6 - Environmental NGOs in “Post-New Order” Indonesia: Saving the Forests Through Democracy

Summary

Given the importance of tropical rainforests in the struggle to mitigate global warming and save terrestrial biodiversity from the “Sixth Extinction”, Indonesia represents a key area of the Anthropocene (Simangan 2019, p. 572). It is thus no accident that, in addition to English and four other major languages, a referent website like Global Forest Watch also offers its online data in Bahasa Indonesia.1 Yet, in the literature on the Anthropocene, apart from a few exceptions (e.g., Chandler 2017), Indonesia is almost inexistent. As emphasized by the editors of this volume (see Chapter 1), the Anthropocene framework remains Western-centred; it has not yet been assimilated by Asian scholars, or its “indigenization” has started only recently. A rare exception in the literature in Bahasa thus far is a special issue of Balairung, edited by a group of students from Gadjah Mada University (Raja et al. 2018). Although it is a modest start, these young scholars nevertheless highlight that the Anthropocene concept opens a brand new theoretical gateway for understanding the specific meaning of the global ecological crisis for a country like Indonesia (Sugandi and Najjah 2018; Haekal and Suci 2018).

In this chapter, I analyse how Indonesian environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) have come to address two emblematic issues of the Anthropocene: deforestation and the climate emergency. A decisive moment in that process was the engagement of Indonesian ENGOs during the 13th United Nations Climate Conference, which was held in Bali in 2007. We will look also at two related issues: the responsibility of banks and other financial institutions in deforestation, or what I call “unsustainable finance”, and the problem of coastal reclamation as a result of land grabbing and developmentalist urbanization. These issues are emblematic of the Anthropocene in the fundamentally anthropic nature of the damage done to the environment. But if they have played a central role in the advocacy campaign of Indonesian ENGOs during the last two decades, it is also due to their entanglement with local and national politics. We follow on the editors of this volume to consider the Anthropocene as a heuristic time reference for the last two decades.