Table of Contents
Since the 1980s, there has been a radical shift in thinking about environmental and natural resource management as being inseparable from issues of the welfare and human rights of minority or indigenous people (Chartier and Sellato 1998). This view was also shared in conservationist circles, where indigenous people acquired increasing visibility in the management of protected areas. Indigenous people and conservation organisations came to be perceived as natural allies based on the evidence that:
… most of the remaining significant areas of high natural value on earth are inhabited by indigenous people. This testifies to the efficacy of indigenous resource management systems (WWF 1996: 3).
The preservation of biological diversity and natural resources was not only regarded as compatible with the rights and traditions of indigenous people, but instrumental to the efforts of many forest communities to protect their forest and defend their land (WWF 1996, 1998).
In this context, the adoption and application of local management practices and customary law is viewed as the key to success. The devolution of management responsibilities to local institutions and local leaders is based on the belief that these people are endowed with a natural capacity to manage a protected area in the interest of sustainability and biodiversity conservation. At the same time, however, little attention is paid to the historical, social and legal context of local institutions and custom, with little understanding of the premises that would sustain their effective integration into different political and legal regimes.
By drawing on the experience of an experiment in community-based management in the National Park of Kayan Mentarang, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, this chapter examines the ways in which customary regulations can be integrated with national laws with regard to the management and protection of natural resources. I focus my attention on customary law, or adat, as an ideological and ethical statement by the community with regard to criteria for resource management. I analyse the kind of resources regulated, and how they are regulated, as inscribed in local regulations among Kenyah and other communities inhabiting the area of the National Park. This is done in order to uncover potential points of intersection between criteria for natural resource management as practised locally, and the principles of management of protected areas contained in the documents of the Indonesian Government, and implemented by conservation organisations like the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). I argue that uncovering potential points of convergence and difference is crucial to a productive engagement between law and custom, and the creation of future alternatives for effective and equitable strategies of conservation area management.