Keywords

1.1 Aim of the Book

This book is part of a planned four-volume series that provides inter- and trans-disciplinary analyses of efforts to conserve and restore tropical peatlands in Indonesia. This book focuses on the governance of such efforts at the local level. In Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia, the rapid opening of tropical peatlands for development has resulted in dramatic ecological change and fire and international smoke damage. The carbon and methane emissions associated with peatlands conversion are considered a significant contributor to global warming. The conservation and restoration of peatlands have therefore become a global concern, and the Indonesian government and international aid organizations have begun to act. This book aims to empirically clarify how peatlands policies have been implemented at the local—particularly the village—level in the hope that this analysis can inform improved solutions in the immediate future.

Although a significant amount of research has been conducted on tropical peatlands, most of it takes a natural science approach. Numerous studies have demonstrated, however, that peatland conservation and fire prevention methods based on purely natural science research is often irrelevant when applied in local societies. To achieve sustainable peatland management, humanities and social science approaches are required to duly consider local social, political, economic, and ecological contexts. At the same time, proposals in academic papers and presentations are insufficient to tackle the imminent crisis of peatland destruction and severe fire. Action-oriented research conducted with the continuous involvement of NGOs and local communities, and the implementation of solutions based on such research results, are critical.

In this series on tropical peatlands, we define “trans-disciplinary” as the combination of multi-discipline approaches with the active involvement of local societies. In that vein, this book mobilizes political science, public policy, economics, anthropology, sociology, fish ecology, and fisheries science approaches while also incorporating GPS and drone spatial analyses as well as analyses of the implementation-oriented activities of NGOs working to conserve and restore peatlands.

1.2 Tropical Peatlands as a New Development Frontier

Tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia, especially in Indonesia, have become a frontier for the development of acacia and oil palm plantations. Peat soils are composed of carbonized organic matter resulting from centuries of sedimentation of plant remains in wetlands that have slow bacterial decomposition activity due to low pH waters. Due to their swampy nature, tropical peatlands have been generally considered unproductive and relatively inaccessible. In Indonesia tropical peatland areas were rarely inhabited or cultivated until the 1980s, when they were suddenly subjected to large-scale development plans. As arable land became less and less available in other Indonesian territories, however, the opening of peatlands began to proceed rapidly and massively during the 1990s (Mizuno et al. 2016). A typical example is the one million hectare mega rice project in Central Kalimantan peatlands that was launched at the end of the Suharto authoritarian regime. Although it aimed to transform peatlands into rice fields, the project was a spectacular failure and resulted in large swathes of dried barren fields (Shimamura 2012; Limin et al. 2007; Goldstein 2016). Despite this disastrous result, similar peat swamp projects—especially to develop plantation agriculture—spread throughout Indonesia. In order to prepare peatlands for acacia and oil palm cultivation, extensive channeling systems were built to drain water out of the swamps. This drainage activity dried peat soils below ground, rendering them vulnerable to fire. Fire was often deliberately used to clear peatlands for plantations, but in such desiccated conditions, it often quickly spread on both the dried surface and subsurface, causing increasingly severe smoke damage.

1.3 Loss of Peat and Peat Fires as a Global Environmental Problem

Peat soils store enormous amounts of carbon. Based on a comprehensive analysis of previous studies and data, Page et al. estimate that there are approximately 441,025 km2 of tropical peatlands globally. Of this, 247,778 km2, or 56%, is in Southeast Asia, with nearly half (206,950 km2) spread across Indonesia. In terms of volume, of the world’s 1758 Gm3 of tropical peat, 77%, or 1359 Gm3, is in Southeast Asia, with 65%, or 1138 Gm3, in Indonesia (Page et al. 2011, p. 801). Tropical peat stores 89 Gt of carbon, of which 77%, or 69 Gt, is in Southeast Asia. Indonesia boasts the most significant amount, storing 57 Gt, or 65% of the total carbon content of tropical peatlands (Page et al. 2011, p. 809). All available evidence suggests that Indonesia has the most abundant tropical peatlands and carbon fixation globally.

The opening of peatlands for plantations does not automatically reduce their carbon stores, if the peatland is kept wet. Usually, however, plantation companies will dry out peatlands in order to manage plantations more efficiently. As mentioned, dry peatlands are susceptible to fire, which releases vast amounts of carbon stored in the peatlands. In 1997, decreased precipitation caused by the most significant El Niño event on record dried up peat and made tropical forests, including peatlands, more prone to ignition and fire spread. Massive fires in Sumatra, Kalimantan and other parts of Indonesia contributed more than 10% of global carbon emissions that year (Page et al. 2002, p. 61). The fires caused severe smoke damage to neighboring countries and the Singapore and Malaysian governments criticized the Indonesian government’s lack of effective fire and smoke control countermeasures.

In 2015, large-scale fires erupted again following an El Niño event. Carbon emissions during the short period from September to October reached 273 Mt. This accounted for 45% of the total annual carbon emissions of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Papua New Guinea, where tropical peatlands are predominantly located (Niwa et al. 2021). These recent experiences, and the reasonable expectation of similar climate scenarios in the future, highlight the need to prevent peatland drying and fires. Maintaining peatland carbon storage capacity is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of global warming.

1.4 The Beginnings and Challenges of Indonesia’s Peat Conservation and Restoration Policies

In response to growing international calls for countermeasures against large-scale fires and smoke pollution, in 2009 the Indonesian government, under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, enacted Law No. 32 of 2009.Footnote 1 The law required the formulation of environmental conservation and management plans, even down to the district level, and mandated that environmental assessments be conducted when spatial plans were formulated. The law also included a provision prohibiting all burning for land clearing, except for traditional burning of fewer than 2 hectares per household, and imposed penalties on violators. In 2011, President Yudhoyono issued Presidential Directive No. 10, which placed a moratorium on the issuance of new development permits in primary forests and peatlands within conservation, protection, and production forests. In 2013, Yudhoyono extended this moratorium for an additional two years and President Joko Widodo, newly elected in 2015, kept the moratorium in place, making it permanent in 2019 (Jong 2019). The moratorium, however, did not apply to previously permitted projects, to those that had been previously granted extensions, or to projects deemed essential for national development, such as those for geothermal power, oil, natural gas, electricity, rice, and sugarcane. The broad exceptions of the moratorium have meant that peatland clearing has continued within the scope of the law. Illegal peatland development has also continued unabated, as incumbent local heads seeking reelection issue land use permits to companies in exchange for campaign financing (Walhi 2017).

All of this led to the devastating fires and haze of 2015, the worst since 1997. This time, criticism came from beyond neighboring countries and pointed to the Indonesian government’s lack of political will to tackle the fires. Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry blamed hotspots in the northern Malaysian peninsula for causing the haze in Malaysia, but the Malaysian government and the pro-environment international community as a whole dismissed this claim and demanded that the Indonesian government stop the fires and transboundary haze.

The international criticism put Joko Widodo in a tight spot. Due to his popularity and previous success as a small-town mayor and then governor of Jakarta, in 2014 he won the direct presidential election, but only by a slim margin. In 2015, he was not on good terms with the government party and his support base was quite weak (IPAC 2016, p. 1). If he failed to address international criticism stemming from peatland fire, his popularity might have suffered and the movement to remove him would have been emboldened. To demonstrate his determination to address the problem, he established the independent Peatland Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut, BRG) in 2016. Recognizing the importance of peatlands to global warming, developed countries and international aid agencies stepped in to support the Agency.

With an initial 5-year mandate, the BRG designated 6.1 million hectares of undeveloped wetlands for conservation and approximately 12 million hectares of developed wetlands for restoration.Footnote 2 Its target was to restore 2 million ha of peat within five years by “3Rs” approach (rewetting dry peatlands, revegetation to restore tree cover, and revitalization of local economies). In FY 2017, 75 villages were designated as peat conservation villages (Desa Peduli Gambut, DPG), or villages where the residents initiate peat restoration activities. As the peat area of these villages amounted to 1.18 million ha, the BRG announced that it had met its goal for FY 2017. However, the designation alone did not indicate actual progress in its peat conservation and restoration efforts on the ground (Majaralhteras.com 2018). In fact, the DPG has not made much progress in restoring peatlands; according to the external evaluator of the program, this is largely due to the low abilities and multiple roles of the people facilitating restoration activities, and to the short period in which they are expected to complete their tasks, only 10 months.

As we have described, peatland fires and smoke damage drew new international attention to Indonesian peatlands. At the same time, global interest in curbing global warming was increasing. Both of these factors led to the creation of Indonesia’s Peatland Restoration Agency, which increased awareness of the importance of peat conservation and restoration and gained the support of many international donors. Before the end of its mandate in December 2020, the BRG boasted of several achievements, most notably that it had rewetted 835,288 hectares of peatland surrounding plantation concession areas (achieving 94% of its initial target).Footnote 3 The achievements seemed impressive, but the actual restoration process was halfway through. Not BRG but the Ministry of Environment and Forestry had the authority to restore the peatland in the concession areas and claimed that the ministry rewetted around 3.5 million ha of peatland. The ministry did not show any concrete data on the rewetted area, however (Eyes on the Forest 2019; Pramita 2022). And the fire continued even in the peatland outside the concession area which BRG was expected to have the authority to restore. An analysis by an environmental NGO reported that the fire occurred in 69% of the peatland area outside the concession area from January to December 2019. The analysis and other reports suggested that the fires might have occurred because the canal blocking was installed in inappropriate places and some of the canal blocking were broken and unrepaired (Nugraha 2020; Prakoso 2020). Recognizing the work yet to be done, the BRG was transformed into a reformed agency called the Peatland and Mangrove Restoration Agency (Badan Restorasi Gambut dan Mangrove, BRGM).

1.5 Tropical Peat Governance Challenges and Recommendations

Today’s tropical peatlands have become a contested space: they are a place for plantation development and a global center for environmental conservation. They are a political arena involving extremely diverse stakeholders including donors, central government ministries, local governments, environmental NGOs, forestry and plantation companies, and thousands of local communities. While everyone recognizes the importance of peatlands, not everyone easily agrees with strict rules of peat conservation and restoration. Even though there may be a consensus to conserve and restore peatlands in a certain local area, determining the detailed borders of conservation and restoration zones, and the stakeholders in charge of each zone, is challenged by different actors vying for their concrete interests and survival in that space.

This book aims to elucidate the complicated negotiations, conflicts, and accommodations that occur among various peatland stakeholders. For this, we conducted a detailed study of Rantau Baru Village in Riau Province (see Column 1), offering insights from different districts and villages for comparison with our main study. We chose Rantau Baru village in Pelalawan district, Riau province, Indonesia as the research site for five reasons. Firstly, the peatlands extended in the village hinterland have been rapidly drained for the plantation opening over the past two decades and have been damaged by frequent fires. Villagers have experienced these severe impacts. In that sense, Rantau Baru is at the forefront of the peatland problem. Secondly, the village is an old village, and the villagers have lived in the peat environment for a long time. We can explore customary peatland use and the emerging conflict between villagers and plantation companies on peatland use. Thirdly, we can highlight the importance of the fishery sector for peatland preservation that has not been paid due attention to by previous research and policies. Most villagers in RB have been dependent on the sector, and peatland preservation is the key to the sustainable management of the community-based fishery. Fourthly, we have really felt and recognized the desperate need of villagers to tackle various peatland issues and to come up with sustainable management of peatland and the coexistence between environmental protection and economic affluence. And finally, we have received strong support from the Pelalawan district government and village government for our trans-disciplinary study in this village.

Although the term “transdisciplinary” is used in a variety of ways depending on the era and field of study (Bernstein 2015), this book orients toward concrete engagement with the peat problem, commitment to the local communities, and collaboration among diverse stakeholders. The researchers contributing to this book come from diverse academic and practical backgrounds. They include political scientists, sociologists, economists, ecologists, anthropologists, and local environmental NGO officials, all of whom focus on how peat problems occur and should be solved in the local space. Inquiry and resolution both require a multi-layered understanding of local social conditions and livelihoods as well as trust and collaborative relationships with residents and local governments. The researchers were therefore not detached from the research subject, the local space, or the inhabitants. Rather, the studies in this book emerged through mutual exchange, discussion, and practice about peatlands and their protection. This transdisciplinary approach, emphasizing the exchange of different kinds of knowledge, has an important role to play in analyzing the current state of governance of peatlands and addressing the peat problems in each local space.

Both top-down and bottom-up approaches to peat conservation and restoration are necessary, but the top-down approach continues to dominate in Indonesia. At the same time, the voices and demands from the communities within and around tropical peat areas remain muted. This book therefore emphasizes the significance of actual peatland use and spatial perceptions of existing customary communities, and strongly advocates for bottom-up practices.

The transdisciplinary analyses of the chapters reveal that peatlands should not be the only focal point when considering peatland conservation and restoration. Conservation of river ecosystems and sustaining fishery livelihoods are also critical to the future of peat. Although many previous studies have highlighted the importance of bottom-up approaches and local perspectives in sustainable environmental governance, we do not consider such terms as fixed, but rather as dynamic. Utilizing the strengths of the humanities and social sciences, this book presents how peat conservation can be realized amid the transformations occurring in local societies. At the same time, we utilize the natural sciences in order to describe the rapid changes occurring in the natural environment, which cannot be understood through local experience alone. Thus, we aim to support the many Indonesian people who seek to establish sustainable peat conservation societies that are grounded in sound science and appropriate for local communities.

1.6 Structure of the Book

The book is comprised of eleven chapters and a conclusion. Three columns explain various technical aspects of our transdisciplinary research, including our data gathering in the main research site, the process of drone mapping, and our online community research methodology.

Chapter 2 reveals the complexities of the politics of mapping forests and peatland at the national, provincial, and local levels. Several cases demonstrate how multiple stakeholders jockey for power and protect their interests in the mapping process and how such processes have failed to create a consensus map at each level. The authors conclude that while pro-environment mapping is not easily accepted, the rubber-stamp mapping of illegal forest and peatland opening is no longer accepted uncritically, as it once was.

With Chap. 3, we move to the main part of the book, the transdisciplinary study of Rantau Baru Village in Riau Province. Chapters 3–5 provide sociological and ecological analyses of the basic conditions of the human inhabitants and the environment in and around the village. Chapter 3 is a study of land use governance in Rantau Baru, where lands and rivers in the traditional territory have been historically treated as ancestral common space, but where, in recent years, peatlands have been sold to outsiders. Describing the transformation of land use from the past to the present, this chapter explores the causes of the commodification of traditional territory. Chapter 4 documents the relationships between scientific and local names of fishes found in the area, and infers recent degradation in freshwater ecosystems in the mid-Kampar River Basin based on a survey conducted in Rantau Baru. It also uses comparative review of studies and methods of effective freshwater protection measures in other developing countries in order to assess the potential of establishing effective freshwater protection measures in our study area. Chapter 5 uses a GPS logger to analyze fishing patterns and practices in Rantau Baru, demonstrating the essential function of the submerged forests of the peat environment in fishing livelihoods. Presenting the case of a nearby village, the author proposes fishing tourism as a potential sustainable livelihood.

Chapters 6–10 provide critical analyses of Rantau Baru and other villages from the perspectives of anthropology, gender, public policy, economy, and geography. Chapter 6 questions the emphasis placed on indigenous local knowledge (IK) and local wisdom (kearifan lokal) in recent peatland restoration efforts, highlighting the potential risks of researcher over-emphasis of isolated local wisdom in traditional knowledge and practices. The author suggests the need to investigate the dynamism, interaction, and transformation of knowledge beyond the framework of local areas, which can result in a better understanding of local realities and build a broader network of cooperation. Chapter 7 investigates the differentiated knowledge and roles of both men and women in peatland management in Rantau Baru Village. It finds that although men are significantly more knowledgeable about peatland ecology and management than women and peatland agricultural activities are dominated by men, gender roles are more evenly distributed in fishery activities. Women and men play complementary roles in household maintenance and reproduction, but women do not participate nearly as much as men in the public sphere of sociopolitical activities. The study provides new insight into the community’s knowledge of peatland dynamics according to gender, and the potential roles of both male and female community members in peatland restoration.

Using the case of Pelalawan District, Chap. 8 investigates how village governments have utilized their budgets for peatland restoration and fire prevention since the enactment of the 2014 Village Law and to what extent local communities have been involved in the project planning process. The author provides a rather grim picture of the law’s impacts on peatland restoration, but also describes how some villages have launched interesting programs even with small budgets. Chapter 9 assesses the Willingness to Pay (WTP) for environmental conservation of aquatic and peatland ecosystems in Rantau Baru. It uses a contingent valuation method to measure how villagers value each ecosystem and an ordinary least square method for estimation. It finds that WTP for conserving fishing areas is closely associated with household expenditures, while WTP for conservation of peatlands is associated with education and weakly associated with household expenditures. Using maps created in collaboration with the villagers, Chap. 10 discusses the position of Rantau Baru as an adat community and the village's current predicament. While various laws assert the importance of the rights of adat communities, the maps clearly show legal and illegal encroachment on village territory by oil palm companies and the resulting degradation of peatlands. The authors point out that respecting the rights will lead to improved livelihoods and better management of peat environments.

Chapters 11 and 12 study peatland communities in different parts of Riau Province. Analyzing a multi-ethnic local community in Pelalawan District, Chap. 11 finds that peatland conservation policies and related livelihood improvement programs involve only a small segment of richer non-peatland landholders, and suggests that existing conservation programs may thus accelerate existing economic disparities. Chapter 12 examines the peatland management of local communities in Kepulauan Meranti District in Riau that participate in a social forestry scheme. The chapter argues that the introduction of social forestry and ecosystem services valuation is not sufficient to achieve meaningful results; the active involvement of community members in the ecosystem services valuation process (including the mapping) is required to achieve sustainable peatland management.

In the conclusion, we propose that the convergence of a long-term future vision of sustainable peatland governance among the government, academia, and communities is paramount, and we dedicate our efforts to this goal.