The word ‘indigenous’ has been deflated of meaning when political leaders in both Indonesia and Malaysia claim that, given the multitudes of ethnicities and identities in the two countries, ‘everyone is indigenous’.^[6] Denying ethnic difference may be useful in processes of mobilising allegiance to or support for political centres, and of underplaying localistic attachments to place. As an analytical category, being indigenous is linked with several characteristics, two of which are important for our purpose. Indigenous cultural traditions are associated with an attachment to place most likely derived from not having a migratory family history. Such traditions are further characterised as an attitude of not being able to objectify place, or of not being able to regard place as a commodity (Benjamin 2002, 2005). It is this attachment to place, and a relative inability to treat home places as an exploitable commodity, that accounts for individuals’ lack of economic competitiveness, while those who are culturally exogenous, because of a migratory family history, are able to objectify and thus exploit place. For example, the popular marketing of ecological tourism depends on an individual’s capacity to regard her/his surrounds as a commodity, implying the build-up of cultural or emotional distance between individuals and their environment, sufficient for them to regard their environment as a marketable product. However, an attachment to place cannot be taken for granted; it exists in varying degrees of intensity among individuals. Paradoxically, in the search for alternatives, the attachment to place has been a useful starting point for those involved in the indigenous land-rights movement, as it has been for the environmental movement.

An attachment to place may, however, be assumed to be present among most groups, and attention can then be focused on their claims for access to land on the grounds of being ‘indigenous’. The indigenous land-rights movement argues that one characteristic that binds most local groups who claim indigenous status is insecurity of tenure. Insecurity of tenure is the common experience of all groups dealt with in this volume. Land managed under customary access may be recognised in the various land laws of the two countries: Native Customary Land in Sarawak, Native Title Land in Sabah or land managed under adat in Kalimantan, because of ideologies of legal pluralism from the colonial era. But such recognition was only a minor concession to the larger process of converting all ‘unoccupied land’ to state land (Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). This conversion of all ‘unoccupied land’ (which may in fact be land left fallow) to state land is referred to as a ‘fundamental error’ by Majid Cooke in Chapter 2. In recent times, this ‘error’ has been systematically contested in the courts in Sarawak (Majid Cooke 2003b), as well as in Peninsular Malaysia.^[7] The idea is to confine access rules which are embedded in place to a few regulations that the State recognises or understands, with a view to achieving simplified titling in the long term (see Scott 1998). In all three regions of Borneo, land claimed under customary use is secure only when it is titled. In this volume, Majid Cooke, Bulan, Eghenter, Deddy and Vaz all refer to the insecurity of tenure of native land. In view of the elephantine nature of the land administration machinery, the process of titling may take decades in some cases. In the meantime, customary land remains state land and subject to ‘development’ at the discretion of the state.

In post-colonial times, recognition of customary access is made more restrictive, with rights and entitlements being decided upon by the state; such access becomes visible only so that lands can be targeted for ‘development’ at the discretion of the state, as under the Konsep Baru in Sarawak (Majid Cooke 2002). In Indonesia, it is only when indigenous groups qualify as enduring adat communities, engaging in prescribed ‘traditional’ livelihood and management practices, that they are recognised as rightful and responsible managers of their land (Li 2003; Eghenter, Chapter 8). The quest for secure title among local communities is therefore understandable.

From a local perspective, there is an aspect of conservation interest that looks towards local groups as potential providers of alternative models for living with (as opposed to wanting to control) nature, and this can be useful for advancing claims to secure titles. The combination of local and universal interest in ‘place’ has been translated into a range of practices, which include research into indigenous or traditional ecological knowledge or local management systems (Berkes and Fowles 1998; Ellen et al. 2000), and participatory resource management, of which community mapping is an important part. Conservation then becomes the umbrella for a diverse range of interests.

Many lessons have been learnt about community desires for conservation. The desire is, first and foremost, fuelled by the potential for generating income (see Filer 1997). Interest in conservation comes only after the relationship between income and sustainable use becomes apparent. Benefits to stakeholders (not necessarily cash) are important incentives for conservation to be successful. However, benefits such as participation and community empowerment, regarded as important for strengthening community capacity to uphold a sustainable society in general, and sustainable resource use in particular, have proved elusive. Among the intended beneficiaries of these approaches, many may remain unconvinced. In many ‘participatory’ projects participation is encouraged at the implementation level, while planning remains the prerogative of an educated elite. Participation, in these settings, can usefully be viewed as a rhetorical tool designed to influence the environment in which decision makers act, rather than changing the decision-making environment at the local level (MacLean 2000). Even in terms of material benefits, examples from India of ‘joint forest management’ projects suggest that income from non-timber forest products, normally valuable to villagers, now has to be shared with the Forest Department, while villagers do all the work (Sarin 1999; Fisher 2000). There is evidence as well that a large part of the benefit from such projects is being captured by better-off people within these communities.

There are additional risks to participation. Wadley (Chapter 6) has found that providing local communities with the opportunity to decide and control their own development, as has happened since the fall of Suharto’s New Order Regime, may not necessarily lead to an increase in local concerns for conservation in West Kalimantan. In fact, decentralisation has resulted in a simultaneous increase in official corruption.

Specific risks can be gleaned from initiatives in community mapping. Participation through community mapping is risky and rarely a straightforward business, as Deddy observes in Chapter 5. First there is the tension between the process of map making and the need to produce maps as a product. Is it the process or the map that is important? An emphasis on map making does not contribute to community participation. The process of map making, if participatory, should involve all members of the community, regardless of social status, age or gender. This type of participation may touch on issues of power/gender relations, and may have implications for the unresolved question of access rights among return migrants. Community mapping may bring to the surface contested claims and titles, the potential being created for the exclusion or inclusion of claims and entitlement, as Wadley found in West Kalimantan. Second, contradicting their original intention, community maps are at risk of being used for exclusionary purposes; for example, to support the interests of powerful community members in promoting destructive logging or plantation development. When maps are used for exclusionary purposes, issues of community access may be ignored, as are claims of less powerful groups against their neighbours.

Ideas about participation also underlie interest in local management systems. The subtext of the interest in local management systems is to draw attention to potential alternatives to the top-down approaches in natural resource management. Eghenter (Chapter 8) discusses the advantages of taking local management systems seriously and respecting institutional (adat) capacity for managing local access to resources. Where local institutions are changing or weakening from market or other forms of largely external pressure, then she recommends strengthening them. Only when local capacities are developed will participation be real. At the Kayan Mentarang National Park mechanisms have been put in place for an inter-adat institutional coordination body of elected members of different customary councils to actively manage the conservation area. Under this arrangement, the central and regional governments ideally act only as facilitators, advisers and providers of guidelines, or at best as participants in co-management. However, in situations where the issue of unequal power relations has not been dealt with, as in the Model Forest Management Area in Southwest Bintulu in Sarawak (parts of which were located on land claimed under customary tenure), local management systems may not be accorded the respect required for participatory management. In this instance, according to Pedersen and his colleagues (Chapter 9), groups with diverging interests (loggers and local people) could ‘co-exist positively’ because of the initial economic gains that emerged from the presence of logging camps, including jobs, new fish ponds, and income-generation schemes such as pepper production. In the long term, there are predictable downsides and the ever-present potential for conflict over land between communities whose priority is to have sufficient land for subsistence agriculture and logging concessionaires who are interested in timber for profitable logging.

Clearly, participation based on accenting ethnic difference has had mixed results. However, analysts have warned against the potential risks of placing too much emphasis on difference.

Indonesia has a history of popular struggles that were phrased … not as claims of distinctive, culture-bound communities (masyarakat adat), but as struggles of ‘the people’ (rakyat). Is the shift of focus from people to culture, which coincides with a shift of the site of struggle from agricultural land to forests and nature, the best approach to justice? (Li 2003: 383).