Disempowering Traditional Spatial Arrangement of Dayak Community: A Case Study of Tumbang Marikoi Village, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

The rapid industrialization in the last decades significantly changed the traditional spatial arrangement in Central Kalimantan Island. The indigenous community’s traditional forest lands management and ownership were transferred to oil palm plantations and mining corporations. Therefore, it disempowered the traditional spatial arrangement by changing the community’s living conditions and transforming their livelihood sources from primary (forests) to secondary and tertiary. The disempowered traditional spatial arrangement of the Tumbang Marikoi village community includes a living area with rivers, forests, and dwellings. They access the forest through the village Kahayan Hulu and the Marikoi River. There is no power grid in Marikoi Village, making them depend on a solar-powered energy generation facility for their daily activities, including gardening, gathering forest products, hunting, mining gold, and fishing. This study applied the phenomenological method to explain the traditional spatial disempowerment in Marikoi Village, Central Kalimantan, following corporate plantation powers and mining activities. The results indicated that the palm plantations affected the Dayak community's living space and daily life. Furthermore, the ownership and management of their customary land, enhancing their economic, social, cultural, and religious life, was transferred to large plantations. As a result, the community’s traditional spatial arrangement was disempowered through river silting from soil drilling, cloudy river water, flooding, distant land for income (selling honey, vegetables, rattan, herbal medicine, and other forest wealth), farming restrictions by clearing land and losing sacred areas and ancestral rituals.

The Pattern Recognition of Small-Scale Privately-Owned Forest in Ciamis Regency, West Java, Indonesia

Small-scale Privately-owned Forest (SSPF) has various patterns identification, based on the stand structure and species composition. The recognition and classification of the SSPF cropping patterns are required for further planning and policy development. Therefore, this study aims to classify the cropping pattern of SSPF in Ciamis Regency, West Java Province, Indonesia. The data were collected by observing the stand structure and species composition of 150 plots of land, encompassing three Sub-districts representing the central, northern, and southern regions of Ciamis Regency. The four categorical variables include tree species composition, age, spatial distribution, and intercropping pattern. While the two continuous variables were stand density and basal area. The patterns obtained were classified based on a Two-Step Cluster algorithm with log-likelihood distance measure, and auto clustering using Schwarz's Bayesian Information Criterion, validated by silhouette index. In addition, a multicollinearity test was conducted to reduce redundancy in using variable sets. The results showed that, the improvement of the cluster quality based on the silhouette index value, was achievable by excluding the tree spatial distribution variable, which exhibits multicollinearity. The cropping patterns were classified into three categories, namely tree crops, mixed-tree lots, and agrisilviculture for group-1, group-2, and group-3, respectively. Group-1 consisted of stands with one or two commercial tree species, and in several cases, were intercropped. Group-2 contained uneven-aged mixed-tree stands without any crops. While Group-3 consisted of an intercropping system of uneven-aged mixed-tree stands and crops. The results suggest further analysis, in order to relate the cropping patterns with the socio-economic characteristics of the landowners, as well as the strategies for the development of a sustainable SSPF.

The Role of El Nino Variability and Peatland in Burnt Area and Emitted Carbon in Forest Fire Modeling

This study was conducted to model fire occurrence within El Nino variability and peatland distribution. These climate and geographical factors have a significant impact on forest fires in tropical areas such as Indonesia. The re-analysis dataset from ECMWF was observed with respect to climate characteristics in Indonesian El Nino events. The INFERNO (INteractive Fire and Emission algoRithm for Natural envirOnments) was utilized to simulate fires over Borneo Island due to its capability to simulate large-scale fires with simplified parameters. There were some adjustments in this INFERNO model, especially for peat fire as peatland has a significant impact on fires. The first was the contribution of climate to the peat fire which is represented by long-term precipitation. The second was the combustion completeness of peat fire occurrence that is mainly affected by human-induced peat drainage. The result of the model shows that El Nino variability mainly affected peat fires but was unable to well simulate the above-ground fire. It increased the burnt area during strong El Nino but overestimated the fires during low/no El Nino season due to lack of peat fire ignition in the calculation. Moreover, as the model did not provide peat drainage simulation, it underestimated the carbon emission. This model has shown promising results by addressing key features in limited input data, but improving some simulations is necessary for regulating weak/no El Nino conditions and carbon combustion of peat fire.

Conflict transformation and collaboration in developing social forestry in Flores, Indonesia

Social movements to realize forest tenure reforms have been ongoing since the 1970s, particularly through policies under the broad umbrella of social forestry. In Indonesia, social forestry programs are initiated by the government, communities, NGOs, academics, companies, and donors, and are based on specific socio-economic and ecological interests. Weak synergies, however between programmatic implementation and stakeholder interests, triggers various forest tenure conflicts. The research examines the complexity of these conflicts, namely focusing around the approaches to conflict transformation that can lead to collaboration in realizing forest sustainability that also support interests of people living in and around forests. I employed a qualitative approach by collecting data through in-depth interviews and participatory observations in Flores in 2017 and 2020. The results show that forest tenure conflicts have occurred since the 1970s due to state forest territorialization. Conflicts culminated in the determination of state forest area boundaries through the 1984 state program entitled the “consensus-based forest land use planning” initiative. Until 2008, efforts to resolve conflicts by offering the community access rights through community forestry programs initiated by the government were rejected by NGOs and the local community. NGOs facilitated communities to demand the return of state forest land as customary forest. This conflict presented the opportunity to facilitate multi-stakeholder forestry programs through a conflict transformation approach by building long-term stakeholder collaboration. Since 2010, the collaboration between stakeholders took place through the community forest program. This study shows the need for more direct attention to studying conflict resolution under an integrated and long-term approach to conflict transformation and collaboration. Pragmatically, this study shows the importance of integrated social forestry policies that synergize various schemes initiated by stakeholders to realize forest sustainability and support local community interests.

The Resilience of Rural Tourism and Adjustment Measures for Surviving The COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence from Bromo Tengger Semeru National Park, Indonesia

The COVID-19 virus pandemic has generated an unprecedented impact on all aspects of life, including rural tourism. This study aims to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of homestay businesses in Gubukklakah Village, Malang Regency, and their adjustment measures to get out of the pandemic. A survey research with descriptive and quantitative approaches was conducted on 47 active homestay owners. 98% of the respondents stated that the pandemic affected their homestay business activities. About 44.6% of them said that the pandemic would not last long, while more than 50% of them said that the pandemic would last a long time. The pandemic has decreased the number of active homestays from 47 to 11, coupled with an 81% decline in income. Due to the pandemic, about 85.1% of the respondents returned to farming activities. The study suggests several actions that can be done to respond to the pandemic, namely the application of health protocols in various activities, the provision of cash or non-cash assistance to pandemic affected families, the strengthening of the agricultural sector and skilled human resources in tourism services, and the innovation of outdoor tourism products based on local uniqueness.

Evaluation of land cover changes and secondary ecological succession of typical agroforestry landscapes in Phu Yen Province

The study of land cover changes as well as landscape succession has theoretical and practical significance. Determining the characteristics, causes, and trends of the changes and succession of a landscape allows for assessing the natural and human characteristics of the territory. On this basis, appropriate solutions and policies in resource management, socioeconomic development, and environmental protection are available for each locality. Applying and integrating remote sensing data with field investigations and surveys improves the accuracy and reliability of research results. From the establishment of a land cover change map based on land cover map data collected in 2010, 2015, and 2020, variations in the land cover types of Phu Yen Province were observed. In the period 2010–2015, the area of natural forests and grasslands, shrubs, and bare lands decreased rapidly, whereas the covered areas of intentionally planted forests, industrial trees, and crops increased significantly. The secondary ecological succession of the agroforestry landscape of Phu Yen Province in the last 50–60 years occurred under the strong influence of human activities. Under the impact of chemical warfare and policies and farming practices of the local people, several evergreen broad-leaved tropical forest landscape units have undergone four to six stages of succession, with the interweaving of the economic development policy of Phu Yen Province and farming practices of the local people, making the structure and length of each period and succession very different.

Commoning the State Forest: Crafting Commons through an Indonesian Social Forestry Program

Studies of the commons grew out of responses to Hardin's bleak prediction of “tragedy of the commons,” that without state intervention or privatization, any commons will eventually be destroyed by allegedly self-interested users. As such, the commons studies traditionally tend to demonstrate cases where common pool resources (CPR) can be sustainably managed by groups of people beyond the state and market interventions. This paper shows a case from Sulawesi, Indonesia, where a state social forestry program can create a space for the program beneficiaries to build a commons. Through fieldwork that involves participant observation and in-depth interviews with program extension workers and beneficiaries in two social forestry farmer groups, this study found that the program can stimulate beneficiary groups to build collective action in managing the state forest plots admitted to them and that the two groups are the only successful ones among 14 neighboring groups that are involved in the same program. The study also shows that the management of the state-sponsored commons requires extension workers with deep knowledge about local people and landscape, economic incentives, and the flexibility of the local state agency in bending the rules based on bottom-up demands. Therefore, the case study shows that, on the one hand, the state program can actually stimulate the creation of the commons. On the other hand, commoning seems to be the only way to ensure a successful social forestry program.

Assessing the Social-ecological Resilience of Organic Farmers in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand

Since resilience is continuing to make its rise to the top of the sustainable development policies, monitoring resilience has become critical because it provides stakeholders with practical actions that can strengthen the state of adaptability to cope with all kinds of change. In this study, resilience, and social theories, such as grounded theory and technography, were integrated as a conceptual framework to produce a specific set of indicators, which yielded forty-seven indices, called social-ecological resilience indicators (SERIs). This study attempts to manage the temporal and spatial scales of resilience systems and to make such indicators suitable for organic rice production systems in four districts of Chiang Mai Province. A questionnaire was utilized to survey fifty-three organic farmers, and the results of the descriptive data analysis indicated that 0.54 (1.00 = the maximum) had been the respondents’ average score. Meanwhile, the highest and the lowest scores were serially 0.69 and 0.40. In addition, the findings revealed that Kendall’s Tau-b rank correlation’s numeric value came closer to +, which meant that the respondents had demonstrated an average tendency to be resilient. Generally, the highest score of resilience existed for those organic farmers, who had been outstanding in creating opportunities for self-organization, such as considerably relying on food and farm materials from the availability of local resources. Moreover, the majority of them were found to have a secondary on-farm profession that was not only subsidizing additional incomes but was also providing new knowledge and opportunities. This contrasted with the group with lowest score. The farmers, who exhibited unsatisfactory resilience, were centralized in dimensions, ranging from a having a lack of diverse water sources to having sufficient competency to exploit the benefits of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). They are, therefore, more prone to being affected by negative pressures. It is recommended that for building resilience, the ‘holy grail’ is boosting self-reliance. This capacity is key to reducing the risk of losing sustenance and enabling stakeholders to apply the appropriate strategies in times of change

Creating Commons: Reflections on Creating Natural Resource Management Regimes in South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Thirteen years ago, PAYOPAYO Peasant School Network, an Indonesian community organizing network based in Sulawesi, facilitated Participatory Action Research (PAR) that eventually culminated in a creation of a common resource management regime around an irrigation system for agricultural use in Tompobulu, a village within a national park in upland South Sulawesi. This note from the field presents a reflection on collective action experiences of a community in building the commons in 2008 to 2009, and revisits the extent to which the commons has been managed, how management regimes changed over time, and how it survives as a commons today. The initial factors allowing for establishment of the commons, understood here as a social practice toward common goals, were a shared need for water (local needs & conditions), and the success to make use of the irrigation commons as a means to initiate other collective actions. Drawing from concerted engagement and analysis conducted in 2021, this note revisits the key factors and highlights different ways the commons continues to persist, namely due to the distinct benefits felt by participants, the existence of institutions that regulate the use and maintenance of the commons, the existence of a monitoring system among members, participation of members in formulating and modifying the rules, and the recognition of National Park authorities on the commons and its rules.

Village Fund for Peatlands Restoration: Study of Community’s Perceived Challenges and Opportunities in Muaro Jambi District

Peatlands conversion to dryland for plantation has caused environmental havoc and is more prone to natural disasters in Indonesia. Community engagements under village administration should be the main strategy for supporting peatlands restoration. Since the new law on villages was enacted in 2014, the village has gained authority and delegated responsibilities from the upper-level government to make rural development decisions in various sectors, including those connected to environmental management, such as peatland restoration. The recognition of authority is followed by the transfer of significant funds, called village funds, from the central government as a form of commitment to undertake the village law. Currently, applied regulations allow community engagement to utilize the village fund for supporting peatland restoration. This study investigated the community's perceptions of village fund utilization for peatland restoration through in-depth interviews and questionnaires with site-level stakeholders that influence village budget allocation-related policies. The investigated aspects included village budgeting and development planning mechanism, the capacity of the community, and rules of district government in supervising the villages. Based on our findings, the identified challenges include the absence of environmental aspects as a part of village development pillars for developing village planning and budgeting, lack of community's environmental-economical nexus knowledge, and lack of district government in supervising village fund utilization and management at the site-level. However, the opportunities to direct the village fund utilization for peatlands restoration are widely open by strengthening the roles of district government to improve village fund governance at the site level.