Activities in Kalimantan

Kapuas Hulu Landscape, West Kalimantan

Land-use change in frontier landscapes of West Kalimantan involves rapidly spreading estate crops. The local communities are navigating their development pathways in the context of a spreading agri-business economy. Tanah Air Beta has nurtured governance coalitions to determine how environmental values might be secured and development might be inclusive. Part of this includes untying the assumptions on how communities benefit from and shape local land-use.

Communities are highly heterogeneous, yet are nearly unified in their support for development. There is potential to nurture the management coalition to better-coordinate visions of all the actors in the landscape. Adoption of multi-criteria assessments could provide tools for achieving spatially optimal solutions that empower Adat management through a landscape approach process. Landscape scale governance learning processes could adhere to new measurement principles that ensure societal beneficial landscape outcomes.

Malinau and Tubu Landscapes, North Kalimantan

The Punan hunter-gatherers face development pressures and roads are opening up to the interior of the Tubu highlands. Punan communities are no longer nomads, but mobility is still high. Some Punan Tubu communities live in the nearby town of Malinau (in Respen Sembuak, a resettlement village that has existed since the 1970s) and other members live in remote highlands areas about a four-day trip by motor canoe from Malinau. Only recently, a road has been opened to the Tubu area which will make the pressure even greater on the natural forests in the region.

Forest biodiversity is important to the Punan because of their dependence on livelihood activities which include harvesting food and crop resources, and the collection of Non-Timber Forest Products. The Punan will need to adapt to new conditions and integrate themselves into the cash economy to survive in a changing world.