasis on establishing
and developing protected areas. Instead, the programme stated that activities had to help to, among other things, ‘protect conservation areas from destruc- tion caused by unbridled exploitation of their natural resources’.8However,
instead of providing some thoughts on how to achieve an ‘active participation of the society’ or ‘co-ordination with the local security apparatus’ the activities mentioned included the evaluation of policies for resource management, conservation and rehabilitation, and the introduction of negative incentives for resource exploitation in the form of tariffs. By doing so, the text again used a managerial approach: while indicating that securing the forests was perceived to be important and that the society, government agencies and the security apparatus should play some role in it, it failed to realize that implementing is not a technical matter alone but a highly political process.
Since the frequent reproduction of arguments in favour of law enforcement did not take away public criticism within and outside Indonesia another policy was revitalized: Social Forestry. At a conference in Bonn in 2003 the Secretary General of the Forestry Department, Wahjudi Wardono, described the essence of the policy as follows:
‘Social Forestry is associated with empowering people who live below the poverty line. This is especially true in remote rural areas, such as in and surrounding forests. By giving local communities the opportunity to manage their forests in a sustainable manner, the government is helping them to reduce address [sic!] some of their most urgent social problems.’9
Social Forestry was thus about empowering poor rural people to manage ‘their’ forests in a sustainable way. With this policy, the government tried to integrate several objectives: poverty reduction, sustainable forest management and ‘social justice’.10This was to be achieved by ‘defining an incentive for the community
to be involved’, by paying attention to ‘short-term income generation’, by making the operational plan ‘local’ and ‘site-specific’.11This policy integrated
all key words that dominated the public debate at the time: poverty reduction, empowerment, social justice, sustainable forest management, and local. The blending of sustainable development was still a very effective and for the government extremely useful concept. By shifting the attention towards social justice it could present it as new, and more responsive to the desires and needs of the people than former policies.
Another important conservation policy document of theReformasiperiod is the Indonesian Biodiversity Strategic and Action Plan (IBSAP) that the
7 Government of Indonesia 1999, p. 341.
8 Government of Indonesia 1999, p. X-6.
9 Ministry of Forestry 2003, p. 4.
10 Rusli 2003, p. 2. 11 Rusli 2003, p. 2.
148 Sustainable development discourse under Reformasi
Indonesian government finalized in 2003 as an update of the Biodiversity Action Plan. It was, again, an impressive document. In response to the 1993
BAP, which was still seen as ‘highly exclusive’ and ‘top-down’,12this time
the process had been more participative: it included a first national workshop; the distribution of about 200 questionnaires about respondents’ knowledge of biodiversity, the 1993 BAP, and their ‘opinion on how IBSAP should be formulated, what should be the contents, whether it would need a legal status, and whether they would subsequently useIBSAPdocuments as a reference’;13
six regional workshops; the preparation of technical reports through con- sultants; focus group discussions, the preparation of a draft document and a second national workshop.
Apart from being criticised for its exclusiveness the BAPhad also been rejected as being donor-driven, so this time theIBSAPwas not written in English but in Indonesian and only afterwards partly translated into English.
If one reads IBSAP carefully, it tried to effectuate a revitalization of the concept of sustainable development. The importance of this concept, according to the analysis inIBSAP, had been ‘disregarded’ and made way for pure ex- ploitation without paying attention to sustainability. Therefore,IBSAPidentified
as a ‘structural problem’ in the management of biodiversity in Indonesia ‘the development paradigm adopted by the government in the 1970-1990s era, which had not accommodated the importance of sustainable development of biodiversity. The government viewed biodiversity as valuable resources to be liquidated in order to earn foreign exchange, accelerate economic growth and diversify the economic base (Dauvergne in Sunderlin and Resosudarmo 1997). In other words, biodiversity utilization was based on the principle of total exploitation, quick exploitation and sale of raw materials. Therefore, the rate of biodiversity degradation and extinction has been increasing as the economy grows.’14
This emphasis on exploitation for economic growth was also made responsible for what among critics of the New Order had come to be known as ‘ego- sectoralism’:
‘The economic growth orientation has hampered a more integrated planning because each sector has to compete to earn foreign exchange fast. In practice, each sector will disregard policies or regulations of other sectors that may hamper them to achieve their economic growth target. This made inter-sectoral co-ordination in resource management a difficult process (MoE 2002).’15
12 Bappenas 2003, p. 2. 13 Bappenas 2003, p. 3-4. 14 Bappenas 2003, p. 64. 15 Bappenas 2003, p. 64.
Chapter 15 149
Seeing sectoralism as a problem directly pointed towards the well-known solutions of integration and co-ordination, which, however, appeared difficult to realize.16Therefore
IBSAPalso proposed a new concept as a major strategy: ‘mainstreaming’. This it defined as taking biodiversity – and thus in this case not the ‘environment’ as in the jargon of the 1970s – into account in ‘all de- cisions relating to development’17and as
‘developing a national policy and legal framework that also incorporates the provisions in relevant international conventions […] followed by and incorporated in the operational procedures by all levels of regional government in the form of regional regulation and technical guidelines […].’18
To do so, several new institutions were being proposed, including a national council on sustainable development (In. dewan nasional pembangunan yang berkelanjutan), which had been proposed at an international level atUNCED
in 1992. Such a council has also been advocated by a prominent Indonesian environmental lawyer and activist, Mas Achmad Santosa. In his words, such a council was badly needed since ‘there was a misperception of sustainable development which had been interpreted as only referring to environmental problems’.19
The IBSAP is also interesting for its attention to other implementation
matters. There is, for instance, the new issue of making the policy document legally binding. In his foreword, the Deputy of Natural Resources and Environ- ment of the Ministry for the Environment, Dedi M. Masykur Riyadi, made an interesting remark that suggests how the bureaucracy and other actors value policy documents:
‘To have a legitimate and effective implementation ofIBSAP, it is possible to make this document legally binding in the form of law (Undang-Undang) or other types of legal documents.’20
The official in Samarinda quoted in the introduction would have put it like this: it is a nice document that has cost a lot of effort and energy. Now it is finished. But it is nothing more than a policy document that will be stored on a pile or on a book shelf. And yet, although many people in Indonesia share
16 See Bedner & Niessen 2003 on the issue of harmonization, co-ordination and integration in Indonesian environmental and sectoral law.
17 Bappenas 2003, p. 103. 18 Bappenas 2003, p. 83-84.
19 Media Indonesia Online7 October 2004, ‘Perlu Ada Menko Pembangunan Berkelanjutan Dalam Pemerintahan SBY dan JK’. Until now this council has not been formed due to the resistance of especially the Mining and Forestry Departments. They feared that it would make KLH more powerful and that it would reduce the importance of the whole cabinet (personal communication, Sudharto P. Hadi, 26 September 2008).
150 Sustainable development discourse under Reformasi
these ambivalent feelings about the importance of policy documents, I do not think that all of them would draw the same conclusion, i.e. that making it legally binding would make people take it more seriously. After all, this conclusion reflects a kind of trust in the strength of legally binding documents that I did not encounter among people involved in the implementation (see partIV).
Other strategies for implementation mentioned were capacity building through ‘dissemination of various laws and regulations, concepts and methods, knowledge and technology as well as information on the sustainable manage- ment, rehabilitation and conservation of biodiversity’; decentralisation through providing ‘space to formulate and implement local biodiversity action plans’; participation and movement, i.e. ‘create a movement for national biodiversity management’ by among others prioritizing the involvement of communities, ‘learning’ and ‘genuine implementation’; co-ordination and implementation, i.e. every government agency ‘needs to take follow up measures by formulating or revising (if already in existence) their respective strategic plans and budget allocation’; and monitoring and evaluation through Bappenas, sectoral govern- ment agencies, communities and the private sector.21
In sum, the policies influenced by the Reformasidiscourse were mainly characterised by keywords belonging to the human rights frame of sustainable development.IBSAPis special for its attention to matters of implementation.
15.2 LAW
TheReformasidiscourse was also institutionalised in law. Preparations for a new Forestry Act had begun in 1989 when President Soeharto had asked his new Minister of Forestry to ‘improve’ the 1967 Act. Silva et al. speculate that international criticism formed the catalyst for this request.22The same authors
describe how the first ten years of internal discussions led to a draft of merely ‘cosmetic’ changes but that even ‘many seniorMOFofficials’ kept this bill from being sent to Parliament since – in line with the Peluso and Vandergeest argument – they feared that other ministries would claim jurisdiction over denuded forestry land.23When in 1998 a major economic and political crisis
forced President Soeharto to step down, the World Bank, with its conditions for loans, gained influence.24The reform bill of 1998 ‘incorporated the World
Bank’s market-oriented policy recommendations and promoted community forestry’.25However, before handing the bill to the
DPR, controversies arose 21 Bappenas 2003, p. 83-85. 22 Silva, et al. 2002, p. 79. 23 Silva et al. 2002, p. 79-80. 24 Silva et al. p. 81. 25 Silva et al. 2002, p. 81.
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about the government’s commitment to community forestry and about a counter bill produced by the Forestry Department’s bureaucrats. The com- promise that was reached in 199926‘slanted’ towards the Ministry’s interests
by giving them significant say about the concession size.27
What is new in the act in terms of conservation is that it uses ‘conservation forest’ (In.hutan konservasi)28 as a new supra category for the old ‘reserve
forest’ (In.hutan suaka alam).29This new category covers the old strict and
wildlife reserves, the conservation areas introduced by theBCA, and hunting gardens.30Particularly important from the point of view of tribal groups is
that art. 8 (1) and (2) stipulate that the government can designate conservation, protection and production forest for a special objective, such as research and development, education and religion and culture. The management for these specially designated areas can be given toadatcommunities, institutions for research and education and social and religious institutions.31
One issue provoked criticism of mining companies: the act prohibited open pit mining in protection forests and did not make any exceptions for con- cessions granted prior to 1999.32Under serious pressure from these mining
companies, which stated that not changing this new rule would make investors turn their back on Indonesia, President Megawati signed a governmental replacement regulation (In.Peraturan Pemerintah Pengganti Undang-Undang, abbr. Perpu),33 which overruled the new Forestry Act.34On August 13thof
2004, Parliament enacted this regulation as law. Both the replacement regula- tion and the parliamentary enactment refer to legal certainty and the difficult position the old stipulation could create for the government in the face of international investment as the main arguments for this change.
Part V of the 1999 Forestry Act is entitled Forest Protection and Nature Conservation but only mentions the objective of conservation as ‘safeguarding forest, forest areas and their environment so that their protection, conservation and production functions are realised in an optimal and sustainable way’.35
Except for this it does not stipulate anything about conservation or refer to theBCA.
More generally, the 1999 Act attributes a bigger role to regional govern- ments,adatcommunities and society-at-large than theBCA. Article 60 (1), for
26 Act No. 41 of 1999 as amended by Act no. 19 of 2004.
27 Silva et al. 2002, p. 81-82. 28 Art. 6 (2) Act 41/1999. 29 Art. 3 (3) Act 5/1967. 30 Art. 7 Act 41/1999. 31 Art. 34 Act 41/1999.
32 Art. 38 (4); see on the contestedness of this issue Rosser et al. 2004. 33 Perpu 1 of 2004, signed on March 11, 2004.
34 Bachriadi 2004, p. 5. According to Prof. Sudharto P. Hadi, the government was afraid of being sued by the companies (personal communication, 26 September 2008).
152 Sustainable development discourse under Reformasi
instance, obliges the central and regional government to safeguard (In.penga- wasan) forests. Article 60 (2) states that ‘the society and or individuals parti- cipate (In.berperan serta) in this safeguarding’. The regional government plays an important role as it is authorised to determine in a regional regulation whether or not anadatcommunity still exists – after having heardadatlaw researchers, the local population, local adat leaders and other involved parties.36The section on participation gives the right to society to enjoy ‘en-
vironmental quality resulting from the forest’,37the right to obtain and pro-
vide information and to control the forest development,38and to obtain com-
pensation in case its access to the forest is removed as a consequence of forest classification.39 The Act even provides for the possibility of class action40
and a dispute resolution mechanism.41
In sum, the Forestry Act 1999 has incorporated a few basic concepts of the BCA, forms a compromise of many diverging interests, attributes as a
consequence a bigger role to the regional governments and society, is more precise in terms of rights and obligations, and even provides for conflict resolution mechanisms. In this it, far better than theBCA, acknowledges the