Communities at the Crossroads: Forest or large-scale monoculture in Kalimantan, Indonesia

The forests of Indonesia are home to globally important biodiversity, a source of livelihoods for thousands of local communities, and at the heart of culture and traditional knowledge systems. The forest has also become a battleground where powerful actors meet with communities who struggle to restore traditional communal rights over natural resources and land. This thesis is aimed to gain an in-depth understanding of what happens when powerful corporations lay claim to natural resources inhabited by indigenous people, which is a worldwide phenomenon. The thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 provides the introduction, starts with a general introduction to the Indonesia's forest management, the timeline of events that significantly affected the Indonesia's forest cover, the research area in Kalimantan and its Iban inhabitants, including their relationships with nature. Chapter 2 presents a more extended introduction to the regional and local issues, and focus on comparing the effectiveness of two approaches Problems-Solving and Appreciative Inquiry. Chapter 3 follows with an investigation of the deforestation phenomenon, based on remote sensing, combined with an ethnographic study. This chapter also shows that some forest areas were preserved by the local communities. Chapter 4 investigates how and why these communities have done so. In Chapter 5, the analysis was broadened to also include communities who had accepted the oil palm to allow comparison. Chapter 6 moves the level of attention from the individual responses up to the village level. Chapter 7 supplies general conclusions on what happens when powerful corporations lay claim to natural resources inhabited by indigenous people. We also discuss our findings in relation to decentralization, governance, and landscape approaches, and present our reflections of the research methodologies used in this thesis, referring to their position on the dimension between purely inductive and purely deductive approaches