Neoliberal Conservation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Neoliberal conservation encompasses initiatives and measures depending upon market mechanisms to achieve conservation objectives. Such mechanisms have transformed aspects of nature and its care into commodities to produce a ‘green economy’ as the basis of conservation and sustainable development. Although many such programmes have been subjected to critical analysis, their role in environmental education has received far less attention. This article focuses on how environmental education efforts are conceptualised and operationalised by Rare, a transnational conservation organisation whose approach exemplifies neoliberal objectives through using ‘social marketing’ tactics in its Pride campaigns in order to ‘sell’ conservation values via a network of local partners managing these campaigns. As a case study, we concentrate on the Pride campaign conducted in two villages bordering the Lamandau River Wildlife Reserve in Central Kalimantan, evaluating its claims to success in redirecting local farmers away from use of fire in land clearing for swidden agriculture and oil palm cultivation. We conclude that Rare's focus on transforming individuals’ motivations and behaviours, in line with neoliberal environmentality, fails to address the barriers to conservation stemming from the structural drivers in the larger political economic context.

KEYWORDS:

• Central Kalimantan
• Dayak
• environmental education
• environmentality
• neoliberal conservation
• Rare

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding the research on which this article is based through its Discovery Grant DP130100051 ‘Fostering Pro-Environment Consciousness and Practice: Environmentalism, Environmentality and Environmental Education in Indonesia’. The second author's field work was also linked to the team research funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand that supported their research through the Marsden Fund. We also wish to thank the Department of Anthropology within the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Indonesia for acting as local sponsor of this research. We would also like to express our appreciation to the members of the Rare office in Bogor who took the time to talk to us. Despite our criticisms of the approach of Rare and its Pride campaign managers in this article, we acknowledge the commitment of Rare and all its local partners to the cause of conservation and applaud the real accomplishments of its programmes. We recognise the limitations under which they must work in challenging contexts. We also appreciate the commitment and successes of the Yayorin team in protecting orang-utan habitats in Central Kalimantan. We would also like to thank the villagers of Tempayung and Bual Baboti for their generosity and time taken in responding to interviews on the Lamandau River Wildlife Reserve Pride campaign. Finally, we would like to express our appreciation to the editors of Indonesia and the Malay World for their patience and good cheer, as well as to the two anonymous referees for their cogent suggestions as to how we could improve this article. All remaining shortcomings in the article remain our responsibility as authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Greg Acciaioli teaches anthropology and sociology, international development, and Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. His PhD research concentrated on the relations of migrant fishers and indigenous agriculturalists in Central Sulawesi. His more recent research focused on resource contestations in protected area settings, both terrestrial and marine, and the politics of indigeneity in Indonesia and Malaysia. He is currently involved in two Australian Research Council Discovery projects dealing with environmental education and with agricultural innovation and food security in Indonesia.

Suraya Afiff is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Indonesia. She obtained her PhD in environmental science, policy and management from the University of California, at Berkeley. Her research focuses on agrarian and environmental politics in Indonesia and her interests extend across various issues, including land conflicts, forest tenure and politics, conservation, REDD, community-based natural resource management, agrarian and environmental justice movements in Indonesia. She is also the Faculty of Arts Asian Scholar at the University of Melbourne (2018–21).

ORCID

Greg Acciaioli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4070-5545

Notes

1 This organisation often presents its name in lower case.

2 See its web page ‘About us: private lands conservation’ <https://www.nature.org/about-us/private-lands-conservation/index.htm?redirect=https-301> (Nature Conservancy n.d.)

3 Personal communication, Julian Clifton, geographer at the University of Western Australia (2017).

4 Any terms, phrases or clauses in quotation marks providing information on Rare subsequently in article without a citation are taken from the Rare website (www.rare.org).

5 On its FaceBook page Yayorin states it aims ‘to preserve the tropical rainforests that are the habitat of orang-utans and other wildlife, through focusing on research, education and conservation, as well as working with local communities, especially those that depend on the forest to maintain their traditional lifestyles, but can find a way to develop without having a destructive impact on the forest ecosystem’ <https://www.facebook.com/pg/Yayorin-Yayasan-Orangutan-Indonesia-17589565285/about/?ref=page_internal>.

6 All translations from Santoso’s (2010) Pride campaign report are by the authors.

7 While the name Tomun derives from the term for ‘mutual understanding’ shared by many of the languages and groups living along the Lamandau River, these Dayak are more likely to refer to themselves simply by a toponym, Dayak + the name of their village or Dayak + Lamandau (the name of the river near which they reside). The latter endonym, Dayak Lamandau, fits with the general orientation to the waterways (aliran sungei) that served as the major channels for movement and interaction in Borneo generally before road construction intensified in recent years.

8 Although the lack of cooperation of the village headman in Babual Baboti is not highlighted in the final Pride Campaign report (Santoso 2010), it is more overtly discussed in other contributions by the Pride campaign manager (e.g. Santoso 2013).

9 The second author, along with two postgraduate students, conducted interviews and participant observation research in Tampayung and Babual Baboti for several weeks across July and August 2015 as part of a larger project focused on REDD+ in Central Kalimantan; Tempayung and Babual Baboti are located within the Sungai Lamandau REDD+ project area (McGregor et al. 2015: 148–149). The first author has not conducted research in either of these villages, but did undertake research in 2004 on resistance against oil palm plantations in the Danau Sembuluh area in Seruyan Regency, located directly to the east of Kotawaringin Barat. This area is occupied by closely related Temuan Dayak, who declare that they originally migrated from the Lamandau region (Chao et al. 2013: 72), as well as Banjarese and other ethnic migrant ethnic groups (Acciaioli 2008b; Acciaioli and Dewi 2016).

10 Rubber was first introduced in what is now neighbouring West Kalimantan at the beginning of the 20th century (de Jong 2001: 368).

11 In much of Sumatra and in West Kalimantan, the earlier introduction of oil palm by Indonesian state-owned companies meant that that the PIR-Bun model was actually followed, with farmers able to work smallholder plots in the surrounding plasma of nucleus estates. In contrast, in Central Kalimantan oil palm expansion came almost exclusively in the form of large-scale private estates, as the introduction of oil palm coincided with the structural adjustment programmes imposed on Indonesia in the 1990s by the IMF and World Bank, which prioritised large-scale industrial agriculture under corporate control (Acciaioli and Dewi 2016: 330–331).

12 Despite the depredations of increasing smoke pollution and fire risk, opening swidden land by burning continues as a preferred mode of ensuring family subsistence for dry rice cultivation. This is in a context of heightened risk, even in peatlands where the fires continue to smoulder underground throughout much of the year (Suyanto et al. 2009).

Additional information

Funding

We wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council for funding the research on which this article is based through its Discovery Grant DP130100051 ‘Fostering Pro-Environment Consciousness and Practice: Environmentalism, Environmentality and Environmental Education in Indonesia’.