Compensatory facilities provided by logging companies such as clean water are often delayed and unsatisfactory, and promises are continually postponed
Conflict in natural resource management can be a catalyst for constructive change says CIFOR alumni Yurdi Yasmi. The challenge is managing it.
Yurdi Yasmi conducted research for his PhD at CIFOR where he worked in the Governance programme from 1998 to 2007. He began his research by developing a way to identify conflict and its escalation in natural resource management.
Conflict emerges when there is “impairment” or harm caused to a stakeholder, he said. This clearly distinguishes conflict from differences in opinion or practice where impairment is not caused.
Anxiety and frustration are usually initial stages in the escalation of conflict and are generally followed by debate, lobbying and protest, with the potential to raise the issue to a national or international scale. He argues that conflict escalation in natural resources management is complex that there is no single pattern of escalation applicable to every situation of conflict.
Yasmi’s PhD, published October 2007, focuses on communities in West Kalimantan, East Kalimantan and Sumatra, where the world’s last frontiers of tropical forest remain. Full document http://library.wur.nl/wda/dissertations/dis4264.pdf
Commodity and conflict
Yasmi experienced conflict first hand when undertaking research in Bulungan, East Kalimantan, when he looked into allegations that local communities suffered water and air pollution caused by logging companies. According to Yasmi, they were excluded from negotiations and denied rights to use wood from the forest for their houses and churches.
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"Local governments lack skills in natural resource management and they do not involve the local community, which creates frustration. Then when conflict emerges, we know it is there but we don’t know what to do about it."
Yurdi Yasmi
RECOFTC |
This scenario is not uncommon in forest management in Indonesia. Forest resources such as medicinal plants which local communities depend on can be instantly classified ‘company property’ and guarded in a military-like fashion. Compensatory facilities provided by logging companies such as clean water are often delayed and unsatisfactory, and promises are continually postponed.
“Too often people living in rich areas are poor because they have no rights,” Yasmi said. “Local government lack skills in natural resource management and they do not involve the local community, which creates frustration. Then when conflict emerges, we know it is there but we don’t know what to do about it.”
Yasmi said that in any transformation process, there is always a shock. He compared the escalation of conflict to a glass of water being shaken.
“When there is a shock, the water moves and it triggers people to think for improvement. But without management, the glass will fall over and the water will splash,” he said. “The consequences can be unbearable.”
“With the right institutional capacities and appropriate, responsive management procedures in place, conflict can become a catalyst for constructive change,” Yasmi believes. If there is governance and management that can provide a setting for negotiation among parties involved then positive social changes are achievable.
Community and conservation
Aside from poverty, human rights and social issues, Yasmi’s research shows that conflict management has many links to forest conservation and sustainability.
“Traditionally, forest communities are very environmentally friendly,” Yasmi said. But he believes that with today’s increased competition over the control of dwindling natural resources, denial of communities rights now effectively discourages them from caring for the forests.
“Without clear rights and ownership there is no incentive to preserve the forest.”
Because of a lack of good governance and forest management, ownership is usually unclear. There are competing claims over resources and it is usually the local communities – who know the most about the forest – who are left out of the negotiations
For conservation to be effective Yasmi believes. that it must include the local community.
Yasmi is now researching conflict and natural resource management at the Regional Community Forestry Training Centre, (RECOFTC), where he uses research products to feed into training and capacity building to assist conflict management in forests in the Asia Pacific region.
Story by Clare Rawlinson, CIFOR