Paper short abstract:

Reflections on working alongside transnational conservation organizations and an Indigenous community in Eastern Borneo suggests projects are spaces where the goals, relationships, and agendas of researchers, practitioners and local communities are negotiated, reshaped, and sometimes transformed.

Paper long abstract:

Here I reflect on a decade of conservation-related work in Eastern Borneo. My position is that of a White Western researcher- an anthropologist and primatologist- employed at a U.S. university. I worked alongside and sometimes in collaboration with transnational conservation organizations and an Indigenous community in a community forest in East Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. This place was the site of relatively high-profile conservation projects, manifesting locally in activities like wildlife monitoring, a “forest rangers” program, educational programming for local youth, and ecotourism development. This project matrix powerfully shaped my research and my relationship with the local Indigenous community, who were subjects, collaborators, and sometimes subverters of these projects. As a researcher I occupied a “slippery” position- at turns an outsider, a collaborator, a confidant, and an object of suspicion. I observed many problematic aspects of the project model noted by others: how it perpetuates power imbalances, encourages dispossession of Indigenous lands and disregard for local sovereignty, commodifies Indigenous knowledge, encourages short-term thinking and exploitative relationships, and discourages learning from failure. I also observed projects as spaces of negotiation where the goals, relationships, and even worldviews of conservationists, researchers, and community members came into contact, conflict, and were sometimes reshaped and transformed. I have seen projects become sites where the local community exerted power and autonomy, subverting and reorienting trajectories imposed by TCOs and researchers. New understandings, alliances, and goals can emerge “behind the scenes” of highly visible projects, creating new paths and trajectories that extend beyond the project matrix.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the project model fails to accommodate the human dimension of conservation and reshapes personal identities and relations, primarily triggered by its gap between project designers and project implementers.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my experience in conservation in Indonesia, I explore how the project model impacts conservation identities, relationships, and overall conservation success. Conservation is a multifaceted field, involving many stakeholders. This complexity requires certain structures that guide various stakeholders in the roles they play. I suggest that although the project system provides a guiding framework for the functioning and implementation of conservation activities, it does not sufficiently accommodate for the intangible aspects that people working within this structure experience.

In general, people have an intimate connection with the field of conservation: they are driven by passion, a sense of belongingness, responsibility, or altruistic and philanthropical concerns. These deep-rooted motivations that shape conservation identities are what drives conservation projects to a success. However, there exists a crucial gap in the project system that impacts on conservation identities in the long run. One such lies between project designers and project implementers, where project ideation, activities and goals are set by the former and handed down to the latter. Over time, implementers experience alienation to project goals and are restricted to meeting targets through task completion, resulting in a lack of motivation to think outside of the project framework. This may potentially result in a lacking of sense of belonging to the project, subsequently altering human relationships at many levels, impacting the project environment at large and its sustainability. Thus, it is imperative to rethink project systems to safeguard subtle relationships to not just the project, but the entire social system involved.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my experience as an advisor at International Animal Rescue Indonesia (YIARI), I describe how top-down project models can undermine Indonesian staff’s ability to meaningfully connect with their work, and share the challenges and successes of YIARI’s efforts to better empower its employees

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on the effects of different project models on how staff members experience and engage with conservation work. When International Animal Rescue Indonesia (YIARI) first started, high-level staff designed the projects, while the local staff was mainly responsible for project implementation. This top-down model, which distinguishes between project designers and project implementers, is shared by many conservation non-governmental organizations (NGOs). However, as YIARI grew, this system increasingly undermined local staff sense of commitment, connection, and ownership. As programme advisor, I observed a lack of loyalty to YIARI and a ‘salary only’ mentality amongst the staff, a true disconnect and lack of understanding between project ideas and the staff implementing these ideas on the ground, and no real sense of unity between staff members.

Consequently, we changed our way of working and prioritised a bottom-up approach in which project implementers simultaneously became project designers. This required project leads to take full ownership of their project activities and budgets, learn how a project matrix system functions, and understand their responsibilities to various relevant stakeholders while ensuring that YIARI’s key organisational goals, as well as donor expectations, were met. The transition has been challenging, in terms of training and mentoring staff, increased workload for high-level staff, translating staff ideas to donor priorities, and ensuring trust and transparency between high-level staff and project leads. Overall, however, these challenges resulted in a more inclusive NGO by enabling Indonesian staff to develop professionally and advance their own visions of conservation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions that arise as the bureaucratic and financial timelines of projects collide with the agricultural and arboreal timescapes of the Haitian countryside. These temporal conflicts between plants and paper are part of the inequalities that arise in project-based aid.

Paper long abstract:

Given critiques of the short-term project cycle in aid work, some contemporary interventions have recast themselves as “initiatives” that bridge government, non-governmental, and international actors, and frame their work as long term cooperations. In Haiti, despite such explicit challenges to the otherwise common short-term funding of aid projects, contractors and so-called beneficiaries experience these initiatives quite differently. The long term and multi-year initiatives are broken down into short-term projects, repeating the model of brief, project-based aid. The bureaucratic and financial deadlines of these projects impose temporal frames that are in stark contrast to narratives of continuity and long-term engagement. These further collide with the temporalities of the Haitian countryside, reinforcing notions of time that are remarkably different from the planting and growth cycles of crops and trees.

This paper explores the tensions that arise as bureaucratic and financial time collide with the agro-arboreal timescapes of the Haitian countryside. While anthropological investigations of conservation have often examined the production of space, the social shaping of time-space has received less attention. By examining the way that aid projects impose particular notions of time, this paper frames a conflict of temporalities as part of larger social inequalities that arise in conservation and aid work. Further, the paper will explore the way that the temporalities of crops and trees often require a re-negotiation of time in aid projects, exposing the mutability and possibilities of project bureaucracies.