Exit the Dragon? Collapse of Co-management at Komodo National Park, Indonesia

Abstract

A significant current approach to creating compatibility between tourism and biodiversity conservation focuses on managing protected areas under collaborative management arrangements. The collaborating stakeholders are generally government agencies, non-governmental organizations, community groups and occasionally private sector organizations, with the balance determined by local circumstances. The aim is to create resilient governance systems informed by adaptive co-management philosophy. In 2005, a collaborative management initiative was set up at Komodo National Park, in eastern Indonesia, to manage a group of islands inhabited by the iconic Komodo lizard and several human communities. The area is popular with general interest tourists wishing to see the ‘dragons’ and with divers enjoying the rich coral reefs fringing the islands. The reefs are also the spawning grounds for fish-stocks exploited by fishermen based locally and further afield. The collaborative arrangements were designed to regulate both tourism use of the islands and fishing, but despite substantial investment of expertise and resources, it ran for just 5 years before collapsing. The reasons for its failure lie generally in the difficulty of managing complex social-ecological systems, and specifically in the overly narrow design of the initiative and in the political ecology of the Indonesian civil service, which despite anti-corruption efforts retains high levels of venality and weak environmental awareness.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Komodo National Park
• tourism in protected areas
• collaborative management initiatives
• world heritage site management