ABSTRACT
Access to this resource wealth constituted the initial impetus for European colonial intervention in the islands during the sixteenth century, and has helped shape various colonial, postcolonial and (arguably) neo-colonial political configurations in the archipelago ever since. This chapter presents the relationship between the natural environment and society in Indonesia as being mutually constituted around issues of resource control and access. Moreover, resource access and environmental change in Indonesia have, for at least five centuries now, been
produced by inherently global processes. Indonesia’s resource wealth has been gradually incorporated into international commodity networks through politico-economic structures of colonialism, export-oriented neo-liberalism and state-centred developmentalism. Waves of global economic integration, mediated through national political systems, have dramatically re-shaped the relationship between Indonesian society and the natural environment, and this economic integration is further reconstituting contemporary modes of environmental governance.
