Conservationist NGOs
The conservation model that conservationist NGOs like WWF, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy promote excludes communities that have been living on the land often long before it was declared to be a “protected area.” This parks-without-people approach has led to increasingly militarized conservation areas and greater violence against communities in and around forests that have been declared as protected areas. Conservationist NGOs have entered into partnerships with corporations—including the world's largest oil and mining corporations—thereby transforming into an industry that propitiously greenwashes the image of these corporations.
WRM Bulletin Compilation. Available in English and Indonesian.
How does REDD+ fit into the development agenda in Indonesia? What are the actors involved in promoting REDD+ and with which interests? (Available in Indonesian).
The approval of a road construction inside the first Ecosystem Restoration Concession in Indonesia puts in evidence the inherent contradictions of such concessions. (Available in Indonesian)
A group of riparian Batwa people, exasperated by the extreme poverty following their eviction in order to establish the Kahuzi Biega National Park, decided to return to their ancestral forests. Since then, they regularly clash with the “eco-guards,” sometimes leading to the loss of human lives.
Back in 2004, conservation NGOs and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry pioneered with a model called Ecosystem Restoration Concessions. This article takes a closer look at this model in the context of new and old threats to forests, and the global push for “forest restoration”. (Available in Indonesian).
Serious abuses in DRC’s Salonga National Park at the hands of park rangers supported by funding from the WWF and a range of international donors are just the latest to be documented. This is a wider problem on human rights abuses and colonial interventions in forests.
