The Indonesian conservation authorities have been quietly experimenting with the privatization of conservation management, a plan announced by the Forestry Minister in 2010. There is an urgent need to expand this experiment.
Presently, not much is working well in Indonesia’s protected area and threatened species management. A study in the Indonesian Journal of Conservation showed that Indonesia’s protected areas lost an additional 2.6 percent of their forest cover between 2000 and 2010. Other studies show protected areas all over Indonesia are losing species, such as orangutans, and a myriad of fish and corals, at very high rates.
People living in and around Indonesia’s protected areas often tell us that the legal monitoring of the area has no relevance to them. Communities habitually ignore regulations, and use the land for agriculture, hunting, uncontrolled fishing or other purposes. For all they care, protected areas might as well not exist.
A 2012 study in the journal Conservation and Society shows that communities are often supported by local politicians and opportunistic schemers who consider the protected areas to be a constraint on economic development. In doing so, they ignore or are oblivious to the often vital environmental services that these areas provide.
In short, protected area management in Indonesia is in serious trouble.
There are various reasons for this state of affairs, but an important one is the inadequate management put in place by the conservation department (PHKA) within the Forestry Minister and other responsible authorities, such as police and the judiciary, for dealing with the conservation challenges. There is a lack of capacity in planning and enforcing conservation management, and without effective enforcement, rules are habitually broken.
Fair enough; Indonesia has 496 terrestrial and 40 marine protected areas, covering 282,342 square kilometers of land and sea. Managing all this is certainly a challenge. But, why not share the burden with others?
Not all is doom and gloom in Indonesian conservation, and there are good examples of effective management implemented by dedicated individuals, local leaders and environmental groups, but with limited or no involvement of the national conservation authorities.
The Sungai Wain protection forest in East Kalimantan, managed by an independent organization supported by local government and stakeholders, has retained its rich forests that maintain a constant water supply to nearby Balikpapan and its oil refinery. This happened despite rampant illegal logging and fires that threatened to wipe out the forests in the 1990s.
The Wehea area, also in East Kalimantan, is managed by highly committed local communities and financially supported by local government and industries. Again, it has effectively managed to terminate all threats to conservation, including illegal logging, poaching etc.
The Tambling Wildlife Nature Conservation project in Sumatra obtained an agreement from the Forestry Minister for a conservation management lease of 45,000 hectares of forest and marine areas. It seems that illegal logging, hunting and fishing in Tambling are under control and wildlife populations are bouncing back.
The Begawan Foundation achieved what government-led projects could not: a significant increase in the wild population of the Bali starling, a nearly extinct bird species. Before the program started, the estimated number of these birds in the wild had fallen to about five. Effective breeding and safe release programs have now boosted the wild populations to over 60 birds.
It is important for PHKA to recognize under which circumstances such conservation efforts are working. This would help strategic decision-making on where privatization of conservation should be encouraged and officially endorsed. The recipe for success includes ingredients such as strong, long-term commitment to conservation, law enforcement, leadership, and organization. Adequate funding is also important, but effective conservation is more about how money is spent rather than how much.
So let’s expand PHKA’s conservation privatization experiment. This could happen in formally protected areas in which all management responsibilities and rights, including revenue collection, are passed on to a private sector group. PHKA can then focus its efforts on meeting conservation targets, and developing new policies. The previously mentioned Tambling is an example.
Privatization could also happen outside the formal protected area network, where non-government groups (NGOs, communities, businesses) take responsibility for conservation management.
Law enforcement is a tough one though, because it cannot easily be privatized under Indonesia’s legal system. It appears that privatized conservation would work best when there is limited need for law enforcement. This could be in remote areas where there are few threats to conservation. It could also be in areas where local communities or government strongly support conservation, or are willing to help enforce laws. Wehea and Sungai Wain are examples of this.
Indonesia’s conservation management is bad enough, so why not scale up an experiment that has been proven to work quite well, to see if Indonesia’s presently negative conservation trend can be reversed? After all, Indonesia still has some of the most outstanding wildlife resources on the planet, and it is the government’s legal mandate to ensure those resources are maintained, not wasted.
The Jakarta Globe, 2014