Governing Resources in a Changing Environment: Local Responses in Contemporary Rural East Java, Indonesia

Abstract

"Throughout the contemporary reform process with the decentralization of power via local and regional autonomy, natural resources are no longer dominated only by the direct power of the state, but also managed by more actors at various levels of society. Within this context, this study focuses on the following crucial questions: (1) How were spatial production and practices in the Upland Bromo created that had the effect of limiting local people's control over and access to resources?; (2) How have recent environmental changes affected local communities and households?; (3) How does the form of new local resources governance evolve after the Reform era?; (4) What are the adaptation strategies of the poor rural households to deal with new local resource governances?; (5) Are the new institutions associated with local resources governance that evolved and took shape in the Democratization and Decentralization era sustainable in term of conserving resources? The theoretical approach follows the concepts of political ecology, new institutionalism, livelihood strategy, and social sustainability. The three villages around Bromo National Park have been selected as case studies due to their highly differentiated social-cultural settings. After conducting qualitative research involving 170 semi-structured interviews, 30 in-depth interviews with key informants, and 5 focus group discussions, the researcher found the following results: The spatial production of Upland Bromo has always been developed by dominant powers with different goals and in different ways to serve the state's interests in order to establish their control over the land and the people."