Collaborative land use planning and sustainable institutional arrangement for strengthening land tenure, forest and community rights in Indonesia - CoLUPSIA

Description

Environmental degradation and forest loss are on the rise globally. The effects of this process are felt most acutely in tropical villages. These communities rely on natural resources from neighboring forests for their livelihood. Here, deforestation also means lost ecological services and reduced availability of renewable resources.

Therefore new natural resource management actions such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation Degradation (REDD) must be designed with land tenure arrangements in mind. Through good land use planning and land allocation and the process of mediation and negotiation of stakeholders about land allocation, development can introduce new institutional arrangements for the various levels of government, local communities and the private sector. These arrangements can also help reduce the sense of disenfranchisemeny of women, minorities and other vulnerable groups.

Economists posit that the Indonesian economy will overtake its western counterparts by 2050. Yet ironically, positive development resulting from that growth rate remains distant for populations in the rural regions where much of the country’s wealth-generating natural resources are derived.

The CoLUPSIA project believes the resulting inequity and conflict can be resolved if governing bodies at national, regional and local scales are given more detailed data; and decisions made for these regions are not made on a top-down model but rather through collective discussion.