The recent return of widespread burning for land-clearing in Kalimantan and Sumatra, with its resulting transborder spread of smoky haze, has been an uncomfortable reminder that the ravages of the drought-related, uncontrolled fires that consumed 3 million hectares of Indonesia’s forest lands in 1997 might be repeated. Public commentary and editorials have voiced dismay and criticism at the apparent failure of policies to limit harmful practice, and have highlighted the attempts of senior officials to evade acknowledging the serious environmental threat as well as governmental responsibility. The combination of a plummeting economy, compromised legal and regulatory institutions, a national leadership with wavering credibility, and a continuing outbreak of civil disturbances and separatist urgings, has left many Indonesians wondering whether the country can survive what looks like the simultaneous deterioration of its resources, it national purpose, and its pluralist traditions. Their dismay is compounded when recalling that not long ago, Indonesia was a place whose success stories of national development had been praised internationally.

Indonesia is of course not the only place in Asia where recent times have brought hard shocks and disillusionment. The compounding of economic crisis and environmental disaster by political upheaval and social turmoil do mark Indonesia as the most destabilized among the countries recovering from the currency shocks of more than two years ago. One could argue that Indonesia is really unique, and has suffered an inordinate amount of bad luck---for instance, the 1977 El Nino effects brought the worst drought in more than 50 years, contributing greatly to the severity of the fire situation. Yet despite obvious differences, other societies in the region are affected by comparable crises of environmental sustainability and cultural challenges to national consolidation. China’s rapid industrialization and its impacts on the resource base, India’s troubled northeast region, Vietnam’s impoverished ethnic minorities in their upland environment, and the Philippines’ persistent problems in Muslim Mindanao are all complex examples where national development aims, problems of resource management, and cultural factors intersect. At the end of the 20^th century, and along with those many Indonesians who derive meaning from the fundamental linkage of their natural and social catastrophes, it might be a good idea to assess what we have learned about these matters, and contemplate how things might be approached differently in days ahead. To that end, I would like to highlight a few elements of the current Indonesian situation and extrapolate a few general points about culture, development and the environment that are relevant to the situation of the countries in the region, including China, that might be facing similar dilemmas.
 
 

Paradigms of Development

Over the past two years many assumptions and beliefs about development paradigms have been shaken and toppled by the economic crisis and its aftermath. Indonesians have seen that economic growth is not limitless, and that their heralded examples of successful national development policy ( increasing educational opportunity, food security, lowering population growth rate, and raising basic standards of living) can suddenly be thrown into disarray. They have learned that the parameters of successful policy are no longer domestic and local, but have stretched to include globalizing trends along many dimensions. Over three decades, Indonesians accepted that the nation-state has sovereign power to determine development directions and implement programs---only to see the power and credibility of the state to do these things erode, and that a wholesale failure of centrally mandated development can occur when people’s participation is consistently denied. And finally, Indonesians have come to see clearly that economic fundamentals and comprehensive five-year plans cannot be declared sound unless there is also good governance in place--- governance that articulates the public interest, enforces government accountability, and is free from corruption, collusion and nepotism.

Environmental Debates

Some of Indonesia’s early and vigorous social movements have taken place in the environmental realm, as awareness has grown of the significance of both Indonesia’s exceptional biodiversity as well as human ecological patterns. As concerns have grown over the non-sustainable exploitation of vast forest and marine resources, environmental NGOs have led the critique of national development plans that give free rein to extractive concessions while excluding many local communities from access to the resources on which their livelihoods depend. Indonesian environmentalists have articulated this critique amid a growing influence of international environmental activism, which sometimes privileges environmental preservation over issues of sociocultural development. Indonesian groups have developed a broad consensus that conservation and development must go hand in hand, and that preserving biodiversity is an important local-level goal that requires community involvement and responsibility as well as acknowledgment of traditional resource management systems. The application of both modern science and inherited or "local" knowledge within communities can help Indonesians deal with challenges of safeguarding biodiversity and developing new products and intellectual property resources for the global markets. Finally, some particular lessons from the extensive forest fire disaster of 1997-98 have shown Indonesians that large-scale conversion of smallholder agroforests for huge, monoculture investments such as palm oil plantations can have serious negative outcomes. This has spurred new studies and documentation of traditional mixed-cropping systems, which not only appear to be more resistant to fires but also provide a measure of resilience for forest farmers in a context of global commodity price fluctuations and currency devaluation. Indonesian environmental scientists and anthropologists are developing better research methods to identify key elements of traditional resource management systems according to their productivity, sustainability, equity, and efficiency, and the economic and ecological crises have made this work even more urgent.

Cultural Challenges

One of the most disturbing outcomes of the various crises in Indonesia over the past several years has been sharpening conflict and escalating violence between social, ethnic, and religious groups. Many people are concerned at the erosion of fundamental tolerance and civility, and feel it urgent to promote renewed appreciation of cultural diversity both within the majority community and across group boundaries. One harmful legacy of past policy was the suppression of the concept of intergroup conflict---it was actually tabu to speak or write about religious or interethnic rivalries under the New Order government. This has led to an impoverishment of horizontal capacities to resolve conflict, to address conditions of disadvantage, and to bridge and heal growing divides between social groups. Another cultural lesson with relevance to Yunnan province and other ethnically diverse regions of Asia has come from the Suharto government’s reluctance to formally recognize local environmental practices as well as the belief systems to which they are fundamentally linked. The rights and the cultures of many traditional communities in Indonesia have not been acknowledged over several decades, contributing to regional disaffections that now threaten the integrity of the nation as a whole. The Indonesian government has paid more attention to local culture as a product---something to be displayed, performed or marketed---rather than a dynamic process that embodies identities and enables communities to negotiate and make choices in a context of rapid social and economic change. This disregard of culture as process and as expression of values is now exacting a high cost in terms of national cohesion.

In conclusion, while the above lessons about cultural conservancy, environmental wisdom and development priorities in Indonesia are hard to learn and also to implement, there are many signs that Indonesians do intend to apply them to build a sounder vision of the national future. Their lessons could usefully be noted by other societies in the region trying to balance cultural, environmental and developmental priorities in the wake of the "Asian crisis."