Recent reform policies in Indonesia have led to the termination of numerous timber concessions and to legislation providing local communities with the opportunity to establish cooperatives for their own development. This has allowed communities to take more control of their forests. In addition, the power vacuum created by the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime has left local and regional governments in some confusion, resulting in a simultaneous increase in local empowerment (as the police and military have lost a good deal of legitimacy) and official corruption. At the time, the implementation of formal otonomi daerah was still very much in question; however, even before its deadline for implementation in 2001, a de facto regional autonomy existed.

In the borderlands of West Kalimantan, these changes have been visible in the heavy involvement of Sarawak timber companies with local community cooperatives in logging forests under the ostensible control of communities.^[35] This was nowhere more apparent than in the upper Kapuas borderland inhabited by the Iban, where historical routes of trade are being used to transport wood across the international border. Although officially considered smuggling, the practice of paying local officials, police and military has made this activity clearly visible. It was uncertain how the eventual implementation of otonomi daerah and the opening of an official border crossing in the area would affect this activity.

Local communities have seen this time as quite positive, as they have the power to manage their resources for and by themselves. Their involvement with Malaysian tukei has caused them little alarm, given their own position as borderlanders. However, they have been worried about future resource competition from timber and oil palm companies that might gain legally binding licences to their forests. This threat appeared to be one factor driving local cooperatives to allow logging in their forests. Another factor was the continuing economic crisis, and although there have been local economic alternatives available (such as pepper gardening and labour migration), logging appeared to be a quick way to earn ready cash, particularly as local Iban tended not to be doing the actual work. The power of communities to benefit more from the logging has been checked in part by the position of local élites who served as liaisons between tukei and communities. Even those local communities that deal directly with tukei may have been hindered in negotiations by their general lack of information about the value of their timber.

Logging practices appeared to be relatively low-impact, involving nothing more than chainsaws and bicycles, and given adequate control, local communities might be able to prevent widespread damage to their forests. This low-impact method might offer a chance for forest management at the local level, while still allowing occasional (and very long-cycle) logging. Under the circumstances of the time, however, this prospect was probably not very good. The demands on local timber may simply have resulted in more bicycle-logging crews in the forest, which is particularly worrisome for the long-term health of the forests. Extraction of high-quality timber has immediate and ancillary effects on surrounding biodiversity, and impoverishment of the forests may well lead to an impoverishment of local people.

Iban have relied heavily on their forests for swidden rice farming and numerous non-timber forest products. One study determined that Iban who are unaffected by timber cutting and related forest destruction purchased only about nine per cent of their foods; the remainder came from fields and forest (Colfer et al. 2000).^[36] As with most poor people in Indonesia, the Iban have tended to rely on a mixed strategy for household livelihood. In addition to the all-important rice farming, they have collected forest products and garden vegetables for sale and home consumption; they have cultivated rubber and pepper as cash crops, and they have engaged in circular labour migration. Their position on this borderland adjacent to a more prosperous and politically stable neighbour and their identity as a partitioned ethnic group has meant that part of that mixed strategy lies across the border, where they have not only found temporary employment but also occasionally places to permanently migrate. Logging is part of this general circumstance and part of the mixed strategy.

The borderland character and the current logging activity in this area was reflected clearly in something I encountered along the government road between Nanga Badau and Lanjak. There, where a bicycle-logging track ended and balok were piled for pick-up, a local had painted a sign reading ‘CV Munggu Keringit Sdn Bhd’. This very effectively summed up the ambiguous position of borderland residents engaged in cooperative logging: ‘CV’ stands for ‘limited partnership’ in Indonesia (from Commanditaire Vennootschap in Dutch), while ‘Sdn Bhd’ stands for virtually the same thing in Malaysia (from Sendirian Berhad in Malaysian). As such a designation had no legal standing, it was obviously intended as a joke. But the sign conveyed very well the message that these borderlanders would continue to look to both sides in their efforts to secure a livelihood. Their position and identity as borderlanders must be given consideration in any search for income-generation alternatives that are economically and environmentally viable (Wadley and Eilenberg 2005).

The strengthening of local adat is often touted as an important means of empowering local peoples to deal with outside pressures on their resources and much official lip service is paid to it (see Eghenter, this volume). However, its effectiveness may often be overestimated. While providing some legitimacy to adat may heighten local self-esteem, adat by itself may be incapable of dealing with the issues it faces, particularly where third-party support is non-existent. A general consensus is needed among communities for devising and implementing effectively binding rules and sanctions, but adat leaders as well as the people they represent tend to have many divided loyalties themselves. Adat should not be expected to function adequately under these conditions (McCarthy 2000).

Local NGOs can give advice on, and provide critical services in, several areas: Indonesian natural resource law; regulations on international investment and relations; ways to register community land; and negotiation tactics and strategies. However, given the extremely weak judiciary and law enforcement, knowledge of laws and statutes may not provide real power in the courts, but rather may become useful in negotiations with companies. This is probably more viable than supporting local adat, especially if the NGOs involved are formed by people from the communities involved, with their own families’ interests at stake (Clarke et al. 1993). Some caution is warranted in a blanket embrace of NGOs as some may actually ‘take advantage’ of international support for local organisations.

The payment of compensation for not logging would be a costly exercise and would require substantial outside funding, but paying local communities to protect  their  forests  may  be  an  important  option  (personal  communication, E. Harwell, March 2000). Such a program, however, would have to be long-term, with adequate monitoring to determine continued compliance by the community. It might be done in conjunction with management of conservation areas such as national parks (Hamilton et al. 2000).

Regulations such as No. 6/99 on Forest Utilisation and Forest Product Harvesting in Production Forests, which allows for the issue of Forest Product Harvesting Rights over a maximum of 100 hectares a year, certainly did very little to promote long-term preservation of forest resources and actually encouraged local communities to cut their forests quickly for immediate profit. Although this regulation has been suspended (see Casson, this volume), there is no indication that logging has subsequently slowed. Indonesian national and local NGOs have played an important role in lobbying for a change to these laws.