Adaptive collaborative management of community forests in Asia ...

Chapter 5: Muddling Towards Cooperation in Malinau • 137
to more than 60,000 ha in Malinau from April 2000 to August 2001. Rapid
unsustainable timber extraction resulted, with relatively small benefits to
communities (Limberg 2004; Kamelarczyk and Andersen 2004). Some
forward-looking communities refused offers of huge sums of money to
log their land (Iwan 2003), choosing instead to conserve their forest.
The central government has since made such permits illegal, although
the district government is still seeking opportunities to grant small-scale
concessions to generate income. Confusion about the classification of land
functions and conflict over claims to forestland have been frequent since
reforms began.
As the new district government has attempted to establish its authority
and presence, opportunities for claiming forest benefits have become more
circumscribed and access to government officials has become formalised
and distant. Local government is at ease with the rhetoric of civil society
participation but suspicious and unsure exactly how to do it. The heady
early days of reform are over, but the roles of district government and local
people in the forest remain as opaque as ever, and struggles for control of
the forest continue.
Malinau research forest
In 1996, the Ministry of Forestry in Indonesia granted the Center for
International Forestry Research (CIFOR) rights to conduct long-term
research in a 321,000-ha area established as the Bulungan Research
Forest 8 . CIFOR has the general mandate to conduct research for the public
good that will improve the sustainability of forests to help alleviate poverty.
Under that mandate, CIFOR’s objective in the research forest is to test more
integrated approaches to managing large forest landscapes. The research
projects have thus focused on how to reduce the impact of logging, improve
the access of communities to forest benefits in the Malinau watershed and
develop more integrated land-use plans and decision making. Research on
how communities value biodiversity, their economic dependence on forests
and how community participation in local government decisions can be
enhanced supported these goals. The program of work described in this
chapter constitutes just one subgroup of all the activities in the research
forest. The authors of this report were part of a larger program at CIFOR
called Adaptive Collaborative Management (ACM), and we referred to
ourselves as the ACM-Malinau team. Our activities in Malinau predated
the other studies in this volume and so were organised with different