ABSTRACT
This chapter has grown out of research conducted over more than a decade on the integrated pest management (IPM) agricultural programme. This programme, designed as an alternative to ‘green revolution’ technology, and introduced in the later part of the twentieth century to various parts of Asia and Africa, was initiated in Indonesia in the early 1990s. This was a time when people in Indonesia were already beginning to voice protests about the repressive, highly centralized, paternalistic government of the New Order of then President Suharto. One of the characteristics of the New Order period (1966–98), was over-regulation and the excessive intervention of the state; one of the programmes that was rigorously enforced during the New Order was agricultural development by means of ‘green revolution’ technology. The ‘green revolution’ has increasingly come under criticism for the way it has promoted the profit of businesses at the expense of farmers, and for the way it has led to a significant degradation of farm resources (see for example, Shiva 1993, 1997). In addition local users, often the owners of the resources, ended up being marginalized in their own ‘lands’. They did not have the right to make decisions or freely exercise their own management strategies. Addressing this problem, the IPM programmes in Indonesia and other countries in Asia and Africa attempted to place farmers' empowerment, self-governance, learning capacity and knowledge enrichment as the main objectives to achieve, rather than high crop productivity and intensive use of technology. There has been more of a focus on local spaces and communities that marks:
a shift from the preoccupation with centralized, overarching, and overreaching solutions of the past decades that have failed to reverse and may indeed have contributed to environmental problems and attendant social tensions
Agrawal (2000:57) In 1998, with economic chaos and demands for reform more strident, President Suharto stepped down, the New Order ended and an official era of ‘reform’ was inaugurated. Part of this reform was plans to usher in a more democratic process of decision making in important areas of Indonesian life; a process that was supposed to lead to a more ‘bottom-up’ decision-making process, as opposed to the ‘top-down’ procedures that had become the norm during the New Order period. Community-based decision making was at the heart of the IPM programme from the beginning, and, even during the authoritative New Order, some progress was made in empowering farmers to be experts and managers in their own lands (Dilts and Hate 1996; Winarto 1996; Winarto et al. 2000).