Paper short abstract:

This ethnography of conservations' market-based instruments (MBIs) in Leuser Ecosystem, Indonesia, interrogates the common binaries in understanding MBIs, such as regulation vs market, Conservation and Development (ICDP) vs MBIs, conservation vs indigenous people (IPs), market values vs IPs belief.

Paper long abstract:

Leuser Ecosystem is a buffer zone to the Gunung Leuser National Park (GLNP), located in Aceh and Northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Based on archival research and 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research found that market-based instruments (MBIs) for conservation has been implemented during the ICDP (Integrated Conservation and Development) era in 1990s. Instead of being an alternative to the traditional regulatory schemes for conservation, most MBIs has been enabled by and being channelled within government regulations and institutions. Meanwhile, the Indigenous People (IP) have been integrated in market-based way of life. Hence, instead of being objected by IPs, MBIs had to adjust with rural class dynamics and the existing market relations of IPs. This paper will examine from the ground up how MBIs has actually worked and intersected with the life and values of IPs in Leuser Ecosystem. It found that MBIs were channelled to agricultural middlemen to support the development of cacao smallholder farming; to wealthy farmers who own rice fields while criminalizing landless IPs who depend on fishing; to local mayor and his political allies who created an ecotourism park in the form of palm oil estate in which he acted as an absentee landowner; and to rural creditor to increase the participation of IPs in the debt market. This paper also highlights the significant effect of 1998 Asian financial crisis to the monetary values of conservation funds’ foreign exchange rate which facilitate irreversible inequities of IPs particularly in the inaccessibility of the skyrocketing price of rural land.