12

A Political-Ecological Heritage of Resource Contest and Conflict

Michael R. Dove

Introduction

There is an interesting divide in studies of ‘heritage’ in Asia between the subjects of cultural heritage on the one hand and on the other hand natural heritage. The loss, restoration and preservation of particular domains of cultural heritage draw considerable attention; and the same could be said for particular places of natural heritage, as in protected areas, but there are few efforts that span the two subjects. There are few efforts, that is, that pertain to the intersections of nature and culture, to society-environment relations – the study of the Asian heritage of natural resource use, for example. The exceptions to this rule are instructive. For example, there are one or two World Heritage sites that have risen to prominence in the region, like the rice terraces of the Ifugao of Northern Luzon in the Philippines (Conklin 1980) that clearly feature anthropogenic landscapes. Some attention has also been given to the pan-Asian tradition of ‘sacred trees/forests’, which are popularly seen as native means of conserving the natural environment (Darlington 2003; Freeman 1999; Sponsel 2005). But these are exceptional sites. Almost by definition, they are not relevant to the vast majority of the lands and peoples of Asia (Dove et al. 2011). More numerous have been the studies by anthropologists and other social scientists of systems of indigenous knowledge, including indigenous environmental knowledge, throughout Asia – even if the language of ‘cultural heritage’ has not typically been employed in describing them. These studies have greatly widened academic understandings of the existence and sophistication of non-western systems of understanding and relating to the natural environment.

In terms of the contemporary crisis of environmental degradation in the region, however, study of the indigenous heritage of environmental knowledge may be less important than study of the heritage of environmental politics. As ancient as cultural traditions of exploiting natural resources are traditions of conflict over such exploitation. The earliest historical records from the region tell us of persistent patterns of resource contest between metropolitan elites and marginal peoples – which in Southeast Asia often have taken the form of a contest between lowland states and upland ethnic minorities (Scott 2009). This contest has typically consisted of efforts by the metropole to appropriate valuable natural resources from the margins on the one hand, and on the other hand of efforts by those at the margins to frustrate these efforts by concealing or obscuring their resources. These enduring contests have produced their own culturally embedded norms of belief and practice, which constitute a robust and distinctive heritage. This heritage privileges not the rights of local communities but those of distant political powers; it privileges not local resource knowledge and practices but imposition of alien management regimes.

This heritage, which we might term Asia’s ‘political ecological heritage of resource contest and conflict’, is very powerful. It is arguably more relevant to the contemporary crisis of resource degradation than any heritage of conservation – because degradation is largely a product not of the absence of resource conservation but rather the presence of resource conflicts. This heritage is at odds with government conservation policy in the region, which generally stipulates that societies at the margins destroy natural resources and the environment, whereas the historic reality is that marginal groups lose natural resources to the metropoles. State policy generally depicts the metropole as the source of rational, sustainable resource management, although the metropole has historically been responsible, directly or indirectly, for most resource degradation. This political ecological heritage is informal. Whereas much that is termed ‘cultural heritage’ is formal and codified, this historic pattern of natural resource use and abuse is not – it is a vernacular heritage. In studying this heritage, I give special weight to actual practice as opposed to idealised policy (Mosse 2004) drawing on the surge in interest in this topic over the past several decades (Bourdieu [1972] 1977; Giddens 1984: 141; Ortner 1984: 148).

I will explore this political ecological heritage by drawing on data on the history of natural resource use in Borneo and more generally the Indo-Malay realm, although the discussion will also be relevant to much of the rest of Southeast and South Asia. My approach to this topic is informed by the field of political ecology. The central tenet of political ecology is that local environmental relations cannot be understood or managed properly without situating them properly within a wider socioecological context and in particular without considering the significance of wider political-economic structures (Blaikie 1985; Forsyth 2003; Peet and Watts 1996; Robbins 2004). I will begin my study with the recounting of a folk parable of elite resource extraction and other examples of the same pattern from both past and present in the region. I will then contrast this historic pattern of elite resource capture with contemporary conservation and development policy in the region, which uniformly attributes resource degradation to local and minority communities at the margins not rapacious elites at the centre. Next I will analyse the political ecological dynamic that underlies this centre-periphery tension, which is the co-occurrence of political marginality with natural resource wealth. I will conclude with the implications of this analysis for our understanding of emerging challenges of conservation and development in the region and the theoretical implications of the concept of a heritage of natural resource contestation.

‘The Big Stone and The Little Man’

The political ecological heritage that is my subject here is aptly summed up in a folk parable from Southeast Kalimantan, Indonesia, which highlights the perils of resource wealth and political marginality. The Banjarese villagers who mine for diamonds in the rivers and streams of their territory say, ‘Siapa yang mendapat batu besar, dia pasti susah nanti’ (‘Whoever finds a big [gem] stone, he will inevitably suffer [as a result]’). Parables like this are worthy of scholarly attention. As Vayda (2009: 18) writes, ‘[f]ar from taking the form of strict statements of invariant sequences, the generalizations deployed by us may refer to sequences seen as recurrent but not necessarily invariant and may be encapsulated for us not in formal propositions but rather in platitudes, proverbs, and homely phrases or sayings’. This particular Banjarese parable crystallises the way that the weak and the powerful in the region relate to one another and resource wealth.¹

The Banjarese Case

The annals of trade in Southeast Asia have long pointed to the foothills above Martapura in southeastern Kalimantan as a source of precious metals and gemstones. One of the sources of nonagricultural income for these Banjarese villagers living there even today is small-scale, part time, alluvial mining of gold and especially diamonds. As the afore-mentioned parable indicates, however, such riches may present a mixed blessing. All Banjarese can tell of the misfortunes that befell men who found truly large, valuable diamonds. The problem with such stones is that they cannot readily be sold: their value is out of proportion to the marketing channels normally used by these part-time miners, who gather diamonds in the same way that they gather other non-timber forest products like rattan and aloes wood. Big gemstones become sources of dissonance within the local and regional political-economic structure because they become points in this structure where power is not commensurate with wealth. Big gemstones represent ‘big wealth’ held – though never for long – by orang kecil (little men). News of such finds quickly comes to the attention of orang besar (big men) in the district capital Martapura, the provincial capital Banjarmasin and even the nation’s capital Jakarta.

A problem is then posed: how can the finder of the stone be relieved of it without giving him more wealth than is deemed appropriate for a poor villager in a remote corner of the country? How can the ‘centre’ extract such wealth from the ‘periphery’ while still maintaining the appearance of a just society, as demanded by the national ideology of Pancasila?² The answer typically is to carry out this extraction in the name of the nation. For example, it may be announced that the stone will be deposited in a ‘national museum’, with the finder being paid an honorarium or even a lifelong pension. In some cases the stone actually may go to a national institution, but in many such cases it goes directly to state elites, who refer to the ‘national museum’ as a way of invoking powerful national images to justify their behaviour and as a gloss for their hierarchical resource extraction. In either case, the essential injustice of the extraction is perceived by all of the parties involved.³ This is reflected in the folk wisdom about big stones and little men: far from improving the position of the finder in the political-economic structure, it worsens it; far from endearing the political structure to the finder, it usually estranges him from it. The finder suffers (he is susah) because of the ill luck that brought him fortune that would never have come to him by virtue of his place in society and that, when it does come to him by chance, thereby reveals – as it brings into play – the political-economic inequity of society. This threat has stimulated development in the region of cultural norms of secrecy about resource wealth, as the early twentieth century explorer Beccari ([1904] 1986: 122) writes:

During my stay in Borneo I did not hear of any big diamond being found in the Sarawak river, but it is not in the Malay character to talk much about any such stroke of fortune; and if any were found it is not improbable that they were quietly smuggled out of the country. Perhaps the fear of attracting other prospectors, or making the Government augment the license tax may also contribute to this.

This is an ancient theme in the region, as Reid (1993: 208) writes of the early colonial period: ‘The political context made it dangerous for a small man to show his wealth unless he had sufficient dependents to defend and legitimate it’.⁴

Diamonds and Hierarchies of Power

There is an age-old association of diamonds with traditional rule in the region.⁵ Diamonds symbolise the ruler because he or she is located at the extreme end of this pattern of resource extraction: the ruler can take valuable gemstones from all others in the society, but no one else can take them from him or her. The value of such gemstones is based, therefore, on the fact that they are objects of desire and contest; and their value is most clearly expressed when this contest ceases – namely, when the paramount ruler holds them. The gemstones’ value is expressed in their movement from one owner to another; yet their ultimate value is attained when movement is no longer possible, when they are held by the paramount ruler. In the flow of resources, thus, the point where the most valuable gemstones cease to flow is the point of greatest power; and the character of the flow up to that point is revealing of the structure of power in society.⁶

In general, very valuable stones move up the hierarchy of power: thus, the Hikayat Banjar (the native, court-based chronicle of the Banjar kingdom of Southeast Kalimantan, written and rewritten over the period of about a century between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries) tells of the historic Sambas kingdom in southwest Borneo sending a large diamond, called ‘Si Misim’ as tribute to their overlords in the Banjar kingdom, which in turn sent the stone on to their overlords in the court of Mataram on Java (Ras 1968: 481, 483, 485).⁷

Contested, sideways movement sometimes occurs, as attested to by this comment of the midnineteenth century observer, St. John (1862, 2: 47) in a passage presciently titled in the contents page the ‘Discomfort of Possessing a Large Diamond’: ‘I may even see the great diamond now in the possession of a Malau chief, whom [sic] would even give it me if I would help him to destroy a Malay noble who attacked his house in order to get possession of this famous stone: the Malay was driven off, not however before he had lodged a ball in the jaw of the Malau chief’ (ibid.: 16). One of the most detailed gemstone ‘biographies’ is given by Raffles, pertaining to one of the largest diamonds to have come out of Borneo at the time of his writing early in the nineteenth century, the ‘Mátan Diamond’ (named after the seat of the sultanate in West Kalimantan where it was originally found), which weighed 367 carats. Raffles ([1817] 1978, 1: 239) recounts the movements of the Mátan Diamond up to his own day as follows:

This celebrated diamond was discovered by a Dayak, and claimed as a droit of royalty by the Sultan of the country, Gurú-Láya [Raffles subsequently refers to this stone as an ‘appanage of royalty’]; which was handed over to the Pangéran of Lándak, whose brother having got possession of it, gave it as a bribe to the Sultan of Súkadána, in order that he might be placed on the throne of Lándak.

The history of the Mátan Diamond and that of the others mentioned thus afford a window into the history of power in the society.

Other Natural Resources

The story of the big stone and the little man is a story about a rich resource that is too attractive to outside actors for the owner to hang on to it and about the multiplying misfortunes that attend the inevitable loss of the resource. The dynamics involved similarly apply to most other natural resources that have been exploited in Borneo in recent history, including black pepper in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the native rubbers in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the exotic Para rubber (Hevea brasiliensis), edible birds nests (from cavedwelling swifts, Aerodramus maximus and Aerodramus fuciphagus), rattan (from the stems of climbing palms, especially of the genus Calamus) and aloes wood (from Gonystylus spp. and especially Aquilaria spp.) among others (see Table 12.1).

Table 12.1 Historical relations between Indonesian governments and smallholder producers of various export commodities

Date	Action	Result
1870	Government passes the Agrarian Act claiming all fallow land as the state’s,for granting to European estates, etc.	Swidden cultivators decide to plant more perennial crops in their fallowed fields.
1910–13	Government restricts the gathering of forest latexes by smallholders, to protect European concessions.	Smallholders decide to cultivate rubber instead.
1910–30	Smallholder rubber producers out-plant estates, and increase their market share.	Government decides to protect the rubber estates.
1935–44	Government imposes punitive export taxes on smallholder rubber producers, to force a decrease in their production.	Smallholders increase the quantity and quality of their production, to maintain a constant level of revenue.
1951–83	Smallholder rubber producers increase their market share from 65% to 84%, by expanding the area of cultivation.	Government focuses all capital and technical assistance on the rubber estates, to minimize their loss of market share by increasing yields.
1980–90	Government promotes nucleus estate schemes, to bring smallholder rubber production under estate control.	Smallholder rubber producers resist the loss of autonomy implicit in these schemes.
1990s	Government supports restrictive markets for cloves, oranges, coffee.	Smallholders abandon each commodity in turn as prices drop.

The parable of the big stone and the little man is generally applicable to a great deal of rural resource development in the region. Whenever politically marginalised peoples develop a resource, the more successful the development becomes the more likely it is that extra-local political and economic forces will become involved and the less likely it is that the local population will retain control and continue to benefit from this development (see Figure 12.1). This principle still largely applies in the post-Suharto era in Indonesia, with the difference being that in some cases provincial- and district-level elites have supplanted those of Jakarta, the national capital.⁸

Figure 12.1  The historic pattern of natural resource development in Borneo

One corollary to the principle of the big stone and the little man is that the greater the extent to which control over resources is forcibly shifted from local to extra-local forces, the greater the likelihood that the resources will be degraded (see also Brookfield et al. 1990: 499). A second corollary is that whenever the value or importance of a particular resource diminishes, local communities will likely be able to reassert some control and resume some benefit and the process of degradation may begin to be reversed. The obverse is also true, which is the third and final corollary: whenever extra-local forces encourage resource development by local peoples and permit it to remain in local hands, this development is by definition likely to be of less interest to the wider society and for this same reason it is likely to be less beneficial for the local peoples themselves.⁹

Figure 12.2  Kantu’ Dayak hunting party (Photo M. Dove)

Figure 12.3  Kantu’ Dayak girl harvesting dry rice (Photo M. Dove)

Figure 12.4  Kantu’ Dayak woman harvesting dry rice (Photo M. Dove)

Figure 12.5  Kantu’ Dayak man shaping a canoe paddle (Photo M. Dove)

Conservation and Development Theory

The big stone and little man pattern of resource capture by extra-local elites is widespread but scarcely recognised. Marginal forest communities in the region, as elsewhere around the world, are commonly perceived by national governments and international conservation and development institutions not as victims of elite appropriation but as the perpetrators of resource abuse themselves, due to ignorance or poverty. This is due not to lack of knowledge of the relevant academic work on elite resource capture but rather to the fact that the popular misinterpretation of resource use by marginal communities serves elite political interests. These interests are served by a steadfast focus on the resources that need to be given to such communities to lift them out of poverty, as opposed to the resource appropriations that have impoverished them in the first place. This obfuscation of reality can be seen clearly in the development of campaigns to market rainforest products, as well as in the structurally similar campaigns that have succeeded them, like timber certification (Cashore 2002, 2004).

Figure 12.6  Kantu’ Dayak carving a hilt for a brush-sword (Photo M. Dove)

Rainforest Marketing

The belief that underdevelopment and environmental degradation are linked on the one hand and that economic development and conservation are linked on the other hand, led to the rise of integrated conservation and development projects (ICDPs) in the 1980s. A central element in many ICDPs was the idea of rainforest marketing, which was initially popularised by some northern non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including Cultural Survival and its marketing arm Cultural Survival Enterprises, Inc. (Clay 1991, 1992a, 1992b). The goal of rainforest marketing was to help forest peoples replace their purportedly unsustainable use of the forest with sustainable marketing of non-timber forest products (NTFPs). The physical manifestation of this solution came to be seen on the shelf of any grocery or health food store in the northern industrialised countries in the form of a wide range of products based on rainforest fruits and nuts. These were important forerunners of today’s vast green consumerism movement (e.g., shade-grown, fair-traded coffee; see Lyon 2004).

The premise of rainforest marketing is that if the return to market-oriented exploitation of the forest can be raised high enough, purportedly destructive subsistence-oriented exploitation will cease.¹⁰ Thus, a container of Rainforest Crunch ice cream stated ‘Rainforest Crunch helps to show that the rainforests are more profitable when their nuts, fruits and medicinal plants are cultivated for traditional harvest than when their trees are cut and burned for short-term gain’. And a box of ‘Rainforest Crisp’ breakfast cereal stated that its marketing venture helps to raise the economic returns to forest residents from forest nuts by 2,000 per cent and that the ‘increased revenues from the nut harvest make the trees too valuable to cut down’. Deforestation thus is linked to local poverty, which in turn is linked to exploitation of the wrong products of the tropical forest in the wrong way.

Central to the logic of rainforest marketing is the assumption that local forest communities are primarily responsible for degradation of tropical forests and lands; and the proposed solution to this is to intensify their exploitation of non-timber forest products. One box of Rainforest Flakes stated: ‘Rainforest Products [the name of the firm involved] and other related companies are working together with Cultural Survival to demonstrate that forest residents can make more money per year from the sale of nuts and fruits than they can by logging and ranching’. The clear implication is that it is the forest residents who are doing the logging and ranching and so the challenge is to make sustainable forest uses more profitable for them than nonsustainable uses. But the real question is not how profitable logging and ranching are compared with the sale of nuts and fruits, but rather who is doing the logging and ranching and who would be doing the selling of nuts and fruits? In most cases, the two groups are very different; and whereas the latter are likely to be local forest residents, the former are not. Local communities are usually not the perpetrators but rather the victims of large-scale resource degradation. For one-half century, anthropologists and others have documented the ability of local communities in the region to practice sustainable natural resource management, beginning with Conklin’s (1957) study of swidden agriculture in the Philippines in the 1950s and extending to contemporary analyses of conservation in ‘vernacular spaces’ (Dove et al. 2011), for example. The lesson of the big stone and the little man is that conservationists would, in practice, better attain their ends by protecting the people in the tropical forest than protecting the forest itself.

Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs)

Much of the work over the past several decades on non-timber forest products has focused on showing that the wealth of tropical forests holds untapped potential for marginal forest peoples. Peters et al.’s (1989) widely cited study concludes that the market value of sustainable exploitation of non-timber forest products exceeds that of exploiting the timber or converting the land to other uses. Following a similar logic, another contributor to the field wrote, ‘[r]ecent studies on indigenous peoples and the impact of their traditional life-styles on tropical forests appear to indicate that crafts development represents a constructive alternative to destructive land-use practices’ (Kerr 1991: 33). A like conclusion was reached in a United Nations (UNESCO/FAO) study of the potential for forest-based handicrafts and other resources to contribute to forestry development and protection in Kalimantan (reported in Ohlsson 1990). The authors of the United Nations study concluded that in addition to handicrafts, the income of forest peoples could be supplemented by ‘agriculture or other activities, such as butterfly farms, crocodile farms, fish farms, and medicinal plant collection’ (ibid.: 69). Notably absent from this list were the tropical forest resources of greatest importance to global society: valuable hardwoods, trees for pulp, gems, gold and copper and other minerals, the world’s greatest botanical gene pool, rubber and other smallholder export crops such as coffee, tobacco and coconuts. The omission of these resources from the list in the United Nations study implicitly endorses the claim of extra-local interests to these resources and weakens the claims of the forest communities themselves.

There are two implicit premises in these marketing and development proposals: the first is that NTFPs are resources that local people can be allowed to exploit; the second and associated premise is that NTFPs are resources that no one but local people would want to exploit. That is, NTFPs are not just non-timber forest products, they are in fact ‘nonvaluable forest products’, or NVFPs. These premises are reflected in the fact that the term ‘non-timber forest product’ is never applied in the context of any higher-value, large-scale development of tropical forest resources. For example, there is no reason to not think of mineral resources as NTFPs, but the world’s biggest gold and copper mine, the Freeport mine in the rainforests of West Irian, is never called a ‘non-timber forest product project’.

To return to the United Nations study of Kalimantan, for a part of the world as rich in natural resources as this, a list of potential income sources for local communities that cannot transcend butterfly and crocodile farms is a recommendation not for the empowerment of the forest peoples but for their impoverishment (see also Li 2007: 141). The list of potential sources of income in the United Nations study is a list not of what the broader society values most, but of what it values least. It is a list of what the broader society is likely to allow the forest peoples to keep, so long as the market does not suddenly render one of these products more valuable than is deemed appropriate for marginal peoples. The search for new sources of income for marginal forest inhabitants is thus, in effect, a search for opportunities that have no other claimants, a search for the least coveted development alternatives.

Political Powerlessness and Resource Wealth

The history of resource exploitation in Borneo is at variance with the prevailing conservation and development premise that tropical forests are overexploited by local communities due to their failure to sustainably exploit and market forest products. The evidence suggests that there has been no lack of such initiatives in the past and that the problem has been loss of control to extra-local elites whenever a resource is developed to the point of becoming attractive. This evidence suggests that the nature of the relationship between resource degradation and the underdevelopment of forest peoples often is the reverse of that commonly claimed. Resources are not degraded because forest peoples are impoverished; rather, these peoples are impoverished by the degradation of their resources by extra-local actors. Their proximity to the resource base makes them an easy target for blame for degradation and their lack of political capital makes it difficult for them to contest this charge. The problem is not that forest communities are poor in resources, therefore, but that they are politically weak; and the problem is not that the forest is environmentally fragile, but that it is politically marginal.¹¹ This political poverty often coincides geographically with resource wealth (Dove 1996). The resulting problem for the forest peoples is that they inhabit a resource base that is coveted by groups more powerful than they. From the standpoint of conservation, the problem for the forest is that it is inhabited by peoples who are too weak to insist on its sustainable use.¹²

The rhetoric of both national and international conservation and development policy in the region frames the challenge of tropical resource conservation as the question, ‘Will the wider society ‘help’ impoverished tropical populations to improve their economic returns from alternate uses of the forest so as to reduce their destruction of the forest?’ Alatas (1977: 8) sees the image of the developmentally needy native as the contemporary equivalent of the colonial image of the lazy native: ‘The image of the indolent, dull, backward and treacherous native has changed to that of a dependent native requiring assistance to climb the ladder of progress’. The conservation and development discourse about how best to ‘conserve’ tropical forest resources and ‘develop’ forest dwellers represents forest dwellers as uninformed agents of resource degradation and extra-local elites as informed agents of ‘improvement’ (see Li 2007).

This poverty-based explanation of forest degradation confers several distinct benefits on political elites in the region. First, it focuses the public discourse on the need to develop the economy and culture of the forest communities. This adds to the benign tone of the discourse and thereby strengthens it (see also Tsing 1993: 296). Second, the emphasis on poverty precludes recognition of the actual resource wealth of forest communities. It is much less problematic to assume that forest peoples have no resources than to explain why the resources that they have are being taken away from them. The emphasis on what the state needs to do for such communities effectively precludes attention to what the state is doing to them.¹³ Third and finally, the poverty thesis affords the central government another excuse for further extending its bureaucratic authority into the lives of forest communities, which, as Ferguson (1990: xv) argues, may be the most significant impact of much rural development planning. The association of resource degradation with poverty as opposed to wealth constitutes a ‘discursive knot’ (Rabinow 1986: 253). It is tied by asking, ‘How can we help?’ and, ‘What do we need to give to tropical forest peoples?’ This knot can be untied by asking instead, ‘How are we hurting?’ and, ‘What have we taken from tropical forest peoples?’ There is considerable irony, therefore, in the offer of ‘help’ by the agents of resource degradation to the victims of this degradation. The colonial novelist Dekker referred to the ‘cowardice’ of ‘invoking public charity for the victims of chronic piracy’ (Multatuli [1859] 1982: 319).¹⁴

Conclusion

Summary

This chapter began with the Banjarese parable of ‘the little man’ who finds a ‘big stone’, a diamond, and reaps misfortune as a result. The misfortune in such cases stems from the incongruous and unstable combination of resource wealth and political poverty. This incongruence, with all of its ill consequences, aptly characterises the circumstances of places like the interior of Borneo, where great wealth of natural resources is coupled with politically disenfranchised human communities. The resulting imbalance explains some of the key dynamics in the history of forests and forest peoples in Borneo, in particular the degradation of the former and the immiseration of the latter. This interpretation of underdevelopment and resource degradation in terms of lack of political power directly contradicts prevailing conservation and development policies, which instead attribute these problems to local poverty and misuse of resources. Prevailing development ideas are exemplified by rainforest marketing, the premise of which is that forest peoples degrade their environment because they are poor. The contemporary search for new non-timber forest products (NTFPs) to bring to market has in effect been a search for nonvaluable forest products (NVFPs) of so little interest to the wider society that they can be left to marginal forest peoples. The forest peoples’ real problem of lack of political power has been obscured by the dominant conservation and development discourse. This focuses – using seemingly apolitical language – on problems of addition not subtraction, helping not hurting, and economic as opposed to political solutions, and thereby ties a discursive knot.

New Arenas for Natural Resource Contests

There are major, current developments in Borneo, as throughout the Indo-Malay region, that raise anew questions about control of natural resource development by local peoples versus extralocal state elites. One prominent example is development of huge oil palm plantations (Potter 2008; Sandker et al. 2007; Sheil et al. 2009), which threatens to add to a growing level of political insecurity in Borneo. Outbreaks of large-scale ethnic violence in West Kalimantan beginning in the late 1990s between Dayak and immigrant Madurese were concentrated in the vicinities of centres of government estate development (Davidson 2008; Dove 2006; IDRD 1994). The tension between local peoples and extra-local elites is also likely to be exacerbated by the new interest in tropical forest lands stemming from climate change, which is producing the latest effort by outside actors to re-imagine the natural resource landscape of Borneo. There is enormous international interest in lowering emissions of greenhouse gases through Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) programs (Chhatre and Agrawal 2009; Griffiths and Martone 2009; Schwartzman and Moutinho 2008). Indonesia, because of its abundant forests but also high rate of deforestation, is one of the major global targets for these programs. Already underway, efforts to implement REDD programs in Indonesia and thereby secure carbon credits will reinvigorate the centuries-old contests over natural resources between marginal communities and central state elites.

What is the solution to the quandary posed by the parable of ‘the big stone and the little man’? To begin with we make progress by simply recognising this quandary for what it is, because this is not the way we generally perceive these communities and resources. The parable does not depict a community that needs a resource that it doesn’t have; rather, it depicts a community that cannot afford to lose a resource that it already has. This is not a quandary of a lack of resources, therefore, it is the quandary of a lack of power to hold on to an existing resource – and this completely transforms the problematic. The general response of the national government and its international advisors toward this problem has been to offer, in effect, to develop the less valuable resources of the tropical forests on behalf of the local peoples. But this is based on a complete misreading of and failure to address the central problematic, namely the historic pattern of appropriation of the richest resources by state elites. What the local communities need above all are the means to maintain control of their lands and natural resources and this entails political empowerment at the local level and wider development of the institutions of civil society.

The Asian Heritage of Natural Resource Contests

The concept and study of ‘Asian cultural heritage’ illuminates this issue of natural resource contests. It helps us to identify customary, embedded patterns of natural resource management and conflict. It helps us to take a more Weberian view of these patterns (Gerth and Mills 1991), not as exceptional or anomalous, but as inevitable functions of regional political realities. It helps us to understand, in particular, the ubiquitous gap between government natural resource policy and practice, which is a central issue in debates about environmental degradation and human immisseration in the region. For two decades, scholars have been trying to theorise this gap (Ferguson 1990; Mosse 2004). By seeing this as a distinctive cultural heritage, we can interpret this gap as not simply an epiphenomenon but as the product of historical, social and political dynamics.

This analysis demonstrates the advantage of applying the analytical framework of cultural heritage to new subjects like natural resource management and, in particular, resource contest and conflict, which were long seen as something anomalous. Scholars of natural resource management in the region are trying to show how ongoing, chronic conflict can sometimes play an integral role in the functioning, not breakdown, of management systems (Harwell 2011). The idea of a heritage of contest and conflict naturalises considerations of politics and power. It helps us to better understand the bases for policy failure and resource abuse and environmental degradation. It leads us away from the conservation and development fantasy of ‘win-win solutions’ toward politically more realistic views of relations between state elites, marginal communities and natural resources.

This pattern of elite resource capture and deprivation of marginal peoples can be called a ‘cultural heritage’ because it is embedded in the region’s cultures. This embeddedness is reflected in the axiomatic way in which state elites claim the moral high ground of rational resource management and the proprietary rights that flow from this, in contrast to marginal forest communities whom they represent as irrational resource users undeserving of rights and needing remedial attention from the state. These time-worn and powerful stereotypes frame natural resource debates in fundamental ways and thereby foreclose some policy options and pre-ordain others.

Notes

1  This analysis draws on the more extended treatment of the topic of ‘the big stone and the little man’ in Dove (2011).

2  Pancasila translates as ‘five principles’, Ketuhanan ‘belief in God’, Kebangsaan ‘nationalism’, Perikemanusiaan ‘humanitarianism’, Keadilan Sosial ‘social justice’, and Demokrasi ‘democracy’.

3  See Forshee’s (2002) analysis of narratives of loss of valuable objects on Sumba and Timor in eastern Indonesia.

4  The colonial novelist Eduard Douwes Dekker ([1859] 1982, whose pen name was Multatuli) places this theme at the centre of his novel Max Havelaar, a famous critique of nineteenth-century government in Indonesia. The symbol of oppression is the ‘official theft’ by the native aristocracy of the villagers’ water buffalos (Multatuli [1859] 1982: 275). The fact that this theme also transcends the region is evident from its appearance elsewhere in literature, as in Steinbeck’s ([1945] 1974) novel The Pearl, which is set in Latin America. Steinbeck tells of a great pearl – the ‘Pearl of the world’ – found by a poor pearl diver, Kino, and of the conspiracy by society to defraud him of it. Instead of bringing him wealth and happiness, the pearl brings Kino and his family violence and tragedy, so that at the end of the story he hurls it back into the ocean from whence it came.

5  Nagtegaal (1994) entitled a paper on entrepreneurial Javanese rulers in the early modern era, ‘Diamonds Are a Regent’s Best Friend’.

6  The concept of valuable minerals ‘moving’ has wider provenance, as in Slater’s (1994) report on Amazonian miners’ conception of gold as a living, feminine presence that seeks out favoured men and then moves on.

7  On the impact of centre-periphery relations on patterns of resource use in Indonesia, see Dove (1985, 1996) and Dove and Kammen (2001).

8  The application of this principle beyond Borneo is attested to by Gudeman and Rivera’s (1990: 155) description of a similar cycle of local development and extra-local appropriation in Colombia.

9  When the twentieth century’s purportedly biggest gold discovery was made in East Kalimantan in 1997, by Bre-X Minerals Ltd., the primary battle over rights to the claim was fought between the children of then-President Suharto. The possibility of a rightful claim being made by local communities was not even discussed. But when the claim was proven to be fraudulent two years later, small North American investors got stuck holding most of the worthless stock. The association between little men and worthless resources was aptly expressed in the title of a New York Times (1997) article on the subject, ‘Small Investors and Big Money Taken by Tale of Jungle Gold’ (see also Tsing 2000, 2005). In short, the claim proved to be so worthless that it was passed off to ‘little men’.

10  See Vandermeer and Perfecto (1995) on the ‘blame-the-victim’ premises of rainforest marketing.

11  The forest peoples of Indonesia are not just physically but also culturally and politically distant from the nation’s seats of power. From ancient times in Indonesia, forest residence has been associated with antiestablishment views, held by those using the forest as a place from which to flee, or assail, the central state (Dove 1985, 2003; see also Scott 2009).

12  Ludwig et al. (1993: 17) reach a similar conclusion regarding the inevitability of resource degradation by focusing on the other part of this equation, namely the association of rich resources and strong peoples, writing, ‘[t]he larger and the more immediate are the prospects for gain, the greater the political power that is used to facilitate unlimited exploitation’.

13  Li (2006: 34) has similarly critiqued the World Bank’s view of development in Indonesia as ‘a matter of addition’ instead of ‘altering existing economic relations’.

14  As Li (2006: 33) writes a century and a half later, with respect to the World Bank’s current village development program in Indonesia, ‘[t]he benevolence of a program does not excise the element of power’.

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