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.