The places that are most celebrated for wildlife are frequently home to some of the poorest people on the planet. All too often, this leads to clashes between conservationists and local communities. Does this mean it’s impossible for wildlife and people to flourish in the same place? Not necessarily. Recent experiences in Papua and elsewhere suggest they can—if conservation agencies work closely with local people. A research approach developed by CIFOR helps them to do that.

Mamberamo Basin covers some 8 million hectares in the Indonesian province of Papua. Over 95 per cent of the Basin is swathed with tropical forest, and recent surveys by Conservation International (CI) have identified hundreds of species new to science, including over 30 vertebrates. Despite the fact that only 12 000 people live there, Mamberamo’s wildlife is threatened by logging, the trade in wildlife and proposals to develop dams and plantations. To counter these threats, CI hopes to create a biodiversity ‘conservation corridor’, a matrix of sustainable land uses that link existing protected areas and traditional reserves.

But conservationists can’t do it on their own.

‘Without MLA, it would have been much more difficult to reach the community conservation agreements.’

Neville Kemp
Conservation International

‘CI recognised that if it was going to achieve its goals in Papua, it needed to get the support of local people,’ says Manuel Boissière, an ethnobotanist seconded to CIFOR by the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD). In 2004, CI invited CIFOR to work in two villages in Mamberamo. Here they introduced CI, local students and government staff to Multidisciplinary Landscape Assessment (MLA), a research methodology developed and refined by CIFOR in Indonesian Borneo.

MLA explores the links among livelihoods, biodiversity and culture, and helps to reveal what matters most to local people. The main objectives of the pilot phase in Papua were to identify the local areas that were important for wildlife and natural resources, and to identify local people’s concerns and priorities. This was the first time that CI had investigated local attitudes to biodiversity, and the success of the pilot phase prompted CI to invite CIFOR to engage in follow-up activities in 2006. These included additional socioeconomic surveys in three villages and participatory mapping of traditional lands.

The mapping exercise enabled CI and the villagers to identify zones for conservation and zones for possible development.

‘MLA helped us to find synergies between our goals of biodiversity conservation and the communities’ goals,’ says Neville Kemp, CI’s former Mamberamo programme manager. This paved the way for CI and the villagers to establish community conservation agreements. These are being developed into village-based law that can be recognised by local government.

Traditionally, villagers in Mamberamo have viewed conservationists and other outsiders with a degree of suspicion. However, the MLA exercises enabled CI and the villagers to learn to trust one another.

‘Without MLA, it would have been much more difficult to get the community conservation agreements, as we would have been working from our values, not theirs,’ says Kemp. He believes that the MLA experience in Papua is one of the factors that led to significant changes within CI during the past year. CI’s latest vision and mission statements talk in terms of protecting biodiversity and helping ‘societies manage nature’s assets for the equitable benefit of current and future generations’.

By early 2009, MLA had been used in eight villages in Papua, to develop plans for areas ranging in size from 70 000 to more than 300 000 hectares, and there are plans to use MLA in other areas too. For example, CI is about to begin using the methodology in southeast Papua to help mitigate negative impacts from a major new oil palm plantation development.

An independent evaluation of CIFOR’s biodiversity research, conducted on behalf of the European Commission, found that CIFOR’s collaboration with CI in Papua has led to changes in behaviour among both CI staff and local government officials.

According to the evaluation, ‘The MLA work added value to an initiative that would otherwise have been lacking a livelihoods and development focus.’ The evaluation suggested that the MLA activities in Mamberamo will probably contribute to better food security and the alleviation of rural poverty. See http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/worldwide/food-security/documents/cifor_finalreport_en.pdf.

Although CIFOR is no longer involved in MLA research, the methodology’s popularity suggests that this is one of the best ways of establishing collaborative partnerships among conservation agencies, local governments and local people. More than 20 projects have undertaken MLA activities. Most of the early projects were in Indonesia, but in recent years MLA has been used as far afield as India and Bolivia, Vietnam and Mozambique.