Weaving Partial Stories: More-than-human Entanglements and Environmental Governance Experiments in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

Different goals and assumptions enable and legitimise the ways that climate change is understood and governed through increasingly urgent, experimental, and heterogeneous interventions. We examine the ontological politics of ‘piloting’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) by weaving together stories from our ethnographic fieldwork in Central Suau, Papua New Guinea and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Weaving partial stories is a methodological technique to examine encounters and disputes over REDD+ activities that entangle land, livelihoods, people, non-human beings, sorcery, and carbon among other entities. We propose the term ethical distance to conceptualise and foreground how governance experimentation in REDD+ intersects with local lives in ways that can reproduce and reinscribe inequalities. By attending to more-than-human entanglements and partiality, we underscore ethical dilemmas and the need to slow down our reasoning in proposing solutions to climate change.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• ontological politics
• environmental governance
• Indonesia
• Papua New Guinea

Introduction

Global environmental and climate objectives are translated and implemented through diverse modalities of power, logics, materials, and discursive strategies. At regional and national scales covering tropical forests in Oceania and Southeast Asia, countries like Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Indonesia have been framed as ‘frontiers’ of climate change mitigation, where multiple interventions intersect with landscapes, livelihoods, and the lives of Indigenous and forest communities (Tehan et al. 2017). Internationally-funded forest conservation and climate mitigation efforts are situated within frontier resource extraction and a constellation of activities, actors, landscapes, histories, and ideologies (Li 2007).

Endorsed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), we approach Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) as a form of governance experimentation. While environmental governance experiments can in some circumstances foster learning and creative practices (Braun 2015), they often reinscribe dominant assumptions and solutions. When the design or logic of an intervention imposes fixed categories – for example, nature/culture, non-human/human, animate/inanimate (Blaser 2014) – this limits or forecloses reciprocal learning and engagement with ontological differences (Blaser 2013b; Di Giminiani & Haines 2020). These 'experiments' can reproduce patterns of environmental governance that universalise categories and erase particularities (Carrier & West 2009; West 2020). This then feeds the impetus for ‘governance experimentation’ that supposedly generates new possibilities, but in practice tends to reinforce inequalities and ethical dilemmas that we explore in this paper.

A large body of ethnographic research has highlighted power asymmetries and diverse local experiences that come into friction with the global framing of REDD+ and its legal norms and discourses (e.g. Miles 2021; Nantongo 2017; Pascoe 2018). Many authors have identified how REDD+ projects exacerbate social tensions (Milne et al. 2019) and how multi-level governance processes for translating REDD+ enrol diverse actors among extractive industries and competing land claims (Astuti & McGregor 2017; Eilenberg 2015; Lounela 2019; Sanders et al. 2019). Common threads of argument have focused on the oversimplification of REDD+ ‘models’ and policy persistence of REDD+ (Asiyanbi & Lund 2020; Asiyanbi & Massarella 2020; Massarella et al. 2018), the disconnect between global commitments and local interventions (Bull et al. 2018), and the repeated failure of such models to incorporate notions of justice (Myers et al. 2018). However, there has been limited engagement with the ethics and ontological politics of such projects – how these interventions generate new possibilities while at the same time limiting or foreclosing other options and alternatives (Mol 1999).

Existing REDD+ literature has explored messy and contingent efforts to translate global environmental and climate objectives at different scales (Pasgaard 2015; Ramcilovik-Suominen & Nathan 2020; Sanders et al. 2017). Building on the ideas of translation in this literature, we examine how the ‘piloting’ of projects brings together different goals and assumptions in ways that are riven with inequalities and give shape to uncertain environmental futures (Di Giminiani & Haines 2020; West 2020). Collaboratively reflecting on ethnographic fieldwork at different time intervals between 2013 and 2019, we pose ethical questions about ‘piloting’ REDD+ in the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project (CSRPP) in Milne Bay Province, PNG and the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) in Central Kalimantan Province, Indonesia. We ask: What kind of ethical dilemmas emerge from ‘piloting’ these projects? Through what modes of reasoning and intervention are ‘governance experiments’ performed? Ethically, what does it mean to ‘experiment’ with REDD+ and intervene in the lives of local and Indigenous peoples?

Experimenting with REDD+ 

REDD+ is governed through complex, heterogeneous, and experimental arrangements in developing countries (La Viña et al. 2016). In 2005, PNG and Costa Rica, on behalf of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, first proposed the idea of ‘Reducing Emissions from Deforestation’ (RED) to the UNFCCC, which was subsequently adopted and expanded to include forest degradation and co-benefits for biodiversity and local livelihoods. Early enthusiasm for ‘avoided deforestation’ as a relatively ‘fast’ and cost-effective (Stern 2006) way to mitigate climate change and halt tropical deforestation contributed to the formal inclusion of REDD+ at the 2007 Bali Conference of Parties (COP13). Following the 2015 Paris Agreement (COP21), REDD+ implementation has continued under the UN-REDD Agency, World Bank Forest Carbon Forestry Partnership (FCFP), and bilateral partnership agreements.

Since its inception, REDD+ has been described as a ‘frontier’ of climate law (Lyster 2009) and an experiment of transformative climate governance (Korhonen-Kurki et al. 2017). While many projects have been characterised as ‘pilots’ or ‘demonstration’ activities using donor funds, some ‘for-profit’ REDD+ projects have progressed to implementation under voluntary markets. However, the rapid scaling-up of local interventions has not been realised. While it was anticipated that REDD+ ‘pilots’ would be transformative and experimental, many authors challenged the economic policy arguments and assumptions that REDD+ would be easy to implement (Howes 2009) due to the political economy of tropical deforestation in developing countries (Corbera et al. 2010; Fry 2008; Humphreys 2008). Incremental, technical and short-term measures have been justified based on ‘lessons learned’ to inform future approaches (Jagger et al. 2009). An emphasis on testing, trialling, and learning lessons has positioned local people and environments as the experimental subjects (or ‘guinea pigs’) of short-term pilots (Sanders et al. 2017). Our focus on ethical implications foregrounds the ways that REDD+ experimentation intersects with local lives and ontological politics in PNG and Indonesia.

Piloting REDD+ in Papua New Guinea

PNG has played a prominent role in international negotiations at the UNFCCC since proposing the idea in 2005. The country was seen as an ideal site for REDD+ because it has the third-largest tract of intact tropical forest in the world; approximately two-thirds of the country is covered in forest. Almost all of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions are from land use activities driven by commercial logging and oil palm plantations, while most land is held under customary land tenure (Babon & Yansom Gowae 2013; Filer et al. 2000). As a pilot country for the UN-REDD Program and World Bank FCPF, these multilateral agencies have allocated funding to build the country’s capability to implement REDD+ . The Government of PNG has undertaken REDD+ ‘readiness’ activities, including the development of institutional frameworks, organisational capabilities, and demonstration activities (Filer 2015).

To date, the Climate Change and Development Authority (CCDA) has been established to coordinate REDD+ across sectors, while the PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA) undertakes implementation and monitoring (Bingeding 2014). A national REDD+ strategy, safeguards, an investment plan to facilitate results-based payments and activities towards a national forest monitoring system have also been developed. Whilst the institutional arrangements are in place, the national REDD+ strategy is yet to be fully implemented and national policies have been critiqued for failing to consider the potential implications of REDD+ for Indigenous and forest communities (Babon 2014). Although the majority of the population live in rural areas and rely on subsistence agriculture (Bourke & Harwood 2009; Laurance et al. 2012), local people have had no formal role in REDD+ decision-making and limited input into the piloting of projects on their land (Cadman et al. 2016).

‘Testing’ and ‘demonstrating’ have been key elements of the national REDD+ programme in PNG including pilot projects. In Milne Bay Province, covering the south-eastern tip of the mainland and island region, the Central Suau REDD+ Pilot Project (CSRPP) was one of PNG’s five original demonstration sites for REDD+ . The CSRPP was proposed in 2013 ‘to test a range of REDD project types’ (SPC/GIZ 2013: 11). The German aid agency in the Pacific (SPC/GIZ) was the main project proponent, working alongside the PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA). The pilot project initially covered 64,000 hectares of lowland forest, comprising 23 wards and an estimated population of 7,000 people (SPC/GIZ 2015). Originally, it was intended to become a pilot site for Reduced Impact Logging (RIL). As there were no established methods for ‘reduced impact’ logging in PNG as a basis for carbon accounting, the focus subsequently shifted to testing ‘whether emissions would occur beyond a reasonable doubt in the absence of carbon financing; in essence whether this particular project would generate emissions reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise’ (SPC/GIZ 2013: 14).

The project design documents describe the CSRPP as an ‘incubator of ideas and testing ground for monitoring and revenue distribution methods’ (SPC/GIZ 2013: 8). The ‘lessons learned from projects’ are intended to accelerate the ‘development of various national REDD components’, ‘along with helping to inform policy enactment and reform’ (SPC/GIZ 2013: 8). Piloting has involved various tests of land stratification (SPC/GIZ 2014) to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, including the trialling of procedures for maintaining and measuring carbon plots. While project verification was meant to begin in 2017, work on the CSRPP stalled due to lack of funding and staff resources. By 2022, the project had not reached the implementation stage and people in Suau remained confused about how it would operate and its potential impacts on their lives and land in the future.

We situate the CSRPP within the frontier context of colonisation and missionisation in Suau, which began in the early twentieth century (Armstrong 1922; Williams 1933). The colonial encounter in Suau was focused on the extraction of resources and labour; authorities introduced waged labour on rubber plantations and relocated villages to enable easier administration (Demian 2004; 2007). Missionisation involved processes of cultural alienation (Kaniku 1977) where the Church banned customary practices like mortuary feasts, traditional dancing, singing and drumming (Armstrong 1922; Williams 1933). Although the missionaries adopted the language from Suau Island itself, at least six mutually-intelligible Suau dialects (Cooper 1975) are spoken alongside English. As social and economic obligations shifted toward the Church, people in Suau moved away from traditional networks of reciprocity. For example, most clans no longer participate in the Kula Ring, a ceremonial gifting and exchange system in the Massim region (Demian 2006). People continue to rely on subsistence agriculture and fishing along the coast and uphold the matrilineal land tenure system, although missionisation and colonisation have influenced the gendered division of labour and the traditional authority of women to make decisions over land. While oil palm plantations and logging concessions in Eastern and Western Suau have brought promises of development, people often travel by sea due to limited road infrastructure. Central Suau remains geographically isolated from other parts of PNG. Similar to PNG, REDD+ projects in Indonesia unfold within local villages and continuing frontier processes nearby to extractive industries Figures 1–3.

Figure 1. Map of the CSRPP showing nearby oil palm concessions. Map by Author.

Figure 2. A village in Central Suau. Photo by Author.

Figure 3. Fishing along the coastline of Central Suau. Photo by Author.

Piloting REDD+ in Indonesia

Indonesia is a pilot country for REDD+ and has received significant international attention due to high greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation. Commercial logging under Suharto’s New Order regime accelerated after decentralisation in 1999 with the expansion of oil palm and mining concessions (Brookfield & Byron 1990; Resosudarmo 2004; Resosudarmo et al. 2014). REDD+ activities have concentrated on the ‘frontier’ islands of Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Papua, where carbon-rich tropical peatlands provide mitigation opportunities (Page et al. 2011).

In the lead up to COP13 in 2007, the Indonesian Forest-Climate Alliance (IFCA) initiated national policy processes for REDD+ . Similar to PNG, Indonesia has received funding under the UN-REDD Program and World Bank FCPF as well as development agencies and bilateral agreements. In 2010, Central Kalimantan was selected as the official REDD+ Pilot Province based on the Norwegian funding (Gallemore et al. 2014; Irawan et al. 2019; Sanders et al. 2017). A national REDD+ strategy was released in 2012, and a national REDD+ institution was established in 2013 but disbanded within two years (Korhonen-Kurki et al. 2017). Vast areas of land and forest are claimed by the state and occupied by corporations with limited recognition of customary land claims, and REDD+ progress within decentralised forest and land allocation policies has been slower than anticipated (Brockhaus et al. 2012; Korhonen-Kurki et al. 2017; Luttrell et al. 2014).

Central Kalimantan is one of five provinces in the former Dutch controlled part of Indonesian Borneo and sparsely inhabited compared to Java. In the southern peatlands, the Kalimantan Forests and Climate Partnership (KFCP) was first announced in 2007. The project encompassed 120,000 hectares of intact forest and degraded peatlands with an estimated population of 10,000 people living in village settlements along the Kapuas River. Following large-scale clearance and drainage canals in a previous failed state attempt to establish industrial rice production in the 1990s, illegal logging and oil palm expansion have exacerbated the severe peatland fires and land conflicts among the overlapping attempts of forest conservation and restoration of degraded peatlands (McCarthy 2013; Sanders et al. 2019). This is a difficult and contested location for an ambitious and experimental project like the KFCP.

Under a bilateral agreement, the Australian Government invested approximately AUD 40 million (Sanders et al. 2020). According to the project design documents, the KFCP was ‘intended to be a learning activity in which technical, scientific, and institutional innovations are tested, refined, and communicated to add to the body of REDD+ knowledge and experience’ (Indonesia Australia Partnership 2009: 2). The project involved ‘testing equitable and practicable payment mechanisms to channel financial payments’ into villages, building ‘institutional and technical readiness’ to implement REDD+, and testing, scaling up, and replicating greenhouse gas monitoring systems (Indonesia Australia Partnership 2009). The initial village consultations took longer than expected (Miles 2021; Mulyani & Jepson 2015). Criticisms of the KFCP in both Indonesia and Australia prompted an independent review (Barber et al. 2011). The Australian Government withdrew its support, and the KFCP ended in 2014. The following year, severe fires devastated the region while releasing millions of tonnes of greenhouse gasses and blanketing Southeast Asia (Astuti 2020).

Similar to the CSRPP, the KFCP is situated within the frontier context of trade, resettlement and colonisation (van Klinken 2006). The main ethnic group is Dayak Ngaju, but other Dayak groups are locally identified (Riwut 2007: 83). Banjarnese and other groups settled in Kapuas for trade in the early twentieth century, followed by landless Javanese and farmers from other parts of Indonesia through transmigration schemes. Dayak people engaged in pre- and colonial-era trade, but maintained relative independence from Dutch colonial rule due to mobility along rivers (Klokke & Mahin 2012; Kurniawan 2016; Riwut 2007). Dayak languages are spoken in local dialects as well as Indonesian language, while customary leadership is maintained alongside of state and village administrative structures. Many people have converted to Islam or Christianity. Religious practices are maintained alongside of formal religion and locally described as ‘Gama Helu’ or ‘Gama Ngaju’, whereas the term ‘Kaharingan’ is unified as a religion also referred to as Hindu Kaharingan (Schiller 1996). Subsistence agriculture continues to be a source of livelihoods, but traditional swidden has declined. The burning practices to open up land were adapted to peat ecologies that have been altered throughout successive interventions (Galudra et al. 2011; Goldstein et al. 2020; McCarthy 2013). This history within local villages is important to understand the frontier processes and ontological politics in which REDD+ is entangled Figures 4–6.

Figure 4. Map of the KFCP showing nearby oil palm concessions and conservation programmes. Map by Author.

Figure 5. A village in Kapuas. Photo by Author.

Figure 6. Everyday life along the Kapuas River. Photo by Author.

Ontological Politics, Ethics, and More-than-Human Entanglements

Ontological politics is visible at the points where different goals and assumptions are challenged through encounters and disputes over REDD+ that entangle land, livelihoods, people, non-human beings, sorcery, and carbon among other entities. Mol’s (1999; 2002; 2010) work on ontological politics underscores that if reality is multiple and performed, then struggles over the prevailing conditions of possibility are political. Ontological politics occurs when different assumptions about reality intersect and compete for primacy (Blaser 2010; see also Blaser 2013a; 2013b). Mol (1999: 79) grapples with ethical questions: Where are the options? What is at stake? Are there really options? How should we choose? Building on Mol’s questioning, Blaser (2014) asks: what is at stake in binary categorisations such as human/non-human, animate/inanimate, and nature/culture? In these questions, ethical dilemmas can arise when such binary categorisations are foregrounded over other ways of being and acting (Blaser 2009) and thereby close down other options. We see this, for example, in the REDD+ project design documents that enable and legitimise certain modes of intervention that intersect with local lives.

We situate our focus on ethics and ontological politics within recent work on multispecies justice and posthuman ethics of more-than-human relations (Bocci 2017; Celermajer et al. 2020; Scaramelli 2019). Extensive ethnographic research in Oceania and Southeast Asia (Chao 2018; 2022; Minnegal & Dwyer 2017; Tsing 2005; West 2006) disrupts and expands human-centred moral claims. Indigenous scholars have long questioned the imposition of universalising categories and conceptions of human agency (Todd 2016; Watts 2013). We engage with the work of Oceanic scholars like Hau’ofa (1994), Māhina (1992) and Nabobo-Baba (2008) who have complicated the boundaries imposed and reproduced in colonial framings of the ‘Pacific’, land, sea, and people. This work not only challenges colonial legacies, but also highlights the ethical dilemmas and historical injustices imbued in these manoeuvres (Davis & Todd 2017).

The term ‘more-than-human’ draws attention to the ways that people navigate interventions that pre-define the boundaries separating nature and culture (Braun 2008; Howe 2019; Stensrud 2016), as well as the boundaries around land (Jacka 2015; Weiner 2013). As Minnegal and Dwyer (2017: 252) explain through their ethnography with Kubo and Febi people in PNG, boundaries and relations are co-existing potentialities, but in certain situations people may choose to foreground either boundaries or relations. These lines of questioning have been extensively developed in anthropological engagement with ontological difference (Blaser 2014; Holbraad & Pedersen 2017; Todd 2016), but are not developed in ethnographic research on REDD+ . Following Gesing (2021: 1), we apply a more-than-human approach to look at the ontological politics of ‘piloting’ REDD+ . In this approach, the terms ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ become adjectives, highlighting processes of categorisation, rather than ‘people’ and ‘things’.

We specifically engage with more-than-human approaches to draw attention to the categorising of human/non-human (and similarly culture/nature) in ways that are not limited to a focus on human actors and include spirits, ancestors, forests, rocks, carbon, and other more-than-human entities. A more-than-human approach, we argue, encourages us to remain open to different ways of being and acting, and to call into question rigidly imposed distinctions, universalising categories, and boundaries that enable and legitimise certain types of intervention and forms of environmental governance (Pascoe et al. 2021; Stensrud 2016; Whatmore 2013; Whitaker 2020).

Weaving Partial Stories as a Methodology

We propose a methodological technique of ‘weaving partial stories’ to organise our ethnographic thinking and leave room for other interpretations (Yates Doerr 2019). Our emphasis on partiality, partial stories, and weaving, and not answering/resolving these questions tries to open up thinking, reflecting, and attending to ethical dilemmas and the ontological politics of ‘piloting’ REDD+ .

Our partial and retrospective stories (Winthereik & Verran 2012) emerged from collaboratively discussing and reflecting on our fieldnotes, observations, and interview transcripts from fieldwork in PNG and Indonesia. By weaving together small ‘vignettes’ or ‘fragments’ of interviews, we engage with ‘storytelling’¹ as an Indigenous methodology and form of knowledge transmission to guide relationships, accountability, and responsibility (Backhaus et al. 2020). Just as Haraway (2016: 14) explored how Navajo string games are a form of ‘continuous weaving’ and practice of storytelling – a making practice as well as an ontological performance – we pay attention to how stories weave different assumptions of reality. This fits with Strathern’s (1988; 2004) work on partial connections and ontological multiplicity based on her ethnography in PNG. Strathern’s method of comparison across difference provides a way to actively engage with Melanesian and other ontological assumptions on their own terms. Further, it is within the weaving of stories from our reflections that the salience of categories and relations becomes visible (Minnegal & Dwyer 2017).

This ‘weaving’ technique is different from ‘comparing’ between two cases insofar as we leave the stories incomplete. A possible disadvantage of this technique is that it limits our description of each project context. Across the REDD+ literature, there is a tendency to draw conclusions about why projects fail. To examine ontological politics and foreground ethical dilemmas that are not prominent in this existing literature, we weave ethnographic fragments as ‘partial stories’ from our fieldwork. In emphasising partiality, we do not attempt to draw conclusions and recognise the limitations of ethnographic understandings and our positionality as outsiders to the communities where we undertook fieldwork between 2013 and 2019.²

Ethical Relations and More-than-human Entanglements in Suau and Kapuas

Sitting together, a group of Dayak farmers in Indonesia explained the settlement of their village along the Kapuas River – they are the descendants of three families who travelled more than ten days upriver on a jukung (wooden canoe) to find land suitable for swidden and establishing gardens. They described their ancestors travelling inland to escape the constraints of Dutch colonial rule in Kuala Kapuas, today a district capital surrounded by oil palm plantations. In another story, they described the happy sound of the selehei bird that co-shapes relations among soil, food, plants, animals, and spirits:

If peteng mayat bird is there, we don’t use the land. Otherwise, it will be bad luck for us. We may face death. If pantis bird is in the land, our land won’t get burned because the rains will come, but that bird is a sign that our swidden will fail to have a satisfactory harvest. Selehei is black and red on the neck, it makes sound like laughing – cuit cuit cuit. This is the good bird. It has long tail looks like an arrow. This bird brings luck. If this bird is present in an area where we do fishing and swidden, we will get so much fish and harvest a lot of rice. You will feel happy to have selehei, and they always bring a happy sound. (April 2015)

Similarly, along the Suau coastline in PNG, local clans share origin stories of their movements over land, which are intimately connected with non-human and more-than-human beings. These origin stories are increasingly part of how people explain climate change and the world becoming less predictable (Pascoe et al. 2021). Listening to birds in Suau is a way of telling the time. There is a bird called kolobi, which people jokingly refer to as the ‘Harbour Master’, whose call signals a change in tide. Sitting with Reni, a mother of five who had married into a village in Suau, she explained:

Kolobi too used to cry, that bird’s name is kolobi. They cry and give us time. We don’t have time before; these things give us time… Some, they hear from the birds, you know. Birds give them signs, like debole saima [high tide] or margoon itiwah [low tide]. That bird [the ooh’ooh bird], when it cries, they know that it is asking for death. Somebody is very sick, and they are going to die very soon. He or she will die very soon. (September 2017)

In this partial story, continually negotiated relations among the environment, spirits, and people are central to life and death; ethical and material concerns are imbued in relations to land and livelihoods. As the climate changes and ongoing forms of resource extraction, including oil palm and commercial logging, expand in the region, these relations among the birds, people, and other beings do not always function in ways that are expected. ‘Now time doesn’t work out’, Reni laments (see also Pascoe et al. 2021).

In Suau, people retell and reproduce origin stories that emphasise the importance of following custom and negotiating relations between people and the environment. For example, an origin story of Tauhou describes a half-human, half-pig who travelled along the Suau coast and established the pig trading system that connects people and places. A local leader and businessman from Fife Bay, Arna, described the story of Tauhou in this way:

We look at Tauhou number one as an animal, as a pig; number two as a person or a spirit, a big spirit and it empowers into groups of people and becomes realities. So they all speak the same language and they call themselves as part of this because the spirit of Tauhou is passed onto different people in the way they receive and see Tauhou in the environment they belong to. (October 2017)

The origin story of Tauhou highlights the fluidity of boundaries as well as the importance of negotiating relations between human and non-human actors. These boundaries between human, non-human, and more-than-human – whether animals, plants, land, ancestors, spirits, or rocks – are not fixed; they are continually negotiated and enacted. Tani, a local mother, business owner and community leader, explained that if someone in Suau encounters a snake in an unexpected place – for example, inside their house or in a clear area of a food garden – then they may question whether this is an animal or sorcerer embodying a snake to send a message.

Custom also plays a role in establishing and stabilising these boundaries in Kapuas. In a village several hours boat ride from the district capital, an elderly man and Mantir (customary leader) described the importance asking permission from the spirits that live in the land:

In the past, we always conducted a small ceremony whenever we entered the forest. We offered some food, eggs, chicken, and so on, to the forest guardian. The purpose of that was to ask permission and to let the spirit in the forest know our activities. For example, when we went to the forest for harvesting latex or timber, we conducted a small ceremony beforehand. Also, if we wanted to conduct swidden agriculture, we had to do a ceremony first, as our ritual, to ask for permission of the inhabitants of the area. There is a spirit who lives in the land, and we have to ask for permission for conducting activity in the area. When we conducted ceremonies, the spirits would give a sign if they permitted us [to conduct swidden] or not. Usually, the sign is given in the rice that we use for the ceremony. We communicate with the spirit as well. If the spirit doesn’t allow us and we insist to conduct the activity in the area, we are highly likely to get problems, either the swidden will fail, or we will get sick, or other types of problems. Sometimes, the spirit can come to our dream when we’re sleeping. They can talk to the person and let the person know the condition, such as types of offering that he/she needs to fulfil. If the spirit doesn’t allow us to do activity in the area, they will explain the reason in your dreams. It took us seven days to prepare for the swidden, and after seven days, the spirit will communicate to us. (March 2015)

Opening land for swidden entails watching, listening, and negotiating relations among human and non-human beings, and extending to spirits and ancestors. Visions and knowledge can be received through dreaming (in Dayak language ‘(ma)nupi’) to navigate and define people’s relations to the others. Dreaming is the source and the beginning for most ancestors/elders to guide where, how, and why people should do things, such as deciding where to establish a new settlement, to do swidden, hunting or fishing, and what the requirements are for doing these activities. Often, this involves certain types of ceremonies that the ancestors/elders guided or agreed on. This knowledge and ceremonies are passed to children and must also be respected by the newcomers and/or dwellers in order to maintain their relations with all (in)visible people and things and beyond that live in the same space.

When sharing and discussing these partial stories, we here reflected on how the Mantir’s description of dreaming extended to spirits, trees, birds, and other non-humans (such as rice in the ceremony). The disruption to knowledge and ethical relations was closely entwined within resource extraction, labour, and economic relations. The village where the Mantir lives was one of the worst impacted by the failed attempt to establish industrial rice production in the 1990s and subsequent fires. Swidden is seldom practised. Young people periodically leave in search of plantation and mining work as well as educational opportunities. Describing the multiplication of land documents within oil palm negotiations, the Mantir explained that these documents were created from their former swidden area. He added:

Well, the practice in the past was different from today. We established swidden together with our friends. So, they could witness the land was ours. Today, you have to have the land document of ‘hitam di atas putih’ [‘black ink on a white page’ referring to a written agreement] to show that the land is yours. Today’s generation no longer remembers or practises the tradition of our ancestors. (March 2015)

Similarly, as palm monocultures and logging concessions expand along the Suau coast, these frontier processes are related to histories of colonisation, changing economic and environmental priorities, and shifts in global commodity markets. Carefully negotiated relations for ethical conduct toward the environment are being disrupted. ‘Being careless’ signified multiple disruptions, as Tani explained:

Before they have like leaders who… believe on custom. And they use those powers to control… the nature… Today, we are careless, we are just like living, not following the custom beliefs and all that – that also destroys the environment… Those were beliefs which people respect the environment and what is in it, like to keep it like intact or something. (June 2017)

Loss of environment and loss of custom were deeply intertwined in people’s memories and stories. Navigating, resisting, and strategising about livelihood options involved continuous processes of building and redefining of customary practices. Donald, a Dayak farmer from a village in Kapuas with social breakdowns and disputes over industrial-scale oil palm plantations, narrated his attempt to establish an oil palm smallholding. The convergence of government officials, investors, scientists, conservationists, activists, among others in his village, added confusion:

Our position is in-between; we are confused. We are afraid if there is no one giving us recommendation what to do – what steps that we need to take – because of the confusion we could take a step that might lead to damage in the future for us. (March 2014)

His village’s former swidden area was in the process of being converted into plantations, prompting him and his neighbours to search for land next to the KFCP reforestation site and within the adjoining state-zoned protected forest area to establish their own claim. We choose not to fill in the events that culminated in the KFCP withdrawing from Donald’s village. Instead, we wish to attend to the ethical implications within the frontier context and environmental histories.

In both Kapuas and Suau, people foregrounded negotiating relations as central to establishing and stabilising boundaries. These relations – the happy sound of the selehei bird in Kapuas and the warning cry of the kolobi in Suau – did not predefine the separation of land and forest from human sentience and agency. Weaving these partial stories, we observed that local sense of time and temporality were being disrupted by the speed of the changes. Birds no longer guide swidden cultivation in Kapuas, and the kolobi bird struggles to tell the time through the changing climate and tides in Suau. These bird stories are ethnographic fragments from our fieldwork: as outsiders, we were able to glimpse in these fragments the complexities of how people manoeuvre within frontier processes as well as the breakdown of chains of belonging.

Ontological Politics of Experimental Environmental Governance

Our entry point for examining the ontological politics of ‘piloting’ REDD+ came from our attempts to weave together stories about converging assumptions, including a story about tree ‘rubbish’ and sorcery. In Suau, after gaining consent over several days of community consultation, a REDD+ project team comprising international and national scientists and practitioners went to the forest to establish a test plot for the CSRPP. The team took samples of biomass to measure the carbon stored in the trees. A staff member at a government agency explained:

I was summoned by the landowners to walk ten kilometres to explain to them why we are doing that kind of activities. Because we are collecting the biomass, leaves and all those kind of things. That we did not explain to them… I had to go back, because in their custom, collecting rubbish is very offensive to them. If you collect somebody’s rubbish that means you are going to do something bad to them. (February 2017)

Both the CSRPP in Suau and the KFCP in Kapuas sought test methodologies of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV), including the measurement of carbon stored within trees and soil. An underlying assumption in establishing a carbon plot is that it is possible to bound – and therefore measure – the biomass in trees in a fixed way. When landowners saw the forestry team collecting ‘rubbish’ (leaf litter and soil), they assumed that this material would be used in the practice of sorcery. This is a common way that sorcery is performed in Suau, and people are careful of throwing their rubbish away in case it may be appropriated for magical means. As ‘rubbish’ embodies those who care for the trees, it can be weaponised by sorcerers against landowners. In this partial story, those attempting to measure the carbon stored in trees unintentionally caused offense and fear by detaching the trees from their social relations with people.

In Kapuas, those who participated in the KFCP’s reforestation trials were given the choice to select from local (endemic) tree species to trial approaches to peatland restoration. The seedlings were collected from intact forest in the northern section of the project site to be grown in village nurseries. The proximity of one of the trial sites to Donald’s attempted oil palm smallholding sparked fears that the reforestation might impose rules, restrict livelihood options, and exacerbate social breakdowns. It contributed to threats being made against project staff, a village hall being destroyed, and the KFCP’s withdrawal from this village.

Field staff explained that the dispute was about a small faction – a ‘tyranny of the minority over the majority’. In their explanation, the project’s withdrawal from Donald’s village was due to the competing environmental and economic rationalities. Donald offered a layered explanation. The dispute was partly about inadequate compensation from the project. It was partly about frustration over state claims to customary land. It was also about broken trust and disappointment over successive interventions. Accumulated feelings of anger and frustration contributed to the cessation of project activities in Donald’s village. In neighbouring villages, many of those who participated in the reforestation trials appreciated the income; particularly, women were able to grow the seedlings close to home whilst caring for children. But many struggled to understand why they were planting the seedlings:

We did the reforestation, but I couldn’t understand the logic. When we did the reforestation, we had to cut down all the trees in that area. Meanwhile, we could not tell whether the seedlings that we planted in that area will grow. I couldn’t understand it… if we want to protect the environment, why did we have to cut down the trees that grew big over there? And also, why we were never asked to take care of the trees that already grew, instead of planting the seedlings when we didn’t know whether the trees could grow there or not? (October 2013)

The seedlings were planted in orderly rows to enable measurement for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV). Without an identity or purpose, nor the resolution of nearby land disputes, the trees did not exist within negotiated relations that included the economic relations for planting oil palm, rubber, rattan, or fruit trees that would have enabled people to identify who should weed and care for the seedlings. For the scientists who identified the tree species for the purpose of peatland restoration, they had anticipated that blocking a large drainage canal from the failed rice project would restore hydrological functions, reduce fire risks, and enable the seedlings to grow to maturity. However, this canal blocking did not occur as planned and no funding was identified to maintain the trial sites. After the project ended, weeds competed for primacy, then peatland fires destroyed many of the seedlings along with people’s gardens and parts of the remaining forest. Those who had planted the seedlings expressed sadness that the trees were not cared for after planting. Their destruction in the 2015 fires became part of accumulated tragedies and environmental histories in which the logic of measuring carbon and trialling the payment mechanism had, in the project design, anticipated future benefits in the villages through carbon markets that did not eventuate.

Returning to Suau, another proposed conservation plot for the CSRPP was disputed by local landowners because of attempts to draw boundaries around land and trees. Gabu, a youth leader who accompanied the project team and witnessed the dispute, described:

We got the knife, we cut the marks of the trees, the sign of X. And then they were trying to what, make the GPS… how many kilometres down here and right about there and the square one, they were trying to mark the square block… So when they got the GPS around like this, there are some boundaries, I mean the [land] owners are not really sure… They got angry… They know their land and that is where they dispute. (March 2017)

Here, Gabu highlights that the practices of marking trees triggered the dispute. In this area, the ‘boundaries’ around land were not settled between different clans – meaning there was contestation over which clan’s land the conservation plot was situated on, with three different clans making claims to the site. Those involved in the dispute interrupted the project team’s attempt to bound their land; they sought to keep negotiations open and avoid introducing new types of relations that could heighten existing contestation. While people feared sorcery and land disputes, they also feared attempts to foreground boundaries and categories at the expense of relationships and negotiations.

Other fears and disputes were expressed within complicated and evolving relationships of ‘commodities’ – palm oil and carbon among other entities – to local lives and livelihoods. In Kapaus, Sarifan, an elderly Javanese man had originally joined the village through marriage to a local Dayak Kaharingan woman and embraced Dayak lifeways and customary practices throughout his life. Sitting with his wife, Sarifan described oil palm investors travelling to this village to enlist local supporters:

To some degree, [those interested in oil palm] are right, we cannot eat peatland. I remember when the KFCP came to this village, the oil palm investors also came to this village at the same time. The guy from hydrology from KFCP was also invited to the oil palm company’s meeting. The former Head of Village criticised what the KFCP guy said in that meeting, saying, ‘I’ve been trying hard to find investor for oil palm plantations to be meeting established in this village, but people want us to eat peatland instead’. (March 2015)

Customary practices, such as asking permission from the spirits in a ceremony, were incorporated into the KFCP’s reforestation trials in anticipation of the canal blocking. ‘Asking permission’ here facilitated the enactment of ‘carbon’ as a new commodity oriented to future markets. The ceremony involved efforts to respect customary (adat) practices within the REDD+ pilot, but the enactment of ‘carbon’ was hard for people to interpret (as a sort of bahasa langit or sky language). It differed from locally reciprocated and economic relations, including relations to food as sustaining life. People similarly observed that the oil palm fruit like ‘carbon’ could not be eaten. The palm trees were sometimes described as colonising land (cf. Chao 2018) such as by destroying and replacing the graves of ancestors. A Mantir (customary leader) in another village observed: ‘It is difficult to think ahead for our future. It is true that we will get a job from the company, but the impact is that our land will be colonised; we don’t have land left’. (November 2014)

In Suau, people’s fears about producing enough food and survival were linked to concerns about outsiders stealing land and air (‘carbon’ was understood as ‘air’). As Tani, who was involved in REDD+ awareness programmes, explained: ‘Every time you say [project proponents] are coming, they [village people] say “they are coming to steal our land; they are coming to give our land away”. Or, “they are coming and tricking us, bullshitting us”’. (June 2017). Gabu, who participated in some of the project meetings in the village, discussed these fears:

People were thinking that… these people might come here and they’ll like steal the land or something like that… Like maybe some of them think like the project was based on the carbon, that’s why people were a bit confused. They might get all the land, all the air, the oxygen of our whole logs or our whole area, area from here to Suau or from here down towards [Western Suau]. They were confusing this. They might come and get our good oxygen and they’ll go and market it overseas or in the European countries. (March 2017)

Some of the fears and disputes that emerged in ‘piloting’ these projects were related to the foregrounding of categories – bounding land and measuring carbon – which closed down negotiations around human, non-human, and more-than-human relations and agency. This ‘closing down’ is a key element of environmental governance experiments that are globally presented as novel and transformative, but were translated into incremental, technical and short-term measures within fluid and contested frontier landscapes.

Ethical Distance in Piloting REDD+ 

While ethnographic research on REDD+ has shown how globally-oriented design features can downplay the potential impacts on the lives of local people (Milne et al. 2019), little attention has been placed on the ethics and ontological politics of ‘piloting’ REDD+ . We propose the concept of ethical distance to understand the gaps or spaces between the converging assumptions and world-making practices in pilot and demonstration sites. Following Stensrud (2016), we understand that governance experimentation in REDD+ brings together differently performed realities that are continuously in the making, always emerging and precariously entangled with each other. In both the KFCP in Indonesia and the CSRPP in PNG, we observed that ‘piloting’ REDD+ implied a sequential movement: first, knowledge and ideas circulate downward from the global scale to ‘test’ methodologies, ‘trial’ instruments, and ‘pilot’ projects; and second, the ‘lessons’ circulate upward from the local scale to guide future policies and projects. This sequential movement increased the ethical distance between the worlds entangled in REDD+ experiments.

The global architecture, funding instruments, technologies, and so on, emerging from international climate negotiations, were geographically, culturally, linguistically, and ethically distant from negotiated relations (more-than-human entanglements) among people, birds, and other beings in Suau and Kapuas. Different goals and assumptions of donors, scientists, conservationists, among many others, to initiate REDD+ activities came into friction with differently performed realities. For example, the inscription of ‘peatland’ as ‘carbon’ in the KFCP meant that the commodity (carbon) could be measured, stored, sold, and profited from, but it remained ‘immeasurable and invisible by local means’ (Miles 2021: 15). Here, ethical distance refers both to the way these pilot projects tie together entities that are geographically, historically, and culturally removed from each other, and to the distant ‘centres’ of decision-making separating the donors, experts, and many others, from the pilot and demonstration sites. This ‘distance’, in which REDD+ experiments are ‘far away’ from those allocating funding and bringing their expertise, encircles the spatial imaginaries of resource frontiers that were relationally distant from their colonial centres (Blomley 2003; Prout & Howitt 2009; McCarthy 2013).

Ethical distance helps to describe the ways in which categories of land, carbon, and people were foregrounded as fixed and static in each project. Drawing on Minnegal and Dwyer’s (2017: 252) description of boundaries and relations from PNG, the methodologies and technologies being tested inscribed fixed boundaries between the human and non-human with respect to land and land use (see also Jacka 2015; Weiner 2013). When certain categories of ‘land’ or ‘forest’ are foregrounded at the expense of others, this can work to deny people the ability to negotiate relations in ways that stabilise boundaries. Thus, in stories about marking trees and the dispute caused by collecting ‘tree rubbish’ in Suau, people contested the imposition of boundaries through the methodologies and technologies being tested. In this dispute, we distinguish between boundaries that were assumed to be a priori such as related to carbon measurement, and those that emerged through continually negotiated relations, where the distinction between human and non-human sentience and agency is not pre-defined (Māhina 1992; Todd 2016; Watts 2013).

Reflecting on debates over radical alterity and emphasising the pragmatic and affective dimensions of ontological politics (Vigh & Sausdal 2014), we do not posit ‘local’ or ‘Indigenous’ as radically other than ‘Western’ or ‘global’ objectives and assumptions in these REDD+ projects. In other words, we do not artificially set up a binary between ‘local’ and ‘ethical’ environmental relations in relation to ‘externally imposed’ and ‘immoral’ projects (see also Scaramelli 2019). Instead, the concept of ethical distance helps to foreground how ethics may take different forms and imply different degrees of responsibility and care. This is not to say that distant ethical relations are inherently bad, or that ethical proximity is inherently good. Rather, we argue that careful attention to the disparities of climate change and environmental governance experiments is essential for understanding ethics as relational and situated in histories of colonisation and frontier resource extraction.

Conclusion

The ideas of experimentation and learning that we have explored with a focus on REDD+ are reflected in global environmental governance more broadly (Armeni 2015; Overdevest and Zeitlin 2014). These ideas extend to other areas from cities and urban climate experimentation (Kern 2019; Liu & Lo 2021) and climate adaptation strategies (Rocle et al. 2021; Warner et al. 2018) to calls for a transition from incremental to transformational adaptation in forest-related climate actions (Djoudi et al. 2022). A proliferation of frameworks and policy models can risk reinscribing dominant assumptions while proposing solutions that do not address the inequalities and histories that contribute to climate change (Braun 2015; Haraway et al. 2016; Tsing et al. 2017; West 2020). Indigenous scholars like Todd (2016) and Watts (2013) have drawn attention to how the affective, material, and embodied dimensions of ethics can help to slow down our reasoning, so that we are better able to recognise when what people say and do cannot – and should not – be assimilated into global environmental and climate objectives.

Proposing the concept of ethical distance, we have explored ethical dilemmas and ontological politics in misunderstandings and disputes in the CSRPP in PNG and the KFCP in Indonesia. From a Western ontological standpoint, it may appear strange that measuring carbon would constitute a threat. While a dispute about ‘land’ is not necessarily an ontological conflict (Blaser 2013a; 2013b), it may, in some instances, conceal struggles over the conditions of possibility, options, and alternatives. Within the REDD+ project designs, there was no way to account for biomass as a tool used in the practice of sorcery: the dominant framings of monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) and carbon measurement did not allow room for this possibility. For example, the dispute over a carbon measurement plot in Suau centred on the different assumptions and interpretations of ‘collecting biomass to measure carbon’ and ‘collecting rubbish to perform sorcery’. This dispute is ‘ontological’ and ‘political’ (Mol 1999). It is also ‘ethical’ in questions concerning what options are afforded in these projects. Slowing down our reasoning here entails questioning: What do we mean by options? Are these options that people really want? Sometimes options can lead people into uncomfortable ethical situations or entangle them in much deeper discomfort than is visible within experimental designs (Warner et al. 2018).

By foreclosing the possibilities of learning from and together with local and Indigenous communities, the universalising tendencies of environmental governance are enabled and legitimised (West 2020). This is not a new process, as Davis and Todd (2017) highlight, frontier processes of extraction, destruction, and transformation have been occurring over centuries, disturbing more-than-human, situated knowledges, and ethical relations. By weaving partial stories, without resolving or tying down a narrative of events, we have sought to recognise the ethical dilemmas of how people manoeuvre within patterns of environmental governance and extractive industries. We have interwoven stories from PNG and Indonesia to draw attention to contestations over REDD+ activities where it is not just boundaries or relations that are disputed, but the very conditions of possibility that are at stake. Weaving partial stories – an acknowledgement that other stories could have been possible – opens up possibilities for generative critique (Winthereik and Verran 2012). Our collaborative and partial ethnographic approach to fieldwork in Suau and Kalimantan emphasises the productive possibilities of dialogue between ethics and ontological politics: Better when, how, for whom? (Yates Doerr 2019: 307).

Our concern with ontological politics has sought to focus attention to the material and ethical implications of attempts to govern tropical forests and climate change in ‘frontier’ regions of Indonesia and PNG. We have further sought to focus attention on the ways that reality is performed and people live, questioning:

What is at stake when someone’s land is being colonised by oil palm, while other trees are planted in orderly rows for carbon measurement? What is at stake when someone is fearful that their land and oxygen will be stolen, or that leaf litter will be used to perform malign acts of sorcery?

These questions are about more than people’s livelihoods and land – they extend to the ethics of experimentation and the politics of conditions of possibility. In concluding, we encourage readers to remain open to partiality in alternative stories of climate change, and to question the assumptions that enable and legitimise environmental governance experiments.

Acknowledgements

This article brings together three separate research projects. Each author was actively involved in the writing and conception. The second author was responsible for fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. The first, third, and fourth authors were responsible for fieldwork in Indonesia. We thank the people of Suau and Kapuas for sharing their stories and lives with us, and our research supervisors for their guidance and mentoring. We are grateful to the many people who gave their time and advice in preparation of this manuscript, in particular Monica Minnegal and Sophie Chao, and Chandra Jayasuriya and Thor Jensen for preparation of the maps. We also thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and constructive advice. Results and conclusions represent the views of the authors rather than supporting organisations.

Disclosure Statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Additional information

Funding

The first author is grateful to Anne Larson and the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) for support and funding under several grants: the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) [grant numbers QZA-10/0468, QZA-12/0882, QZA-16/0110], European Commission (EC) [grant number DCI-ENV/2011/269-520], United Kingdom Department for International Development (UKAID) [grant number TF069018], the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID, currently DFAT) [grant numbers 46167, 63560], and the CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) [grant number TF No. 069018], with financial support from the donors contributing to the CGIAR Fund. The second author acknowledges the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research through a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant [grant number 9471] and the Australian Government Research Training Program. The University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts provided additional funding through their PhD Fieldwork Scheme, as did the Faculty of Science through a Science Abroad Travelling Scholarship and the Albert Shimmins Postgraduate Writing-Up Award. The third author acknowledges the support of Norad [grant number QZA-21/0159] and thanks the Centre for Politics and Government (PolGov), the Department of Politics and Government, Universitas Gadjah Mada for support during the research process.

Notes

1 Research in Suau, PNG explicitly engaged with local forms of storytelling known as pilipili dai, which encompass the sharing of origin stories and daily practices of engaging in reciprocal relations, negotiation, and contestation (Pascoe et al. 2021).

2 The research Indonesia involved fifteen months of cumulative fieldwork in two separate research projects (Sanders et al. 2017; 2019; 2020). The research in PNG involved twelve months of cumulative fieldwork (Pascoe 2018; Pascoe et al. 2021). Information about field methods and ethnographic descriptions are included in these publications. We have used pseudonyms when referring to individuals.