ABSTRACT
It can be tempting to explain deforestation in terms either of irresponsible behaviour or of poverty, natural resource extraction, and population pressures, but this ignores big structural and geo-political issues: path dependency, neo-colonialism, and the pressures of powerful developed countries on the economic and political development of poor, developing countries, are major, overlooked drivers of environmental damage. The mistake of mainstream conservation has been to focus on a few technological factors – who owns the land, how much corruption there is, whether some people are trying to disproportionately enrich themselves through resource extraction – but these questions miss the bigger structural, long-term picture. The struggle to conserve Indonesia’s rainforest is complicated, not only by domestic political history and economic development, but by the relationship, attitudes, and expectations of Western countries towards Indonesia, and vice versa. Chapter 1 analyses the assumptions, rhetoric, and values which frame the way in which deforestation and forest resources are seen by major stakeholders. Drawing on the theories of Gramsci, it explores how environmental NGOs encountered a crisis of legitimacy which encouraged closer allegiance with commerce, as the‘common sense’of neoliberalism spread outwards from the US, weakening environmentalism’s allegiance with the left. It then describes the historical political, economic, and ideological conditions that cemented Indonesia’s post-independence, post-Sukarno, and post-New Order eras and shows how Indonesia’s forest policy institutions and subjectivities are connected to resource demands and the Global North’s need to maintain political and economic hegemony.
