The Becoming Custodians research project follows four communities in Indonesian Borneo as they build their own conservation organisations.
Governments increasingly recognise that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are effective guardians of nature and that conservation efforts should support community rights and well-being. But this recognition often comes with new burdens: responsibility for environmental outcomes, expectations of socio-economic change, and administrative tasks that take up significant time and energy.
To understand what community-led conservation means in practice, we are learning directly from those communities that are leading conservation efforts. What are they doing and experiencing? What support do partners provide? And what would it take to make community-led conservation more effective and just?
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Halfway through the project, we have almost finished the ethnographic fieldwork. More on that later. The second, explanatory part of the research has now begun, and we would like to give a short update on that. Apologies to the casual reader: this will get a bit technical.
Coming home from the field or the river, they often enjoy some afternoon drinks and meals in someone’s house, talking about anything to kill time. But this afternoon felt special, like a celebratory feast, reflecting something about how the landscape is changing.
Cik Gu’s story represents a dilemma facing all village residents: whether to hang onto ancestral lands that they struggle to manage, or hand them over to others and gain time and funds to do other things, such as running their PUMK.
“So long as this is state forest, then it is the problem of the state”, he notes. However, with a permit, “we will be ordered to guard the forest, and if it is destroyed, we are the ones who will be scolded”. He concludes that it is better to have no permit at all than a permit that you can’t do anything with.
Kak Desintha and I were rather surprised. We had assumed the salt and tamarind would be used to massage the foot, but it turned out they were applied to the mouth instead. You could say we got our first real taste of fieldwork in Mengkalang Jambu.