Beyond oil palm development: perceptions and land-use decisions of local communities

Abstract

Involving local communities in ecosystem service research can improve the relevance, quality, and, ultimately, outcomes of natural resource management. Local engagement can also contribute to solutions for ecosystem management challenges by diversifying the range of options, and contextualizing their applicability. The benefits to local communities of ecosystem service-based policies for regulating industrial developments, such as oil palm industry growth, are therefore best understood from the perspectives of the local communities themselves. The goal of my study was to assess land-use change in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, and to identify the causes and effects of the increasing expansion of the oil palm industry. I used various tools to explore how local communities perceive the changes to ecosystem services in an oil palm-dominated landscape. The research was conducted in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, between 2016 and 2018. In the following chapters, I present the details of my study. In Chapter 2, I examine community perceptions of environmental change. I used observations, focus group discussions (FGD), and interviews in four villages along the Belayan River, in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, to explore how ecosystems are perceived by local communities living in different oil palm development contexts. I also used a novel tabletop Role Playing Game (RPG) to understand how these communities make land-use management decisions to meet their livelihood needs. The game is presented in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3, I describe my RPG and assess its value as a research tool, and in Chapter 4, I present the details of how I used my RPG to gather information on the demographic factors that affect land-use changes. Main livelihood activities differed across the villages, which were either fishing communities, oil palm smallholder communities, or forest-dependent communities. Perceptions of ecosystem services also varied across the villages, although three services were considered crucial by all four villages: fish provision, water quality, and land availability. These services can be a common-concern entry point for discussions on landscape management. Despite common recognition of the negative impacts of oil palm development on these crucial services, all communities are nevertheless choosing to expand the oil palm industry. The communities identified a wide array of direct and indirect drivers underlying this trend, including social influence, financial capital, ecological factors, and subsidies from local governments. This was evident in the game sessions, where most players chose to expand oil palm land-use in their landscapes. Their decisions in the game provided us with an understanding of how and why land-use changes occur. Decisions were affected by the demographics of players, particularly concerning how they allocated their labour in the game. For example, ethnicity and livelihood were shown to affect the amount of paddy farming, ethnicity, and education were shown to affect oil palm expansion, and livelihood and gender were shown to affect land clearing. In terms of land management, this study highlighted that every landscape has different types of actors that collectively affect land management decisions, which lead to oftendifferent land cover outcomes. I learned that the processes of planning and managing sustainable lands should be adapted to local contexts since the different actors have different characteristics, values, and perceptions for managing their land. Thus, to manage land more sustainably, it is necessary to include the more holistic knowledge of local communities, even though other factors, such as institutions (policy and social relations) and nature (climate change) are also drivers behind people’s land-use decisions. If crucial, widely valued ecosystem services are to be maintained in oil palm landscapes, it is essential to engage local people, along with policymakers and oil palm companies in the beginning stages of land-use policymaking processes.