B. Eastern Asia Sector Review

1. Overview

This section of the report examines the situation of Indigenous Peoples in the whole of South and South East Asia with a focus on four countries: India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines where PeFoR has developed its projects and which were visited as part of this review. Within this region, the politically marginal and ethnically distinct peoples who inhabit the forests of the Asia-Pacific are in a phase of rapid social change, characterised by accelerating deforestation, dispossession of their lands and rapid integration into the market.

Their common experience of land loss, human rights abuse and economic and cultural impoverishment, has brought many of these peoples to realise that despite their diversity and differences they all share a common struggle. In the face of powerful outside interests — outside their villages and outside the region — which seek to profit from their forests and their internal political divisions, many of these peoples are in a phase of rapid reorganisation, linking up to create new institutions — local associations, national organisations and international networks — through which they can better project their demands and influence decisions that affect them.50

Deforestation has become a matter of global concern. Taken as a whole, the Asia-Pacific region, which has already lost more than half of its original forest cover,51 continues to suffer a startling rate of forest loss.52 The results have been a dramatic loss of biological diversity, a growing dependency in many countries on imported timber and other non-timber forest products, unpredictable and more severe floods and droughts, the loss of top-soil and farmland and the increasing vulnerability of forests to fires.

Until recently international, environmental standard-setting aimed at curbing these losses has tended to focus on the technical dimensions of natural resource management, while the social, economic and political aspects of the forest crisis have received relatively little emphasis.53 Happily, thanks to the increasingly outspoken voices of indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and non-government organisations, this situation is beginning to change. It is now becoming more widely accepted that environmental degradation often results from social injustice and political inequalities.54 Forests and reefs are now seen as contested resources over which many different sectors of society seek to assert control. Often, environmental degradation results when these conflicts of interest resolve in favour of urban elites rather than the rural poor, while those to suffer most in these struggles are the region's indigenous peoples.55

The most startling example of this process were the massive forest fires of 1997 and 1998, which are estimated to have resulted in the destruction of 5.5 million hectares of forest, mainly in Indonesia, although other countries in the region also had serious fires. The fires were a repeat of the massive burns of 1982/3, when Indonesia lost an estimated 3.5 million hectares, and of 1992/3, and were similarly linked to the 'El Nino' weather phenomenon. However, whereas in previous years the region's governments have always blamed these forest fires on the irresponsible behaviour of shifting cultivators, this time that excuse has not been credible. Satellite imagery has revealed clearly that the majority of the large fires in Kalimantan and Sumatra were started in major land clearing operations being promoted as part of the Government-directed transmigration programmes and for the establishment of oil palm, paper-and-pulp and timber estates. Poorly managed logging in neighbouring forests, which left the forest cover broken and therefore under-storey drier, and which strewed trash and unused tree-trunks across natural fire breaks, caused the fires to spread easily through the natural forests. The Indonesian Minister for the Environment was outspoken in his criticism of the forestry companies and noted how forest-dwellers had always been unfairly blamed for starting the fires:

"While the bosses of large plantations just walk into their air-conditioned offices if the situation becomes smokey, these voiceless people have to take all the blame and suffer from suffocating smoke."56

While economists tried to estimate the full costs of the fires — one estimate was of a total loss of US$4 billion — and environmentalists gave figures for the impact of the smogs on people in cities — according to the WorldWide Fund for Nature some 47 million people will have suffered temporary or long term health effects, little information has yet emerged of the impact of the fires on the indigenous peoples in the forests. Studies of previous fires suggests that these will have been severe; food crops are lost: game in burned over forests becomes scarce: rattan gardens are destroyed: while cash crops, like pepper, cloves, cinnamon and rubber, are also wiped out. Recovering from this damage takes years. Rattan gardens, for example, take at least seven years from being replanted to come into production. Preliminary Government assessments of the social impact of the latest fires in Kalimantan show that tens of thousands of Dayaks now face hardhsip and starvation from the combined effects of the fires and droughts.57 The lessons are clear: the simultaneous promotion of industrial forestry and plantations and the denial of indigenous peoples' rights, can lead to serious economic loss, environmental damage and impoverishment.

Rights and Definitions

The use of the term 'indigenous' is controversial in Asia. The term in its most literal sense only implies long term residence in a given area. Accordingly, many Asian governments have protested that the term does not apply well to their countries as the majority populations are clearly 'indigenous' in this sense, unlike the settler populations in the Americas and Australasia, whose origins are obviously distinct from the peoples' whose lands they have assumed.

However, as noted in the global overview above, in international debates the term indigenous has come to be applied to politically marginalised, territorially-based ethnic groups, culturally distinct from the majority populations of the nation states in which they now find themselves, who recognise themselves as 'indigenous'.58 In this sense, the indigenous peoples of Asia are more obvious and include, all or part of those groups that are officially distinguished from the society of the national majority, such as the 'scheduled tribes' of India, the 'hill tribes' of Thailand, the 'minority nationalities' of China, the 'indigenous cultural communities' of the Philippines, the 'isolated and alien peoples' of Indonesia, the 'aboriginal tribes' of Taiwan, the 'aborigines' of Malaysia and the 'natives' of Malaysian Borneo.59

In recent years, such peoples have begun increasingly to identify themselves as 'indigenous'.60 In part this is because the term 'indigenous' carries fewer pejorative connotations than terms like 'aboriginal' and 'tribal', with their implications of 'primitiveness' and inferiority. However, the main reason they have begun to adopt the term is to demonstrate their common struggle for recognition of their rights. By labelling themselves as indigenous, these ethnic groups at once affirm their solidarity with others using the same term and assert their rights to their territories and to self-determination, rights which are recognised in existing and emerging instruments of international law.61

The right to self-determination is a right enjoyed by all peoples,62 as clearly spelled out in the United Nations' International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, by claiming this right, Asian indigenous peoples are not necessarily asserting their will to secede from the existing nation states within whose boundaries they now find themselves. To a substantial extent, one can generalise by noting that the more oppressive are governments' relations with indigenous peoples, the more likely they are to demand secession from existing states. Thus, in extreme cases, where government-directed violence against indigenous peoples has been severe, the indigenous peoples have been seeking independence or statehood, such as in Burma, Nagaland, West Papua (Irian Jaya), Bougainville and the Moro of the Philipines.63 However, for most indigenous peoples, what indigenous peoples are striving for is not secession but rather the right to renegotiate their relationship with the State so that they have the degree of autonomy and self-governance that they need in order to maintain their distinctive social and political institutions, retain or regain control over their lands, territories and cultural heritage. They also seek control of the natural resources that underpin their daily lives.64

It is exactly these rights which many of the region's governments contest since they covet the lands and resources in indigenous territories. They have thus sought to limit the rights which these peoples enjoy and frustrate the emergence of strong political organisations. At the international level, many Asian governments have thus insisted that the concept of 'indigenous peoples' does not apply in Asia because almost everyone is indigenous. In this way they hope to prevent emerging human rights standards on indigenous peoples from being applied to their countries. It is a rearguard action which is unlikely to stand the test of time. Already some countries like the Philippines have readily accepted that the international legal concept of 'indigenous' does apply to their own politically marginalised ethnic groups which are now officially referred to as 'Indigenous Peoples' or 'indigenous cultural communities'. In Nepal, too, the term indigenous is commonly applied to the distinctive ethnic groups in the Terai by forestry officials. In recognition that there are indigenous peoples in Nepal, in 1993 the national government even formed a National Committee on the International Year of Indigenous Peoples.65 In Mid-1999, the Nepali government explicitly recognised the existence of 61 indigenous peoples in Nepal, who make up some 60% of the population.

Some governments, like Bangladesh, which have protested to the United Nations that the term indigenous has no place in their national context have been wrong-footed when indigenous peoples have pointed out that the term 'indigenous' is already used in national laws.66 Likewise, in a landmark case for the Ainu of Japan, on 28 March 1997 a local court in Sapporo, Hokkaido, recognised the Ainu as an indigenous and minority people.

Nevertheless, summarising the view of many Asian countries, the Chinese government continues to reject that the concept of indigenous peoples applies to their national situation arguing that the term 'indigenous peoples' only applies to those peoples who have been dispossessed of their ancestral homes by European colonial policies.67 The statement, which is designed to deny the right to self-determination to China's 'minority nationalities', conveniently ignores the fact that in its early years the Chinese communist party had explicitly recognised exactly this right.68 A report by Cuban Special Rapporteur, Miguel Alfonso Martinez, presented to the Working Group on Indigenous Populations of the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Distcrimination and Protection of Minorities in 1998 has also argued that the term 'indigenous peoples' does not apply to ethnic groups in Africa and Asia, but only to those in countries which have suffered European colonisation and where the settlers have remained to become the politically dominant population.69 Asian indigenous peoples, who feel that they are suffering equally serious loss of rights due to their domination by peoples of non-European descent, have consistently objected to these discriminatory arguments. For example in 1991 a joint statement by the West Papua Peoples Front, Karen National Union, Jumma Network, Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, Alliance of Taiwan Aborigines, National Federation of the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, Lumad-Mindanao, Cordillera Peoples' Alliance, Ainu Association of Hokkaido, Naga Peoples' Movement for Human Rights, Homeland Mission 1950 for South Moluccas and Hmong People, argued:

"First and foremost, we want to bring to your attention the denial by some Asian governments of the existence of indigenous peoples in our part of the world. This denial... seeks to withold the benefits of the [Draft] Declaration [on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] from the indigenous, tribal and aboriginal peoples of Asia. We hereby urgently request that peoples who are denied the rights to govern themselves, and are called tribal, and/or aboriginal in our region, be recognized, for the purpose of this Declaration, and in accordance with ILO practice, as equivalent to indigenous peoples."70

This argument is likely to drag out over several years at the United Nations, but as noted above the argument has been side-stepped in various ways by other specialised agencies in the United Nations' family of organisations.

Indigenous Peoples and Asian Values

The reluctance of many Asian governments to recognise indigenous peoples' rights to their territories and to self-determination sits oddly with these same governments' principled stand in favour of so-called 'Asian values', which they claim emphasise the social and economic rights of the community and the importance of social solidarity rather than the civil and political rights of the individual.71 If the community is to be given greater value in Asia, then why not value the distinctive cultural traditions of the region's indigenous peoples? Some proponents of so-called 'Asian values' have even gone so far as to question all international human rights standards on the grounds that these are based on individualist, western concepts which have no relevance to Asian societies.

Some observers believe that the real message being sent by Asian leaders, through their assertion of 'Asian values', is that they do not want any interference either by internal or external critics of their abuse of power. Indonesian author and ex-political prisoner Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose opposition to the authoritarianism of Indonesian leaders made his writings hugely popular, thinks that 'all this talk (of Asian values) is just manipulation to justify the violation of rights in order to preserve the personal interests of those in power.'72 Before his deposition and incarceration, Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Anwar Ibrahim was equally skeptical and called it:

"a shame, although clever, to take Asian values as an excuse for authoritarian practices and the denial of basic civil rights... To say that freedom is western or un-Asian is an insult both for our own traditions and our ancestors, who sacrificed their life against tyranny and injustice... Honestly, we have to admit that we are still struggling to eradicate the remains of the so-called 'oriental despotism'"73

Numbers

According to the International Work Group on Indigenous Affairs, almost two thirds of the world's indigenous people live in Asia and they recently published the following table summarising existing estimates of indigenous numbers in various Asian countries.74

Indigenous Peoples and Social Policy

Throughout Asia, an underlying objective of government policy towards indigenous peoples has been to promote their integration into the national society, while denying them their rights to exercise their customary law, to control the resources they depend on and to make decisions for themselves. Deeply held prejudices often underlie these disenfranchising policies. In Indonesia, for example, indigenous peoples are officially characterised as 'people who are isolated and have a limited capacity to communicate with other more advanced groups, resulting in their having backward attitudes...'75 In Thailand many of the 'hill tribes' are even denied Thai nationality and residence and the Thai armed forces have on occasion expelled long-settled communities into Burma at gunpoint.76

Indigenous systems of land use have been particularly despised. Environmentally sophisticated rotational farming systems have been widely condemned, not so much because they have been shown to be destructive but because they bring little revenue to the exchequer and require large areas of forest that are coveted by other interests.77 These prejudices have been directly expressed in national land tenure laws. With the important exception of Melanesia and, to a lesser extent western Pakistan and India's northeast, indigenous peoples' rights to the collective ownership of the lands have been systematically denied and only in the

are reforms in these policies just beginning. In Sarawak, for example, the State has recently given itself the power to alienate 'native customary land' not only in the 'national interest' but even in favour of private companies: a legalised expression of racial discrimination which holds indigenous peoples' property rights inferior to the property rights of other citizens.

In Peninsular India, where collective land rights are denied, legal protections that are meant to prevent 'tribal' lands being sold to non-tribals and a policy of positive discrimination that reserves a proportion of educational and administrative positions to tribal and outcaste groups, have proved ineffective. As the Commissioner for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes noted in his Twentyninth Report, owing to the 'complete non-recognition of the rights of the people over resources' the country's 52 million tribal people have been condemned to 'the very dustbin of development', through a five-stage process of degradation, which commenced under colonial rule and intensified since independence, that deprives tribal peoples first of their communal rights, then of their individual plots of land, degrades them to underpaid and then bonded labour depriving them finally of their very dignity, leaving them fatally resigned to endure further suffering.78

Indigenous Peoples, Forests and the State

The assertion of legislation denying indigenous territorial rights was initiated during the colonial period, when new tenure regimes were imposed to facilitate the collection of taxes.79 The process of alienating indigenous lands intensified when the colonial authorities perceived the need to secure control of forests with the twin aims of preventing environmental degradation and assuring a supply of timber to strategic industries - timber for the colonial navies and sleepers for the railways. Classical forestry, as developed under the British and Dutch, involved the establishment of a network of forestry reserves to be managed according to the tenets of 'scientific forestry' under the control of forestry departments. Imposing this policy brought the colonial governments into immediate conflict with native rulers and indigenous peoples, who felt they had prior rights to these forests.80

Indeed, almost immediately after these reserves were created in India colonial officers began curtailing the tribal peoples' privileges81 and when in the 1920s the authorities began to establish a network of hunting reserves and conservation areas, still harsher restrictions and penalties were imposed.82 The result, in India and throughout most of the region except Melanesia, was the arrogation of huge areas of land to the Crown; lands which were passed to the State at independence.83

In India today, fully 22% of the national territory is under the control of the forestry departments where local communities' rights to land are denied. Exactly these areas are those most densely inhabited by indigenous peoples. In Indonesia, 74% of the national territory is run by the Forest Department based in Jakarta. Between 30 and 65 million people live in these forests. In the Philippines, the forest reserves cover 55% of the country and include almost all the ancestral domains of the country's 6.5 million indigenous people. In Thailand, the 40% of the country managed by the 7,000 staff of the Royal Forest Department includes almost all the upland areas inhabited by the country's 700,000 members of the 'hill tribes'.84

The most obvious result of this 'scientific forestry' has been the catastrophic degradation and loss of the region's forests. Forest reserves were established to regulate and tax developing forest industries, but the politically connected logging companies that have gained rights to the forests have become so rich and powerful, they soon overwhelmed any capacity or intention the state may have had to restrain the exploitation.85 Even conservation zones, established to try to salvage some forest from destruction have only caused yet more areas to be alienated from indigenous control.86

To the degradation of forests caused by logging have been added other overwhelming pressures. Mining, hydropower and other infrastructural developments have displaced indigenous peoples and flooded and destroyed large areas of forest, while access roads have encouraged settlers to enter and occupy indigenous domains. Plantation schemes, of soft-woods for pulp and paper and of cash crops such as palm oil, rubber, tea and cloves, have been another major motor for the annexation of indigenous lands. For example, in late 1997, Iban Dayaks, one of the most numerous indigenous peoples in the Malaysian State of Sarawak, protesting plantation companies that began bulldozing the indigenous peoples' crops without negotiation or compensation were shot at by armed police, with one fatality.87

Many of these industrial-scale cash-cropping projects have been supported by resettlement schemes which have sought both to concentrate dispersed indigenous communities into centralised settlements under Government supervision and encourage large-scale settlement of indigenous lands with 'surplus people' from other areas of the national territory. The aim of these projects is both to free up land for use by non-indigenous settlers and bring about the administraive annexation of previously autonomous indigenous communities. Indonesia's transmigration programme is the best known but similar colonisation schemes in Nepal, Bangladesh and Malaysia have also targeted indigenous lands.88 Likewise, in Vietnam, the post-war communist government has promoted a massive colonisation of the central highlands, outnumbering the area's 700,000 indigenous people who had been led to believe the area would be set aside as autonomous provinces.89

More broadly, the indigenous peoples of the region have experienced rapid social change due to their incorporation into expanding market economies. Monetarisation and the intensification of indigenous economies have radically reshaped both the way indigenous peoples relate to their environment and to each other. While some of these changes have undoubtedly been beneficial others have been socially and environmentally damaging. The assertion of cash values in place of other long-cherished norms has eroded previous traditions of sharing, exchange and mutual support, meaning growing disparities in wealth and health.90

The creation of land markets has posed particular problems to peoples who lack both political connections and experience in handling large sums of money. In western Bangladesh and neighbouring India, the Santal, once the exclusive occupiers of the area, now own less land per capita than the invading Bengalis.91

Logging and forest loss have affected indigenous peoples severely. The loss of land, destruction of game, pollution of rivers, fouled drinking water, destroyed fish stocks and depleted forest products have all meant serious impoverishment for Dayaks in Borneo for instance.92 Women have suffered particular hardship as their societies become increasingly enclosed and subject to the legal and cultural impositions of outsiders. In India, for example, tribal women have lost control of land and are excluded from any effective participation in decision-making.93

Prejudices Against Shifting Cultivation

For many centuries the conventional view of indigenous systems of forest management has been that they were backward, wasteful and destructive. Underlying this prejudice lies a deep mistrust of peoples who are neither subject to government control and taxation systems nor contribute substantially to the market economy.95 The Dutch characterised shifting cultivation in what was to become Indonesia as the 'robber economy' and in India, the British classified areas of shifting cultivation areas as 'wastelands' not because the practice laid waste the forests but because it provided no revenue to the Empire.96 As pressure on natural resources has intensified, such systems have, in addition, been criticized as being environmentally destructive.97 A failure to distinguish between traditional forest farmers, who may have developed complex systems of forest management and incoming settlers who have moved into the forests and adopted less sophisticated slash-and-burn techniques has led many governments and development agencies to assert that shifting cultivation is the principle cause of forest loss in the region.98

However, many detailed studies of Asian forest-dwellers' economies made since the 1950s suggest a quite different conclusion. Hunters and gatherers, such as the Penan of Sarawak, who explicitly see themselves as passing their lands unharmed to the generations that follow,99 consciously manage their resources to ensure sustained yield.100 The idea that present generations are merely stewards who hold the lands of the ancestors in trust for future generations is echoed in many indigenous cultures throughout the region, as in New Guinea where the people refer to future generations as 'our children who are still in the soil'.101

Studies of shifting cultivation reveal not only their extreme variability and complexity but the enormous reserve of vernacular knowledge on which they are based.102 Practices to conserve resources, restore soil fertility, mimic biodiversity and protect watersheds have been widely documented throughout the region. Equally, studies reveal the immense reserve of practical lore in forest-based societies concerning their environment: to the knowledgeable the forest is an immense store-house of medicines, drugs, herbs, spices, fruits, oils, resins, gums, dyes, basts, rattans, horn, ivory, bird's nests and much else.103

Complementing this practical knowledge, these forest-dependent peoples have also developed complicated customary rules regarding land tenure, land management and resource rights. For example, in common with many other indigenous peoples of the region, in Borneo, the Dayaks' systems of forest management is based on a complex web of overlapping rights, duties and mutual obligations, in which individual or family rights to use of farmland, forest trees, fishing areas or hunting zones overlay communal areas owned by the community. In many Borneo societies these rights are inherited equally by men and women.104

For indigenous peoples', their ancestral territories do not just provide the economic base for their daily lives but are intimately bound up with their cosmologies and identities as communities and as peoples. The landscape that they occupy is pervaded by their history, their millennial experience and is at once their home and the abode of the spiritual beings whose invisible presence explains the functioning of the visible world. The land is not just economically important to indigenous peoples, it is sacred to them. Moreover, this connection with the land is maintained through traditional land use systems like rotational farming (and see box). The Karen of northern Thailand note:

"the rotational farming system is integral to the concept of being a Pgkenyaw. It is the physical manifestation of the lifestyle, beliefs, culture and history of the people as a whole and if it was to be abandoned a large loss would be felt throughout the people."105

Much of this is obscure to administrators and other outsiders. Common property systems have been seen as open-access areas, in which competition between individuals for resources inevitably leads to over-intensive use and environmental degradation — the so-called tragedy of the commons. However, as Michael Cernea of the World Bank has pointed out:

"The term common property has been largely mis-understood and falsely interpreted for the past two to three decades. Common property regimes are not the free-for-all that they have been described to be, but are structured ownership arrangements within which management rules are developed, group size is known and enforced, incentives exist for co-owners to follow the accepted institutional arrangements, and sanctions work to insure compliance. Resource degradation in developing countries, while incorrectly attributed to 'common property systems' intrinsically, actually originates in the dissolution of local level institutional arrangements whose very purpose was to give rise to resource use patterns that were sustainable."106

This is not to say that indigenous systems of resource use are flawless and inherently sustainable. On the contrary, as indigenous societies undergo rapid change, the balance they may have maintained between societies and their environments can be upset. In the first place, many indigenous peoples have lost much of their ancestral territories to outsiders and this had led to too many people being concentrated on too little land, upsetting traditional patterns of land ownership, management and use. Rising indigenous populations have likewise increased local pressure on the environment. Increasing demands for cash, some externally imposed and some internally generated, also place a heavier burden on local economies and environments to produce a marketable surplus.

New technologies, like steel tools, chain saws, shotguns, agricultural machinery and transportation, new crops and agrochemicals, may radically change land use. At the same time traditional value systems, social organisations and decision-making processes may be transformed and not just as a result of outside impositions. All these forces tend to upset indigenous peoples' relations with their environment and may result in over-intensive land use and environmental degradation.108

The Indigenous Peoples Movement in South and South East Asia

Social movements by native and tribal peoples in Asia have a very long history. Resistance by indigenous groups to the takeover of their lands, the expropriation of their labour and the imposition of taxes long predates the establishment of colonial states. During the colonial era uprisings of indigenous peoples against further impositions and exploitation were commonplace and often had to be put down with considerable violence. In the post-colonial era, liberation struggles of indigenous peoples have also flared up again in a number of countries. However, it is only relatively recently that these peoples have begun to explicitly identify themselves as 'indigenous' and made demands based on existing and emerging standards of international law.

One important event that prompted the entry of Asian indigenous peoples onto the 'international' stage was the struggle of the Igorot peoples of the Central Cordillera of the Philippines to halt the construction of a series of World bank-funded dams in the mid-1970s. The project threatened to displace some 80,000 Kalinga and Bontoc people from their ancestral lands and was imposed at a time of hardening opposition to the Marcos dictatorship.109 When locals protested against the project, the Marcos regime tried to undermine resistance with bribery and obfuscation. However, resistance hardened and the people resorted to civil disobedience to prevent surveyors getting access to the area. Engineers' campsites were dismantled and roads were blocked, prompting the government to send in the army and initiate a campaign of violence.110 The Igorot leader Macli-ing Dulag was assassinated and many people took to the hills and joined the New Peoples Army in defiance of the imposed development programme.111 The conflict endured long after the World Bank pulled out and the project was cancelled. Local villages were repeatedly bombed and subjected to counter-insurgency programmes as a result.112 An important consequence of this debacle and similar major problems with World Bank-funded projects in India and Brazil, was the World Bank's adoption of a policy on 'tribal peoples' in 1981 (see above). At the same time, international human rights organisations like Survival International launched public indignation campaigns, based on the letter-writing model developed by Amnesty International, in support of indigenous rights.

A major impetus to the internationalisation of the Asian indigenous rights movement came with the setting up in 1983 of the UN's Working Group on Indigenous Populations, which has met almost annually in Geneva ever since. Representatives of indigenous peoples from India and the Philippines began to attend the Working Group from 1984 onwards and soon identified that they shared a political platform with indigenous peoples from the Americas, Northern Europe, Australia and New Zealand in pushing for their rights to the ownership and control of their territories and to self-determination. At the same time, Survival International began to activate the ILO's complaints procedures by documenting serious human rights abuses in Bangladesh and India amounting to government violations of their commitments under ILO Convention 107. The complaints were taken very seriously by the International Labour Conference and by the ILO's expert panel on compliance. The Panel found that Survival's allegations that the resettlement plan of the World Bank-funded Sardar Sarovar dam in India contravened India's obligations to recognise adivasi land rights were prima facie correct. The ILO also sent two investigative missions to Bangladesh to look into the human rights group's allegations of genocide.

The elevation of the issue of indigenous rights into an international concern and the elaboration of revised human rights standards recognising their rights, encouraged many Asian peoples facing government repression to appeal to the international community for redress. Increasingly, 'tribal', 'native', 'aboriginal' and 'ethnic minority' groups from various Asian countries began to identify themselves as 'indigenous' and linked up to form networks and alliances to push for their rights. In the late 1980s, the various indigenous movements in the Philippines linked together to form a national federation of indigenous organisations with a small office in Manila financed by the Ford Foundation. In 1988, sixteen indigenous organisations from India, Indonesia, Japan, Nepal, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Thailand met in Chiang Mai to analyse their common cause and different strategies for achieving self-determination and set up the 'Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact' to help coordinate their future work.113

Many of the Asian Indigenous organisations in turn formally linked themselves up to the wider international indigenous movement at a meeting in Penang in Malaysia in 1992. The conference participants, indigenous peoples' representatives from Central and South America, Central Africa and Asia, elaborated a 'Charter of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests' and formed an 'International Alliance of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests'. This Alliance has functioned ever since, with regular regional meetings of its members, six-monthly meetings of its coordinating committee made up of representatives from each of the Alliance's eight regions and by means of a small indigenous-run international secretariat based in London. The Alliance has been intensely active, seeking to ensure that global environment policy-making takes full account of indigenous rights. It has involved itself actively in processes being driven by agencies such as the World Bank, Commission on Sustainable Development, FAO, UNDP, GEF and CBD. Global Conferences are held every two or three years to thrash out the Alliance's own policy and to programme future work.

However, the Alliance has not been without its problems. As Dayak activist Raymond Abin of Sarawak noted in a fax message sent to the 3rd International Conference of this International Alliance, held in Nagpur, India, in May 1997, after he was prohibited from travelling to the meeting by the Malaysian authorities:

"With this message I would like to take the opportunity to inform you of the appalling situation facing the indigenous peoples of the Bahasa region [Indonesia and Malaysia]. The destructive development policies and programmes of the governments, which place great emphasis on natural resource exploitation and acquisition of lands, have caused acute problems for the indigenous communities. Our human rights as indigenous peoples are continuously being suppressed, harassed, intimidated and violated in our efforts to protect and defend our cultural heritage, resources, land and environment. Our peoples are being deprived, evicted, culturally assimilated, economically marginalised, and live in poverty and malnutrition as a result of development activities within our lands and territories.

The governments are still issuing timber licences over our forest in spite of our strong protest against logging operations within our territories. Deforestation is carried out intensively and extensively in Sarawak, Sabah, and Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, and in Sulawesi, Yamdena Island, Irian Jaya and various parts of the archipelgo. In Sarawak, the Dayaks are strongly resisting the targetting of their native customary lands for large-scale oil-palm plantations....

The Orang Asli communities in peninsular Malaysia are continuously being displaced by various mega-development projects including highway construction, highland resorts, parks and plantation schemes. Their rights to land are totally denied by the government. The aggressive promotion of tourism is another threat to indigenous peoples throughout the Bahasa region, leading to widespread cultural disruption, child labour and the exploitation of women in the vice trade."114

The fact that indigenous peoples are actively resisting some outside interventions has given many the false impression that the are static and conservative societies, opposed to all change. But this is just to create another pretext for outsiders to intervene in indigenous peoples' lives 'for their own good'. The reality is that very many indigenous peoples are actively seeking change, on their own terms, at their own pace and under their own control. As a Tinggian resisting the logging of their pine forests by the Japanese-owned Cellophil Corporation in the Cordillera of the northern Philippines eloquently stated:

"Don't mistake us. We are not a backward-looking people. Like others we want development and we want to improve our lives and the lives of the next generations; we want better education, better health and better services. But we want to control this development in our land and over our lives. And we demand a share both in decision-making and in the benefits of development."115

Awareness of the issue of indigenous rights has begun to spread throughout Asia. Regions that were previously isolated from these international currents of thought have begun to take note, such as Pakistan, Burma and Indochina.116 Indonesia has witnessed a huge up-welling of indigenous activism, since the fall of the Suharto and the weakening of military control. Whereas the Indonesian government considers that some 1.5 million people can be classified as 'suku suku terasing', the newly emerging indigenous movement which formed itself into a archipelago-wide alliance at a major conference in Jakarta in March 1999 estimates its own numbers at around 65 million. This means that the great majority of Indonesians not living on the central islands of Java, Lombok, Madura and Bali, now consider themselves to be indigenous peoples and wish to regain control of their lands and destinies.

2. Local Experiences: Issues and Lessons

As described in section A of this report, many international development agencies have adopted specific policies on Indigenous Peoples aimed at ensuring that their aid programmes are adjusted to suit local circumstances. However, despite these policies and the calls for change made by national indigenous movements, there is surprisingly little evidence that any of the donors have funded projects with national governments aimed at national policy reform towards indigenous peoples. For example, the World Bank, in violation of its policy commitment to ensure that borrower government policies towards Indigenous Peoples coincide with the Bank's, has persistently shied away from insisting on such reforms.117 Despite numerous World Bank projects in India, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, which have affected Indigenous Peoples, policy reforms have been avoided. In fact, with the exception of the Philippines, this review has come across very few projects, which have targetted Indigenous Peoples for assistance. This finding reinforces the conclusion drawn in Part A of this study that bilateral and multilateral agencies find it very hard to intervene on behalf of Indigenous Peoples because of the awkward position this then puts them in with their government counterparts.118

In the main it has thus fallen to national and international NGOs — some with funds from the development agencies — to support Indigenous Peoples more directly in their struggle to recover recognition of their rights to their lands. Moreover, most of this support work has been through local level projects with 'grassroots' NGOs and indigenous communities, with relatively little funding being directed to national level policy reform. In recent years, PeFoR has played a prominent role in providing this kind of community-level support.

This section of the study reviews experiences in this area.

Mapping as a Tool for Tenure Reform and Community Management

The use of geomatic mapping technologies by Indigenous Peoples to demonstrate their relationship to their lands and to mount land claims is a relatively recent phenomenon. Once the basic idea and the technology was introduced into the South East Asia region, the technique has spread rapidly. Community level mapping exercises are now underway in the India, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Thailand.119 PeFoR deserves much of the credit for the rapid dissemination of the technique, through support for local level projects, national and regional workshops and exchange programmes.

At their best, mapping projects directly involve community members in the survey of the land use and boundaries of the own domains. The technologies used vary widely. At their simplest, as used in Thailand, maps may be hand-made 3D maps, made by cutting shapes along contour lines derived from government base maps enlarged to a 1:15,000 scale. Vegetation zones, roads, land use data, village sites and the boundaries of land claims can then be painted onto the models. These maps have proved to be useful tools for community mobilisation and village level discussions of land claims and natural resource management planning. Other mapping exercises are using geomatic (mainly GPS) or traditional surveying techniques to locate data on maps. Although these techniques do allow community members to decide what is put into the maps, they do, however, generally rely to some extent on trained personnel from outside NGOs to prepare the base maps, record the field data directly on the maps, or in the computer, and print up the final maps. Higher technologies, such as sophisticated Global Information Systems, while allowing much more subtle use of colours, layers and data sets, increase the conceptual distance between those with the indigenous knowledge in the communities and those who make the maps. Community control and a sense of ownership of the maps can be attenuated accordingly and there is a risk that the technical NGOs consider themselves and not the villagers to be the owners of the maps.120 The study detected a tendency for support NGOs helping Indigenous Peoples with mapping, to adopt progressively more sophisticated systems driven by their own thirst for knowledge, fascination with the technology and a will to get ahead of and outwit government administrators. The risk is that the mapping process becomes more and more remote from indigenous priorities and in the end becomes yet another form of administrative annexation, this time by NGOs, against which the Indigenous Peoples have to struggle. Clear mutual agreements on who has the intellectual property rights to maps — they should be vested with the communities not with the NGOs — and greater investment in training the indigenous leadership in the manipulation of data and the new technologies are part of the answer to this emerging problem.

In the field, there are a number of other difficulties that mapping exercises have to overcome. The first is that they tend freeze what are in reality fluid boundaries and systems of land use. Hard lines are drawn where fuzziness and ambiguity may, in fact, prevail. Mappers in Mindanao, in the Southern Philippines, for example, find that traditional areas of land use expand and contract seasonally. In Borneo, communities move around as lands in the immediate vicinity become 'used up'. Boundaries are hunting grounds shift accordingly. Secondly, the maps do not just include — more or less successfully - the concepts of the community mappers, they exclude the concepts of those who are not involved, both people within the communities (often women) or areas in question (often lower caste or status groups) and those outside them or on their boundaries (neighbouring communities). Successful mapping initiatives depend on both adequate community preparation within the area to be mapped and on prior agreement with neighbouring groups on the boundaries between villages or ethnic groups. This problem can be exaggerated however and a common solution where inter-community boundaries are disputed is to map the boundaries that extend around all the communities and leave resolution of the disputes of the internal boundaries to the future, preferably according to customary law and procedures.

Within the region, the process of mapping Indigenous lands has probably gone furthest in the Philippines, where something like 700,000 hectares of community lands have been mapped out of a total of 2.9 million hectares so far registered with the government as Ancestral Domains. The experience there has revealed a number of additional problems. One is that customary areas and boundaries frequently do not coincide with existing administrative boundaries. Villages can thus find that they are subject to several barangay, district or even provincial jurisdictions, which entails complicated negotiations if the regularisation of tenure is then sought. Unusually, in the Philippines NGO-made maps can be accepted by the local administration as authoritative documents on which to base land claims and not just as advocacy tools, which is the way they are used in many other areas. In this case, increasing precision in the survey techniques is called for, requiring more specialised training of mappers and implying a closer interaction with the local administration. However, PAFID's experience with differential GPS suggests that community mappers are able to deal with this level of technical complexity given the right preparation.

A common finding of this review, was the need for an emphasis on preparation, training and community-level capacity building. Preparatory meetings, workshops and visits are crucial for the long-term success of the mapping exercises themselves. Establishing community consensus and agreement on the goals and practices of the project is a crucial first step and some NGOs make consensus decisions a pre-condition to their involvement in helping to map any area. Community control and sense of ownership depends not only on formal agreements — which are vital — but also on quite detailed training of community members to ensure that at least some in each mapped community are comfortable with the details of the technology and the way it is being used to represent local knowledge. Unduly abbreviated training was the main weakness I observed in many projects. Since maps are just tools in a much longer process of establishing a community's control over its lands and natural resources, the long term usefulness of mapping projects also depends on adequate capacity-building and community mobilisation. A frequent complaint heard in the course of this review is that outside donors tend not to provide enough funds for this element, as they seek quick and visible results and are wary of creating dependency — a legitimate concern.

Participatory mapping is here to stay as part of the tool-kit used by the Indigenous movement. Communities have discovered that it is powerful as much for community organising, strategising and control as for communicating local visions to outsiders. Mapping can build community coherence and reaffirm the value and importance of traditional knowledge, recreating respect for elders and customary resource management practices.

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of the mapping movement is that it has provided a tool for the indigenous leadership to address community-level concerns, thus helping them maintain ties with their constituents as they engage in political negotiations at the national level. Maps have also proved vitally important tools to indigenous communities confronting the impositions of logging, mining, plantation and conservation schemes. By use of maps, communities and NGOs have been able to demonstrate conclusively the overlaps between indigenous lands and imposed concessions. They have also been used to expose the incompetence of different line ministries, whose maps are so very often erroneous and have created horrendous confusions in the overlap between different jurisdictions and concessions.

Initial enthusiasm for community-mapping led to it being considered a 'magic bullet' that could resolve land conflicts and promote sustainable natural resource management, in one shot. Experience has quickly taught most of those involved that mapping is just a tool — a very powerful tool in the right hands — in a much longer struggle to reform land ownership systems, indigenous self-governance and government systems of administration. To be effective, mapping exercises need to be integrated into long term community strategies and be clearly linked to broader strategies for legal, policy and institutional reforms. The charge that the mapping 'craze' has diverted attention away from other pressing issues — like political organisation, tenure reform, legal changes and national policy reforms — has some weight. However, the lessons are being learned fast and a more skilled and mature movement is emerging as a result.

Land Titling

A detailed treatment of the formidable and varied legal complexities confronting Indigenous Peoples seeking to secure unambiguous recognition of their rights to own and control their lands is beyond the scope of this paper.121 As noted above, throughout the region, national laws have for long ignored or denied indigenous land rights or provided legal processes which are neither secure nor appropriate for their cultures and customary systems of land use. Their customary systems of inheritance, land ownership, natural resource management and use are poorly understood and fit badly into the national legal and administrative systems. For those indigenous peoples living in official forest reserves the situation is, in many respects, even worse. Lands are considered to be owned by the State and the rights of indigenous residents are almost wholly curtailed.

Confronted with this situation and facing the rapid takeover of their lands by other interests, many Indigenous Peoples throughout the region are demanding recognition of their right to own their lands and, where relevant, have them excised from the jurisdiction of the Forestry Departments. For many, the mapping projects, summarised in the preceding section, are principally conceived as ways of pushing for ownership titles. Unfortunately, a finding of this review is that many indigenous organisations, especially those in Indonesia and India, are very unclear about just what kind of title they actually want.

A land title, as many jurists have observed, is really a 'bundle of rights' and the components of the bundle vary widely from law to law and from one legislation to another. There is therefore a pressing need for indigenous rights activists to look long and hard at the components of the 'bundles' on offer. Which components suit their interests and which do not? Can laws and constitutions be refashioned so that the 'bundles of rights' which indigenous people secure really suit them and their future development?

In many other parts of the world, Indigenous Peoples have made similar demands and then faced similar dilemmas. In many countries, either due to pressure from Indigenous Peoples themselves or due to the more-or-less benign intentions of administrators, laws have been specially modified to try to promote indigenous interests. However, many Indigenous Peoples have found that legal recognition of their rights, while desirable in principle, may entail further problems. These may arise because the new laws do not accommodate the flexibility of indigenous systems. Another set of problems arises because land titles may parcel up lands into saleable lots. Land titling can thus have the effect of placing indigenous lands in land markets and can facilitate the break up of ancestral domains.122

At the international level, Indigenous Peoples have responded to this challenge in a number of ways. Some indigenous spokespersons have rejected the notion of land ownership as a western imposition. 'We don't own the land, the land owns us' has been a common affirmation. Other indigenous spokespersons have, however, decided that they do need legally secured ownership rights and the challenge has then been to find forms of title which best accommodate indigenous customs. In Latin America, one of the most widely favoured solutions, which has been accepted in some national laws, has been to qualify Indigenous Peoples' land titles as 'inalienable, un-leaseable, and un-mortgageable'. In this way, while rights of ownership are secured, the lands cannot be sold or otherwise removed from indigenous control, either by the actions of the State or third parties, or, and this is equally important, by elements in the indigenous society itself. Making land un-transferable in this has some major advantages in assuring the continuity of the indigenous land base. However, there are some disadvantages too. In particular, it means that land cannot be used as collateral to secure loans from banks for development purposes.

Land titling can also entail other problems. Indigenous peoples have noted that their attachment to their lands while strong is also fluid. Settlements move, break up, coalesce and reform. Access to land and other resources may be reallocated as families grow, move or diminish. Rigid legal titles provided to individuals, families or communities may freeze these systems preventing the reallocation of rights according to customary law. A widely favoured solution chosen by many Indigenous Peoples is thus to assert rights to the communal ownership of a wide territory, thus allowing people within the collective territory to apportion rights according to custom independently of the law.

Indigenous Peoples' rights to own, control and manage their territories are now recognised in existing and emerging international law.123 However, national laws may make no provision for indigenous systems and many governments are reluctant to recognise indigenous rights to large blocks of land, which may be coveted by other interests. The dilemma for Indigenous Peoples is thus two-fold. First to assess which type of land title best suits their present and future needs and second to work out tactics for securing this kind of title given the legal and political context in which they work. Holding out for optimal legal reform may not be an option for peoples facing immediate threats to their land base, yet overhasty acceptance of sub-optimal land titles may create serious problems in the long term.

Un-transferable titles may not be suitable for all individuals, communities or peoples. In particular, many Indigenous Peoples may have a long experience of land markets and private ownership and may not favour communal systems. Effective control of large territories embracing many settlements implies the existence of effective indigenous institutions able to oversee and coordinate land use in mutually acceptable ways.

Exactly these problems are now being faced by the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, where the recognition of indigenous rights has advanced further than in any other country in the region excluding Melanesia. Under the revised Philippines constitution of 1992, the concept of indigenous peoples' rights to ancestral domain gained some recognition. In 1993, an Administrative Order was passed which allowed the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to recognise, in a preliminary way, these rights, by the issuance of Certificates of Ancestral Domain Claims (CADC).124 The issuance of CADC to a community is supposed to afford them interim protection against unilateral expropriation or exploitation until such a time as ownership of the area can be adequately determined. However, the communities had to wait another four and half years, until the very last minutes of the Ramos government's term of office, before a law was passed, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997, which provided a mechanism for fuller recognition of ancestral ownership rights. This confusing law establishes a number of procedures for recognising both individual and communal ownership of 'ancestral domains' and 'ancestral lands'. Strong points in the law are that:

• it clearly recognises the principal — if not the practice — of indigenous ownership and control of their territories;

• it accepts the exercise of customary law in the adjudication of disputes and for community decisions about resource management and land allocations;

• it establishes the principal of 'free and informed consent' before lands can be alienated or communities relocated;

• it places certain bureaucratic trammels and defences in the way of third parties wishing to exploit indigenous lands;

• it insists on the 'full participation'125 of indigenous peoples in the establishment of protected areas and watershed management regimes on their lands.

The law also suffers serious deficiencies and shortcomings. These have been discussed in detail by the Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center (LRC) in the Philippines and include:

• the problematic distinction between 'ancestral lands' and 'ancestral domains' which may encourage the fragmentation of indigenous territories;

• the effect of bureaucratizing the administration of lands and thus weakening community control and unity;

• the facilitation of legalised access to indigenous lands by third parties especially mining interests.126

Since the law was promulgated, the LRC has noted that the land titling has in some areas facilitated access to indigenous lands by loggers and miners. Two of the three types of title that can be acquired under the IPRA allow the alienation of lands and it has proved easy for outsiders and individuals within the community to dodge or manipulate the obligation to gain 'free and informed consent' from the community as a whole. The law has, in effect, commoditised lands and given more power to outsiders to re-allocate indigenous resources, while at the same time encouraging the emergence of indigenous entrepreneurs bent on privatising the indigenous commons.

Professor Pons Benagan of the Philippines Center for Social Science notes how, whereas under most traditional systems in the Philippines rights were not traditionally transferable outside the community, IPRA now allows this. The communities' legal defences against expropriation lie in IPRA's provisions for free and informed consent and the exercise of customary law. However, where community organisation is weak and awareness of the law insufficient, it has proved all too easy for the unscrupulous to manipulate these provisions to their advantage. The lesson that Benagan draws from this experience is that indigenous land titling should come with unbiased institutional support, legal training and capacity building to enable communities to manage their lands and make decisions in ways that ensure genuine consent.

Problems with Legal Personality

Questions regarding the scale and nature of titles thus relate directly to the question of which indigenous institutions should be recognised as having legal personality — that is the right to negotiate and enter into contracts with the government or third parties. Who speaks for the group? In which indigenous polity are land and resource rights to be vested?

Western laws favour a number of options, encouraging persons to enter into contracts as individuals, corporations or other legally registered associations. Indigenous Peoples however often demand the recognition of the legal personality of their own customary institutions. Yet, where they have secured collective title to lands, they often then have serious problems dealing with outsiders in mutually acceptable ways. Divisions within the communities often result from lack of agreement or clarity about legal personality.

For example, in Papua New Guinea, 98% of the national territory is recognised as being owned by the traditional land-owners but the law is imprecise about which indigenous institutions have rights to manage these lands and negotiate rights of access to the resources on them. These imprecisions have allowed local elites within the communities to register as associations, gain control of notionally communal lands, enter into deals with logging and mining companies and other interests and make large personal fortunes at the expense of the rest of their group. Similar problems have arisen among some indigenous communities in the Philippines, where control of communal lands has been vested in village chiefs or 'dato'. Lack of customary checks and balances on these leaders have allowed them to enter into deals without the consent and contrary to the best interests of members of the communities they lead.127

In North East India, where collective land ownership is recognised in law, indigenous people report that deforestation of their communal lands is a severe problem. Many villages have felt pressured by poverty, lack of services and by timber companies to sell off the timber on their lands. Many villages have been exploited by unscrupulous timber merchants as a consequence and the practice of timber sales has lessened as the villagers have seen how the costs outweigh the benefits. Logging has now been prohibited in some areas. However, the problems in the villages remain unresolved and the sale of firewood from communal lands continues to be one of the main sources of income for the indigenous communities. Government efforts to ban these sales, on environmental grounds, were halted after fierce protests from the communities. Yet, the benefits from these sales are not being shared equally in the communities and the NE is witnessing the emergence of an indigenous elite of 'mini-capitalists'.128

The problem may arise in a number of ways. In the first place, customary institutions may have evolved in entirely different contexts from those in which they are operating today. In the past, communities may not have needed complex controls on traditional leaders charged with mediating inter-ethnic trading of, say, salt and iron in exchange for cloth and game. Only once these same leaders are expected to mediate trades in land, timber, minerals and cash do the lack of institutional controls emerge as a problem. At the same time, customary law and value systems may be eroded or transformed by increasing interaction with the national society, with the consequence that leaders no longer perform according to traditional norms.

The failure of traditional institutions to take decisions in the collective interest has led many outside observers to condemn indigenous rights advocates as romantics blind to the inherent divisions within indigenous societies. For their part, many indigenous peoples have responded by establishing new, more equitable, accountable and transparent institutions to regulate communal lands and their relations with outsiders. They have recognised that customary institutions may need to be revived, reformed or replaced to meet new pressures and demands from within and outside their communities.

The lesson from these experiences is that there is a need both for precision about which institutions should be empowered to make decisions for the group and for effective measures to ensure broad community involvement in decision-making.129 In some circumstances, customary institutions may have evolved to deal with social and economic circumstances quite different from those they now have to address. The dilemma remains that local traditions, institutions, experiences and circumstances are so varied that prescriptive solutions are very problematic. Yet legal clarity is nevertheless necessary if unrepresentative groups are not to gain control of communal lands and resources.

Custom and Change

The assertion of customary law and institutions as modern and viable alternatives to imposed government laws and administration continues to inform the indigenous movement. Yet as these ideas gain currency and are put into practice it is becoming increasingly clear that custom too needs to be flexible and to change in order to deal with new circumstances. Indeed anthropologists' studies clearly show how, in the past, customary law and institutions did change rapidly as circumstances changed. Leadership patterns changed rapidly as new crops and trading networks spread through the Indonesian archipelago, for instance.130 In Sarawak, Iban concepts of territoriality have changed over time as population density has increased and settlements have ceased being so mobile. In the past, the collective territory, menoa, used to embrace the lands and hunting grounds of several villages. Today, in Iban custom, most villages have their own menoa, each one clearly bounded and distinguished from those of neighbouring villages.131

Unfortunately, in some regions, this traditional flexibility in custom has been lost. The substitution of state imposed institutions has caused custom to atrophy. In some areas the problem dates back to the imposition of colonial rule. During the era of Dutch rule, in Indonesia, for example, steps were taken to formalise and freeze adat. Formerly dynamic and evolving processes of self-governance and natural resource management were typologised and codified. These measures may have given an unreal appearance of permanence to what had previously been quite fluid processes. After independence, although some laws have recognised adat, many rights previously exercised by customary institutions were curtailed or overridden by centralised policies, laws, institutions and development plans. As a result in many areas adat became 'folklorised', dealing with religious and ritual aspects of community life while leaving decisions about land, livelihoods and political issues to the individual and the imposed institutions of the State. Reviving the scope and authority of adat will be challenging in these circumstances.

Many indigenous peoples in other parts of the world are working through similar dilemmas and are reviewing and reworking their traditions to fit new circumstances and values. For example, at the international level, sustained advocacy by indigenous representatives has been effective in securing recognition in international human rights law for the right of Indigenous Peoples to exercise their customary laws. At the same time, indigenous spokespersons active at the international level have, for their part, agreed that the exercise of customary laws should not lead to violations of international human rights standards.

In various parts of the world, customary law is thus going through an active process of scrutiny and reform by Indigenous Peoples themselves. In the Philippines and South America, peace-pacts and inter-ethnic compacts have been established and extended to curtail traditional practices like head-hunting, raiding and feuds. In Africa, there are movements to curtail customary practices such as female genital mutilation. In Papua New Guinea, custom is being re-evaluated and 'bad custom' which permits multiple marriages and wife-beating are being challenged by indigenous lawyers in the courts.

The acceptance of the need to restore flexibility to custom has not yet worked through the indigenous world. At the regional conference, titled 'Customary Law versus the State' (check) which established the Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago, AMAN,139 there were fierce debates about the extent to which adat really accommodates the present needs and rights of indigenous women. The indigenous women argued that in some parts of the archipelago customary law treated them as second class citizens and that in others traditions that gave them greater equality had been lost and substituted with male-dominated decision-making from which women's concerns were excluded. To accommodate these views the proposed structure of AMAN was amended to ensure that women got equal representation in regional councils.140

The lesson from these experiences is that for customary law to be effective it needs to be respected, but to secure respect it may need to be reworked to fit changing circumstances and values. The dilemma is that as the rate of change inside and outside the communities increases due to modern communications, globalisation and the ever deeper penetration of the market, the fine line between 'invented tradition' and arbitrary improvisation may become blurred. Custom is respected because it embodies the immemorial wisdom of past generations. How much can this wisdom be substituted with new ideas before respect for the ancestors wanes?141

Promoting the 'Cascade Effect'

One of the major challenges for donors to small-scale initiatives is how to promote wider change from small beginnings. Most donors hope that the 'projects' that they fund will trigger wider changes, stimulating similar changes in neighbouring communities once they see the advantages that come to nearby communities. The PeFoR programme has had the promotion of this 'cascade effect' as one of its long term goals.

The main tools used by PeFoR and others in the field to promote the 'cascade' include the following:

• dissemination of reports and information sharing in local languages;

• regional workshops aimed at evaluations and experience sharing;

• 'exposure' trips in which project partners from different regions are funded to visit each other and learn from each other's experiences;

• overlapping community training, whereby projects — such as community mapping exercises — involve members of neighbouring communities as well as target villages to encourage them to then undertake the same initiative themselves.

This conscious promotion of the 'cascade' has undoubtedly helped spread the idea of making land claims and mapping. Indeed, the idea has spread very fast and widely in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

However, the broader spread of these initiatives has also run into clearly identifiable obstacles. In the first place this is because initiatives like mapping do cost money and require technologies and skills which cannot all be imparted to a community. Nearly all the participatory mapping systems being used in Asia, for example, however much they rely principally on local skills and knowledge for primary data gathering, nevertheless depend on outside technicians from NGOs to enter the data onto maps or into computers and then draw or print up the final maps. Thus, in the Philippines and Indonesia, where effective 'cascading' has occurred and initial enthusiasm for mapping has rapidly spread out from target communities, the capacity of technical assistance NGOs to then service growing demand has been overwhelmed due to the limits of time, staff numbers and financial resources. The tendency for the technical assistance NGOs to progressively adopt higher technologies such as GIS as they become increasingly adept at map-making, further limits the possibility of 'cascading' to other communities without NGO support. The adoption of higher tech. systems thus has the effect of making NGOs increasingly indispensable and correspondingly limits self-development and self-determination.

However, the main obstacles to the 'cascade' are the same market forces and top-down impositions of law, policy and institutions which have created the communities' problems in the first place. Judicious inputs of well-targeted funds to communities can help them organise and make land use decisions to delay the impact of these pressures on their lands, cultures and livelihoods. But much wider social mobilisation, political change, market reform and legal and institutional change is necessary if these 'artificial' islands of 'self-development' are to endure and spread.

Avoiding Dependency: Indigenous-NGO 'Partnerships'

A disappointing, though admittedly impressionistic, conclusion of this review is that almost all the community mapping and forest management initiatives that have been triggered or bolstered by outside funding are unsustainable without continued external support (but see box). This is not to say that the advances made by the communities with external support will all be lost. Clearly the build up of training, institutional capacity and the gains in terms of having new tools, such as maps, to organise around, are enduring gains which may be useful for a generation.

However, the NGO programmes and many of the community-based natural resource management systems introduced with external support are not self-sufficient and will depend on further external support if they are not to wither away. Most poor communities, lacking land title and legal control of their lands and resources, are unable to afford the considerable costs of mapping and for regularising tenure without external support. Technical assistance NGOs thus have to offer their support to communities as a free service, subsidised by grants from outside agencies.

Given the fact that the entire initiative of promoting community-based forest management is essentially one that works against pervasive market and institutional failures, it is neither realistic nor reasonable to suppose that the transition from government-controlled land use (or open access regimes) to community-regulated commons can be achieved without external financial support.142

One implication of these hard economic facts, is that community-run initiatives will continue to be reliant on service NGOs and northern donors for some time. This makes the kind of relationship that NGOs establish with the indigenous communities all the more important as they may have a very profound influences on the evolution of indigenous institutions and perspectives.

Many indigenous peoples clearly recognise that long term partnerships with supportive NGOs are both desirable and beneficial. NGOs that clearly accept the principle that they should support indigenous initiatives by providing advice when requested rather than giving directions are especially valued. The more mature indigenous organisations also recognise that it is unrealistic for them to expect supportive NGOs to share their visions, perspectives and priorities completely. In developing partnerships between such organisations, what is important is not so much a full coincidence of vision, but rather openness and mutual understanding about each group's agendas and priorities. Successful collaboration depends more on openness, flexibility and mutual accountability than that one group subordinates its priorities to the other (or disguises them). In this sense the WorldWide Fund for Nature's 'Statement of Principles on Conservation and Indigenous Peoples' is to be welcomed as it makes wholly clear that while the WWF strives to respect indigenous rights, it only seek to collaborate directly with indigenous peoples where they also manifest a clear commitment to conservation.

However, throughout the region, there are indigenous organisations which complain that certain NGOs are in practice no more respectful of indigenous peoples' rights to self-determination and self-development than government agencies. They accuse of them of paternalism, of lack of understanding of indigenous realities, of substituting themselves for indigenous peoples in negotiations and consultations, of imposing their own priorities and agendas, and even of capturing funds otherwise destined for the communities themselves. The problem seems to be especially commonplace in India where the Gandhian tradition of self-sacrifice and of taking the burden of the poor onto ones own shoulders apparently lends legitimacy to this process of substitution. The issue is inadequately analysed and addressed by the NGO community.

For their part, indigenous peoples have stressed that donors should clearly distinguish in their minds between Indigenous Peoples' Organisations and Non-Governmental Organisations — a distinction already accepted in the Rio Declarations. They urge that, wherever possible, donors try to develop their funding relationships direct with IPOs rather than with NGOs or through NGOs.

One way out of this problem, which has already been attempted in Thailand, Sarawak, Sabah, Indonesia, West Papua and the Philippines, has been for indigenous peoples to establish their own NGOs which are staffed by indigenous persons. Insofar as these institutions do maintain close ties with the communities from which they are sprung, they have often proved to be more sensitive to community priorities and concerns. On the other hand, this review also came on cases where regional and national 'indigenous' NGOs seemed quite as arbitrary and imposing of their ideas and preconceptions on local communities as non-indigenous NGOs. They may have weaker ties and less effective communications with indigenous communities than the NGOs they have set up to replace. Indigenous NGOs only retain their legitimacy as such so long as they remain transparent and accountable to the constituencies they claim to represent.

The long term ideal surely is for indigenous peoples to become self-sufficient and autonomous, and able to service their own needs for legal advice, financial management, market research, development planning, health care and education provision, natural resource management, policy reform advocacy and so on. However, in the short and medium term, close partnerships between indigenous peoples and NGOs will continue to be necessary. Indeed, given the increasing tendency for governments and the larger aid agencies to channel services through NGOs, the need for these 'partnerships' will intensify before (and if) they can be dispensed with.

Another problem for indigenous communities dealing with NGOs, even those NGOs which focus on servicing indigenous peoples or are run by indigenous persons, is that most of them are highly specialised. They tend to be set up and staffed to support indigenous peoples either in human rights advocacy, or conservation planning, or community development, or health-care or education — rarely more than one of these and almost never all of them. Indigenous communities, however, actually often need simultaneous support in all these fields in a well-coordinated framework. This implies either much closer collaboration between NGOs with different skills — which is highly problematic and rarely occurs successfully - or radical retraining of NGO personnel.

This review has only been able to scratch the surface of this issue. A much deeper appraisal of the problem and solutions seems warranted, which would engage both NGOs and indigenous peoples' organisations in a hard look at their own strengths and weaknesses.

3. Communities and Local and National Government

Resources on the Land

Land titles may not by themselves secure full control of the resources on or under the land. For example, in other parts of the world, indigenous peoples even where they appear to have clear rights to their lands find themselves hedged about with a large number of regulations and limitations. In Canada, wildlife on Indigenous Peoples' lands continues to be the property of the State. In most countries, sub-surface resources - minerals, water and petroleum- are also reserved by the State as national assets to be developed in the public interest. In India, all rivers are treated as State assets. In Guyana, rivers and riverbanks in Amerindian areas are also retained by the State. In Colombia, the State considers that it retains ownership of timber resources in Indian 'resguardos' (reserves).

Even where the State does not claim ownership of resources on indigenous-owned lands, resources may nevertheless be subject to regulations and controls on their use. Wildife protection laws may prohibit the hunting or capture of endangered species, for example; strict environmental regulations may apply to mineral extraction etc. These sorts of laws and regulations mean that government agencies are frequently involved in decisions about resource use in indigenous areas.

Indigenous communities have divergent views about the desirability of these kinds of interventions. In Guyana, for example, indigenous land titles give Amerindian communities full rights to dispose of the timber on their lands without the Forestry Commission having a say in the matter. One result has been that a number of Amerindian communities have entered into very disadvantageous deals with timber companies which have severely damaged local ecosystems for little gain to the communities. Some Amerindian organisations in Guyana are thus calling for changes in the law to ensure that the Forestry Commission oversees contracts between Amerindian communities and loggers to ensure that they get a fair deal and that timber is harvested in a responsible manner. In other countries, experience has been exactly the opposite. In various parts of Melanesia, for example, Forestry Department officials have colluded with loggers to loot indigenous lands.

The lesson from these experiences is that State authority over natural resources on indigenous lands is a two-edged sword. It may provide protections to indigenous peoples ill-placed to resist the pressures of outside interests but it may also facilitate access to resources on indigenous lands.

These are key issues that the indigenous movement in South and South East Asia are wrestling with. Are indigenous institutions strong enough in themselves to face off outside interests? Can State institutions be trusted to ensure that socially just and environmentally prudent decisions are made in issuing permits to outside interests? Options that suit one resource or people may not be best for others.

Indigenous Organisation and Local Administration

Reform in the relations between Indigenous Peoples and the central institutions of the State has been the main focus of concern of the indigenous movement and its supporters. Fundamental reforms - in land tenure laws and in the jurisdiction of line ministries dealing with sectors like mining and logging, the recognition of customary law and the creation of new autonomous provinces- require no less. A cost of this focus on national level reform is that until recently much less attention has been paid to understanding and reforming the relations between Indigenous Peoples and the local administration, even though it is with these agencies that indigenous communities interact on a daily basis and through which they relate to the wider apparatus of the State. Yet, if community-based mapping, development and natural resource management initiatives are to prove sustainable they have to be able to deal with the local administration. After all, many of the affairs over which indigenous peoples seek to regain control are presently the responsibility of the local administration. The recuperation of self-development and self-determination requires changes in local as much as national governance.

Indeed, from the perspective of indigenous peoples much of the history of South and South East Asia has been a history of administrative annexation, as colonial and then post-colonial powers have sought to extend their control over the further flung reaches of their expanding domains. Yet, despite their common goal, the strategies adopted by the various colonial and post-colonial powers have been quite different. As a result, the unravelling present-day administrative ties in order to promote indigenous self-governance poses quite different challenges to indigenous peoples in different parts of the region.

During the colonial era, the British and to a lesser extent Dutch administrations both favoured administration by indirect rule. The aim being to reduce the financial costs of administration and co-opt indigenous institutions in service to the colonial state. Under the system, the colonial state tolerated the continuing functioning of native institutions, including native courts, native customs and native rulers, so long as they did not seriously impede colonial interests. At the same time the local institutions were empowered to act of behalf of the colonial state in raising taxes, imposing law and order and regulating access to land and other resources.

In Sarawak, for example, administration of the colonial state was imposed down to the level of the district through the appointment of British 'district officers'. However, at the sub-district and village levels, the continued authority of temanggong (paramount chiefs), pemancha (regional chiefs), penghulu (sub-regional chiefs) and tua kampong (village headmen) was recognised. These traditional leaders were empowered to carry out censuses, raise taxes, sit in native courts and oversee the application of customary law. They were also provided with modest salaries and their political connections gave them considerable local prestige and power.

Unusually, this system of indirect rule was maintained following 'independence' in 1965 when Sarawak was incorporated into the Malaysian Federation. Today, many Dayaks note that the traditional leadership, which remains a formal part of the local administration, often make decisions in favour of outsiders, notably loggers and plantation companies, and against the interests of their own people. For this reason in a number of communities, new longhouse associations have been created, as a way of creating new democratic and accountable institutions under village control as a counter-weight to their traditional institutions which have been co-opted by the State.143

By contrast, in Indonesia, the institutions of indirect rule established by the Dutch were replaced after independence with new local administrative structures which reached right down to the village level. Local leaders complain that these institutions were imposed with very little consideration for the existing indigenous institutions and polities. As a result, communities may have been artificially grouped together or fragmented and authority over different aspects of village life may be divided among a number of different institutions.

The current Indonesian government model of administration has many parallels with colonial policies of direct rule, whereby colonial administrative structures were imposed on native peoples and replaced customary systems of governance. The overt aim of such administrative policies is to eradicate indigenous institutions and disable native expressions of power while accelerating the cultural assimilation of local communities. The policy was especially vigorously imposed by the French in Africa where colonial rule was seen quite explicitly as much as a cultural project as an economic one.144 In Indonesia, the process has led to the wholesale takeover of indigenous lands by logging, plantations, mining and colonisation projects.

Taken together these two thumb-nail histories are not encouraging. Indigenous communities have found that whether they are administered by their own (co-opted) institutions or by state-imposed ones, crucial decisions about the allocation of rights and resources are being made against their best interests. In all these countries the indigenous peoples want reforms and seek to regain control of their lands and resources, yet the review found there was much less clarity either among NGOs or at the level of the indigenous communities about how they hoped to achieve this. A number of Indonesian indigenous spokespersons, feeling betrayed by the current administrative structures are calling for the recognition of their own adat institutions as the organs of local government — exactly the system that has betrayed their indigenous brothers and sister just over the border in Sarawak.

This is a worrying finding and suggests the need both for further research and, more importantly, for donors to promote workshops, seminars and experience sharing among indigenous groups so that they can to pool insights and information and elaborate proposals suitable for their own circumstances.

The experience of indigenous peoples in other parts of the world should also be taken into account in these exercises. Lessons from Latin America, for example, teach us that the choice between direct rule and indirect rule should not be confused with a choice between imposed government and autonomy. Indirect rule through indigenous institutions was adopted by colonial states to ensure their rule, extract revenue and control resources and not to secure local autonomy. Indigenous peoples in Latin America have argued that maintenance of their autonomy requires that they maintain their customary institutions outside the control of, and parallel to, the official institutions of the State, while at the same time trying to secure as much influence in local government as possible. Such dual power structures, they argue, afford them much better chances of maintaining their own cultures and controlling the local activities of government agencies.

In India, recent legislation building on the 1992 73^rd Constitutional Amendment recognises the principle of tribal self-rule in tribal areas145. The amendment, which is now in the process of being interpreted and enacted in the various States of India, empowers the 'Gram Sabha' (community assembly) in each panchayat ('parish'/village territory) to make decisions about some natural resources, land allocations, planning and certain budgets, by direct democracy. That is to say that decisions are to be made collectively, either by vote or by consensus, by all enfranchised adults of the parish. As proposed the law should provide indigenous communities with control of small water bodies, minor forest products and land markets, and is also meant to give the Gram Sabha a voice in decisions about mining.146

The move, pushed through by adivasi politicians and which adheres to the ideal of the Panchayat Raj inspired by MK Gandhi, seeks to accommodate indigenous peoples' demands for self-determination and land rights. The amendment, which for all its good intentions has been imposed from the top-down with little actual engagement from the communities themselves, poses a major challenge to the indigenous peoples who now have to mobilise to see that the State laws enacting the amendment do so in manners best suited to the communities. Problems have already emerged in Maharashtra and Guajarat where the States have interpreted the amendment as not applying to forest lands (where the majority of the indigenous peoples' customary lands lie).

The main problem for the tribal communities, however, may come from breathing vigour and life once more into community level decision-making. After three centuries of bureaucratic annexation, integration and market penetration, and deepening impoverishment, dependency has been created and customary systems of governance are sometimes weak or even absent. In such areas, anecdotal evidence is already accumulating of community elites gaining control of the key committees charged with resource allocation and a pessimistic prognosis is that new forms of elite dominance, bureaucratic annexation and dependency will soon develop as substitutes for the old. On the other hand, in areas where customary institutions have retained their vigour, there is more hope that the political space created by the ruling will allow room for more equitable and democratic institutions to flourish.

Regionalisation and Native Power

A final dilemma which confronts Indigenous Peoples, particularly in Indonesia, relates to proposals for the regionalization of power. After four decades of centralised political control that has favoured the emergence of a corrupt national elite in Jakarta which profits from access to the timber, land and mineral resources on the Outer Islands, there have been popular demands for the devolution of power to the regions or the provinces in order to limit these excesses. The recent election of President Wahid looks likely to hasten reforms along these lines. Among his first statements on assuming power was his willingness to look for mechanisms for granting greater autonomy to some of the more restive provinces - such as Aceh, Irian Jaya (renamed 'Papua') and Maluku.

The implications of these reforms, which have been widely demanded by NGOs and many indigenous peoples, are not at all clear. The experience of Indigenous Peoples in other parts of the world urges caution. Too often devolution of authority about access to natural resources to regional centres has actually intensified pressure on local communities. In Venezuela. Cameroon, and Brazil, for example, decentralization has favoured the emergence of regional elites who have even less regard for human rights and national laws than the elites in the capital cities. Mining and logging on indigenous lands has thus intensified and not decreased.147

When Papua New Guinea gained independence in 1975, tensions between some of the 750 indigenous people and the newly incumbent administration were already apparent. To accommodate local demands for greater autonomy, a decentralised form of government was introduced. The small country was divided into no less than 19 separate provinces each with its own provincial parliament and administration. The result was that, despite having a population of little more than 3 and a half million people, as many as 130 ministerial positions were created. The hugely inflated bureaucracy built up to service this top-heavy form of government provides most of the jobs open to PNG's educated elite and absorbs up to 75% of provincial budgets. This is turn acts as one of the main pressures for the intensification of extractive industries — mining, industrial fishing and logging — which having proven to be inimicable to long term community welfare. The result, far from lessening community opposition to government, has been the flourishing of local opposition movements, some of which characterise the State as 'Lucifer'.

As Wanek notes, from the perspective of the indigenous communities of the Admiralty Islands in Manus province, who have been successively ruled since colonial times by Germans, British, Australians, and then by central and provincial Papua New Guinean administrations:

"It is not such a terrible difference for most of them to be dependent on Berlin, Canberra, Rabaul, Port Moresby, or even Lorengau, because outside dependence as such interferes with local politics, local culture and local social and economic patterns."148

The lesson from these experiences seems to be that decentralization only favours Indigenous Peoples where the rule of law and accountable institutions of democracy really function. The real need is for organs of government, whether regional or central, that respond to local peoples' concerns and are accountable to the local communities for the decisions that they make.

4. Scaling Up: From Local Innovation to National Change

So far, this review has examined some externally supported local initiatives in South and South East to assure indigenous communities of recognised rights to own and control their lands and resources. It has also directed attention at the legal and local administrative frameworks in which these initiatives are being implanted in the belief that greater attention needs to be paid to these institutional questions than activists seem to realise.149 However, the reality is that few countries in the region have found it expedient to accede to indigenous peoples' demands for full ownership of their lands or accord them such a high degree of autonomy.

On the other hand, Asian governments have gone much further than many in adopting policies of collaborative forest management, where authority over resources is shared between government and local communities rather than being fully transferred to them. Many NGOs have themselves collaborated with these initiatives seeing them as crucial steps in a transformation of forest policy towards one that assists the poor and secures forests. In some countries, substantial donor supported has been funnelled into these schemes, thereby transforming what started out as small-scale and local initiatives into nation-wide programmes. This section looks at these processes of 'scaling up' and asks two main questions.

• How far have these reforms accommodated indigenous peoples' needs and perspectives?

• To what extent has the assistance of donors to build local initiatives into national level programmes helped or hindered indigenous peoples?

Broad Acceptance of Collaborative Forestry Options as the Way Forward

Since the days when social forestry became the vogue in the 1970s, international understanding of the complexity of plural forestry has grown apace and the literature reviewing these experiences has grown accordingly.150 Key agencies such as the World Bank and the FAO have invested heavily both staff time and money in collaborative forestry programmes. CGIAR agencies such as ICRAF and CIFOR have followed up with more detailed research. In some countries, community forestry has come to dominate forestry practice, as in Nepal where some 60% of the country's forests are now managed by communities. Despite this proliferation of experience and literature relatively little focus has been given to the particular needs and priorities of indigenous peoples within the broader framework of collaborative forest management. Based on this literature and the interviews carried out for this study the following broad conclusions seem to emerge.

Community Forestry

Community forestry options vary greatly in the extent to which they recognise indigenous peoples' ownership of forests. In general, community forestry schemes do not actually transfer ownership of forests. Control of forest management and marketing is devolved to communities or sections of communities ('user groups'). 'Projects' have experimented with the extraction and marketing of a wide-range of products including: timber, NTFPs, wildlife, butterflies, eco-tourism etc. Results have been very mixed but successful enough to encourage wider application. Among the problems encountered:

• community forestry contracts may be rejected by indigenous peoples if they extinguish or limit land claims

• 'user groups' may not correspond to customary institutions or forest owner groups

• 'user groups' may be dominated by local elites and exaggerate caste, class and gender divisions

• land use decisions may favour the personal interests of the few over the need and rights of all

• lack of familiarity with extraction, management and marketing may lead to poor decision-making or create heavy dependence on external expertise, and demand high capacity-building inputs

• over-extraction may result from market, community and individual pressures

• markets prove unreliable or demand greater quality or quantities than communities can supply

• start-up capital requirements oblige contracts with outsiders who then dominate decision-making

• external programme proponents see indigenous peoples as poor people with 'ethnicity' not as peoples seeking to clarify their political relations with the State as well as overcome their poverty.

Indigenous Peoples and Joint Forest Management in India

India's experiments with Joint Forest Management (JFM) grew out of attempts by forestry officials to accommodate tribal demands to manage their own forests.151 Under JFM forests remain the property of the State under the jurisdiction of Forest Departments but local communities are contracted to manage the forests and retain a portion of profits from the sale of harvests. The extent to which profits are shared with the communities varies considerably from state to state in India, as does the degree of forest department intervention.

In study caried out for the FAO, John Bruce notes that JFM is notable for the low security of tenure it provides to participants. In most states, the Forest Protection Committees established to co-manage forests with the Forest Departments lack legal personality and have no status outside their relationship to the government agencies. Many of those involved in JFM thus see the process as just another means by which the Forestry Departments are able to organise local labour to improve public lands. However some in the forest service have argued that State intervention is crucial to ensure that the weaker sections of communities benefit from and are not further marginalised by JFM.152

In the mid-1990s, large-scale foreign assistance, notably through concessional loans from the World Bank, was provided to help 'scale up' joint forest management. Notionally, the programme now embraces the whole country. However, the programme has begun to run into serious problems. One set of problems derives from the lack of real political will in some States to implement the programme. In Indian states where the programme was 'home grown' and implanted by leading foresters, the scaling up has been relatively successful. In these states, the existence of a least some committed foresters, active social movements pressing for reform and a network of concerned NGOs, has ensured that mechanisms have developed to monitor progress and provide accountability.153 However, in other states which have accepted the programme mainly as a result of national policy change and the provision of outside funds, these checks and balances have been lacking. Forestry Department officials have resisted what they see as an erosion of their authority. Joint Forest Management schemes have thus been implemented half-heartedly, with inadequate community preparation and with too much authority being retained by officials. In these circumstances scope for the application of local institutions, knowledge and initiative has been frustrated and enthusiasm for JFM has been correspondingly weak.

A second set of problems has come from the inflexible application of the JFM concept. JFM was originally conceived by foresters as a way of encouraging the rehabilitation of degraded 'forest' lands. The programme is thus only applied in areas where natural forests are already lost and local communities require help to restore forest cover and achieve (or regain) a more sustainable forest management system. Ironically this has meant that those communities which have not significantly depleted their forests do not qualify for the programme. Many of the adivasi groups in Central India have been caught out by this Catch 22.

In other areas, adivasis have felt excluded from JFM because opportunities to participate have been monopolised by higher caste groups who have been able to use their greater access to officials to secure participation in the JFM scheme. Marginalised and technically landless groups like the adivasi have thus seen 'degraded lands' and 'wastelands' that were important to their livelihoods annexed to JFM and been further impoverished.

Surprisingly, despite its policy on indigenous peoples, World Bank support for JFM, has not helped focus attention on the special needs of indigenous peoples. In January this year, the World Bank abruptly pulled out of the Madhya Pradesh Forestry Project after adivasi groups frustrated at the way JFM was being imposed on their traditional lands without their rights or interests being accommodated travelled all the way to Delhi to visit the World Bank office and voice their complaints. Denied access to the building, the adivasis camped in the compound until the Bank accepted a petition from the group. World Bank staff privately admit that the project was not developed in accordance with OD 4.20 and was thus indefensible. Alarmed by this experience and facing complaints through the Inspection Panel, World Bank staff in India are now considering winding up their involvement in JFM altogether.

Among the lessons learned from the JFM experience are the following:

• communities can only benefit if they also have adequate lands for subsistence outside forests

• long term benefits require that a major share of the profits be retained by the communities

• forestry officials need re-training and given incentives to devolve decisions to communities

• forestry department commitment must be real and not a token response to aid agencies

• arrangements should be fitted to local forest management traditions not prescribed from above

• the programme should be extended to include healthy forests

• special provisions are needed to accommodate the needs and rights of indigenous peoples.

The apparent failure of JFM to deal with the concerns of indigenous peoples requires urgent investigation. Initially, it appeared that World Bank involvement in scaling up the programme was broadly successful as the basic underpinnings for the scheme had already been developed nationally. However, it appears that social activists had not networked sufficiently with adivasi groups to accommodate JFM to their special needs and problems. This survey identified a notable reluctance among NGOs to address indigenous peoples' concerns separately from other 'local communities'. This lack of local preparation combined with the World Bank's failure to apply its own 'safeguard' policy has led to an explosion of concern from the impacted indigenous groups.

Community Forestry in the Philippines

The rapid depletion of Filipino forests by logging, mining and settler encroachment was officially acknowledged as requiring a policy response in the late 1980s.154 The need to limit and regulate logging and to promote community forestry alternatives was accepted by government by the end of the decade. In 1990, the government adopted a Master Plan for Forestry Development which entailed an attempt to 'scale up' previous community-level initiatives in forest management.155

Under the plan, communities were entitled to leaseholds of State-owned forest lands under Forestry Stewardship Agreements which gave them rights to plant trees and market forest products over a 25 year period. Concerns were expressed early on in the process that Forestry Stewardship Contracts made no provisions for unresolved indigenous land claims and might even be used to extinguish native rights. Modifications were subsequently introduced to reassure indigenous communities entering into contracts that their historical claims were unaffected.

During the 1990s international assistance was poured into the forestry sector by bilateral and multilateral agencies. The Asian Development Bank gave substantial support to plantation development and the World Bank provided additional funds to overall forest sector development. Both lending programmes were modified to accommodate the Forestry Stewardship initiative, while the interests of communities in the face of plantations were promoted through 'contract reforestation' initiatives by which individuals, cooperatives or communities could secure financial and technical assistance for tree-planting schemes. At the same time, USAID targetted community forestry through two large Natural Resource Management Projects which provided special funds for the Department of Energy and Natural Resources to provide outreach to the rural poor. Although indigenous peoples made up at least 30% of the rural poor inhabiting Filipino forests, specific provisions for indigenous peoples were not prominent in the overall programme.

Despite the good intentions on the part of the donors, the overall impact of the forestry reform programme for the rural poor in general and indigenous peoples in particular has not been a great success. The main beneficiaries of the programme have been the plantation and seedling companies that have developed the plantations. Contract reforestation has been less successful in servicing local markets than anticipated and most of the contract reforestation schemes that have endured have been outgrower schemes for large-scale pulp and paper mills such as PICOP. In northern Mindanao, contract reforestation has actually drawn settlers onto indigenous lands and provoked serious conflicts.

NGOs and indigenous spokespersons note a number of other unhappy results of the forestry reform programme. One has been that the sector has become almost entirely dependent on donor support and is deprived of funding and political support from central government. As a result the programme has not been 'rooted' in domestic processes of policy or institutional reform and the connections between the aid-funded reform and local political processes have been weak or absent. Community forestry has thus become a donor-driven enclave within the political economy, tolerated as a way of capturing foreign exchange rather than one promoted to achieve sustainable development. Consequently, the affected communities have been further distanced from national reform politicians and instead of being empowered and better connected to national policy processes find themselves burdened by the new community forestry bureaucracy which has expanded massively thanks to the foreign funding. The overall verdict of those interviewed in this study is that forestry reform has suffered from too much top-down money. The donor-driven programme tried to build on an incipient civil society initiative before there had been any real institutional change nationally. The result was a programme which swamped the national reform process and which has left Indigenous Peoples less empowered than before.

The Struggle for Communal Forests in Thailand

The exhaustion of Thailand's forests by massive and sustained over-harvesting of timber led to a nation-wide logging ban being imposed in 1989. While illegal logging continued thereafter, official policy shifted towards the build up of plantations, the establishment of a network of protected areas and the zoning of forests with an emphasis on watershed protection. Controversy over a national 'forestry master plan', developed by the Finnish forestry consultancy Jaako Poyry Oy with FINNIDA assistance in the early 1990s, triggered a major re-appraisal of the role of forests in the national society. An IUCN evaluation of the FINNIDA-funded FMP substantiated NGO concerns that the plan was excessively focused on commercial timber production, had not involved local communities or NGOs in design, made inadequate provision for local livelihoods and failed to address the need for tenure reforms. The controversy helped give impetus to NGOs and commmunity groups who mobilised nationally against forest policies that excluded the poor.

National land use zoning has led to proposals for up to 40% of the national territory being classified as protected in one way or another affecting some 2,500 villages including the majority of the 'hill tribes', as the indigenous peoples of Thailand are locally known.

In response to government proposals to restrict access to forests, a civil society movement - formed into a strong coalition in 1995 calling itself the Assembly of the Poor - developed a well-articulated demand for the introduction of a Community Forestry Bill into parliament which would at least recognise community rights to use and manage, if not own, forests. The initiative was partially successful and a community forestry act, amended by the Royal Forest Department, was passed in 1997 providing scope for a recognition of community rights.156

Despite the prevalence of prejudice in Thailand against the 'hill tribes',157 the social movement for a community forestry act sought to downplay ethnic differences and emphasised the rights of the rural poor in general to have access to forest resources. Lack of strength in the indigenous organisations at that time meant that they were not able to effectively articulate their own specific concerns and they did not stress the distinct nature of their struggle for recognition of their rights. The broad movement therefore underestimated the extent to which indigenous peoples constituted a separate sector requiring special measures to confront the institutionalised racism of the national society.

During the late 1990s, the movement for a recognition of community forests suffered a major set back as Thai middle-class conservationists, schooled in 'western' preservationist notions of conservation, mobilised to amend the community forestry act. Taking advantage of a change of government, a coalition of 25 of these so-called 'Green NGOs' lobbied effectively for changes in the community forestry act so that communities could not claim rights in watershed forests. In June 1998, the act was amended accordingly. Playing on, or ignoring, the prejudices of lowland Thais against highlanders, the conservationists actively targetted 'hill tribes' living on the watersheds seeking to block their access to forests and persuade them to relocate into the lowlands.158 Local campaigns focused on the importance of the upper catchments as sources of water in the lowlands, where competition over water resources has escalated due to rising industrial and urban demand and increased abstraction for intensive farming both of wet rice and soft fruits. Hill tribes were singled out for blame for the water shortages being experienced in the lowlands. A disturbing upsurge of anti-hill tribe violence and intimidation has resulted constituting both a threat to the indigenous highlander societies and a major challenge to the broader community forestry movement. The movement has belatedly been forced to recognise that, to avoid being divided-and-ruled, it must itself recognise the distinctive needs of the 'hill tribes' in their dealings with the national society and officialdom and push for reforms in their treatment.159

International funding of forestry initiatives in Thailand has played a relatively minor direct role in all this. The controversy over the FINNIDA-funded Forest Master Plan helped spark off a national policy debate but subsequent funding by the bilateral agencies and the Global Environment Facility has not been targetted at promoting community forestry but on the contrary has reinforced the exclusionist approach of protected area zoning and planning. Moreover the near three decades of bilateral and World Bank support for various projects with hill tribes in the north of Thailand in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were notable for completely ignoring the issue of land tenure. The projects were directed at pushing through narrowly conceived 'crop substitution' programmes aimed at weaning the hill tribes off their dependency on opium poppy cultivation, which they had learned to rely on during the colonial and early cold war era to pay off taxes and the corrupt exactions of local warlords and political supremos.160 The new impositions on the hill tribes, now in the name of water conservation, are only the last in a whole history of interventions, none of which has given priority to their own needs or to securing their rights. A solution to the problems being encountered by the 'hill tribes' may be a long time coming.

Towards Community Forestry in Indonesia

Forests in Indonesia have been rapidly depleting since the 1960s when the practice became prevalent of handing out logging concessions to military commanders. Logging quickly expanded to supply cheap logs to the Japanese timber industry principally to produce plywood. Under heavy pressure from government-directed colonisation programmes forest loss escalated, a process further exaggerated by large-scale schemes, some developed with foreign assistance, to expand tree crops in 'conversion forests'. In the mid-1970s, the Indonesian government restricted and then banned the export of unprocessed logs which had the effect of providing a protective market for a domestic plywood and timber processing industry, which developed a voracious appetite for timber. Demand soon outstripped supply and hastened the extension of the logging frontier into the remoter parts of Kalimantan, Sulawesi, the Moluccas and 'Irian Jaya' (West Papua). By the late 1980s, NGOs were estimating deforestation in Indonesia at around 1 million hectares a year, a figure long denied by the government. Recent studies put the rate of forest loss even higher — at some 1.5 million hectares per year - and note that over half of all timber is being extracted illegally.161

As Fay and Sirait note:

"In the early 1980s, in what could be considered one of the largest land grabs in history, the government implemented a forest zonation system that classified most of the Outer Islands as forestlands. Seventy-eight percent of Indonesia, or more than 140 million hectares were placed under the responsibility of the Department of Forestry and Estate Crops. This included over 90% of the outer islands. Estimates place as many as 65 million people living within these areas. According to the Department of Forestry, the creation of the State forest zone nullified local Adat rights, making thousands of communities invisible to the forest management planning process and squatters on their ancestral lands. As a result, logging concessions, timber plantations, protected areas, and government-sponsored migration schemes have been directly overlaid on millions of hectares of community lands, causing widespread conflict. Yet, in fact for many local people, traditional law, or hukum Adat, still governs natural resource management practices."162

Since the fall of Suharto in 1998, the political protection afforded to his cronies has gradually been eroded and reform-minded politicians and officials have begun to push, tentatively for wider reforms in forest policy. Under pressure from NGOs and a civil society that grows daily more confident of itself, the Forestry Department has felt obliged to give way, at least in part, to demands for community access to and control of forests.

One area of dispute focuses on exactly which areas are classified as State Forests. Recently released official figures show that only 68% of the areas claimed as State Forests have actually been fully demarcated and gazetted, but no clear maps are available to help communities find out if they live in the gazetted areas or the remaining 32% which formally still remain under the jurisdiction of Ministry of Agrarian Lands. Besides many communities are now questioning the legality by which the forest lands were demarcated and gazetted. Formally required procedures to consult the local administration and affected communities were often not run through, opening up the possibility that the annexation of community lands to establish State Forests could now be challenged in the courts.

A vigorous civil society movement has emerged to challenge State control of forests including several broad allainces of NGOs and other civil society elements such as the Coalition for the Democratization of Natural Resources (KUDETA), the Communication Forum on Community Forestry (FKKM) and AMAN. While their tactics and priorities vary, all have called for a devolution of control of forests to local communities. All these initiatives have benefited from considerable financial support from development NGOs and foreign Foundations.

The Forestry Department has taken various steps to accommodate this pressure. In January 1998 it passed a special decree recognising the rights of communities in Krui to have permanent control of their forests under community management. Later the same year, as part of a condition for forestry reform introduced into an IMF/World Bank structural adjustment package,163 a new law was rapidly passed, PP6, which included measures to grant forestry concessions to cooperatives, which many NGOs have criticised for being vehicles for local elites to gain access to natural resources over the heads of traditional owners. The outcome was bitterly resented by NGOs who had been hurried into consultations on the law on the understanding that it would accommodate their demands for community forestry, only to find that it did nothing of the sort. Confidence in the World Bank's commitment to real consultation was severely undermined. A third piece of law was also passed in the period, Ministerial Decree, SK 677, which clarified the process by which communities could set up as cooperatives and secure 20-35 year leases to forests. Finally in mid-1999, the Government engaged in a further consultation exercise in drafting a new Forestry Act but again the process broke down when it transpired that while a more-or-less open external drafting process was underway which involved civil society groups, the Ministry was simultaneously drafting its own version internally. It was the internal draft which was submitted to Parliament and ratified despite widespread objections including from former Ministers of the Environment and of Forests.

During all this period the Indonesian economy was in crisis and the World Bank sought to take advantage of this opportunity to push through a US$600 million Forest Sector Adjustment Loan (FORSAL), designed to help the country through its balance of payments crisis at the same time as bring reforms to the forest sector. This was something that the World Bank had long thought was necessary and had argued strongly for in the 1980s, when it had been rebuffed. The FORSAL proposal has also had a rocky ride. After their bad experience with PSRL 1, NGOs have been very wary of engaging in dialogue with the World Bank. On principle, most NGOs have opposed all further loans to Indonesia anyway, arguing that further increasing the country's debt will only intensify pressure to sell of the country's assets and labour to recoup foreign exchange. It appears that the World Bank itself is now reconsidering the FORSAL proposal. A review by the Bank's Operations Evaluations Department argued strongly that the short-term leverage offered by structural adjustment loans provided much too a clumsy tool by which to effect the delicate and long-term legal and institutional reforms that forestry requires.164

Meanwhile, movement towards a recognition of adat rights has also come from the Ministry for Agrarian Affairs which in mid 1999 passed a Ministerial Decree SK5/1999, titled 'Guidelines to Resolve Adat Communal Rights Conflicts'. The decree allows for the recognition of adat lands as communal, non-transferable titles, although it does include the possibility for lease-lease back arrangements, such as those promoted by the World Bank in Papua New Guinea.

Conclusions about Donor Involvement

These thumbnail sketches of the role of international development assistance in national reforms towards a recognition of community rights in forests are obviously incomplete. They have focused in particular on the implications of these reform programmes for indigenous peoples. For what they are worth, they lead us to a number of tentative and general conclusions.

• Success at the national level depends above all on prior success and mobilisation at the local level. Local initiatives not only build up a mass of technical and political insight but also create the basis for an informed interaction between civil society and government, and international agencies.

• Well-directed long-term support from local and international NGOs and development agencies to local initiatives, in community organisation, resource management projects and experience sharing substantially assists this process.

• Long term investments in civil society advocacy and capacity building are needed to complement this local level build up of skills and capacity, with human rights work getting a far greater share of attention.

• Broad and adequate reforms cannot be projected on the basis of a small handful local pilot schemes. A wide range of local initiatives provides a much stronger basis for informed reform. Local, regional and sectoral differences must be understood and accommodated if national level reforms are to have the flexibility to suit the great variety of local circumstances.

• In order the exert adequate leverage on entrenched bureaucracies and vested private sector interests, these local level initiatives need the support of a broader movement of civil society. Build up of this civil society movement requires further investment in networking and communication above all to maintain links with base organisations.

• Successful 'scaling up' thus depends on the prior establishment of an adequate 'critical mass' of shared practical experience and advocacy capability to ensure that national legal and institutional reforms really respond to local needs and realities.

• Direct donor support to NGOs and CBOs for the build up of this critical mass is arguably more important that aid passed through governments.

• Donor assistance passed through conventional government to government channels to promote community forestry reforms has worked best where it builds on existing well-rooted local initiatives and where there are strong civil society movements for these reforms.

• The success of external funding interventions depends above all on real, long-term engagement of civil society movements in reform processes. The mantra of 'participation, transparency and accountability' is too often given only nodding observance.

• Exclusion of civil society from effective engagement in reform programmes is one of the most common causes of the failure of donor assistance to the sector.

• In particular, not enough has been done to tailor community forestry options to suit indigenous peoples as differentiated from local communities in general.

• Overfunding in the early stages of reform processes has often swamped the absorptive capacity of government institutions.

• Overfunding of government institutional reforms, without counter-wieght programmes to build up community institutional capacity and natural resource management skills, results in the empowerment of the local and national bureaucracy rather than the communities.

5. Looking to the Future

Asia's indigenous peoples are at a cross-roads. On the one hand, globalization, trade liberalization and the increasing mobility of labour, capital, goods and services are putting their societies and environments under increasingly strong pressure. These pressures, coupled with heavy-handed government policies and laws that deny these peoples' rights while obliging their integration into the national mainstream, put their very survival as distinct peoples in jeopardy. On the other hand, indigenous peoples' own mobilisation at local, national and international levels and a growing international acceptance of the justice and environmental prudence of recognising their rights is creating the context for radical reform. Paradoxically in Asia, where governments have been the most reluctant to admit the international concept of 'indigenous peoples', reforms in forest policy towards a more socially sensitive approach, while still patchy, have gone further than in any other region.

If indigenous peoples' futures are to be secured in the Asia-Pacific there remains a need for substantial further reform. These reforms should be refined and developed in close consultation with the indigenous peoples themselves and not imposed by those from above, however good their intentions. Such measures could include the following:

National Governments

• Governments should discontinue their discredited integrationist policies and associated practices of forced resettlement and colonisation and instead provide scope for people to take charge of their own destinies.

• Where locally demanded Governnments should ratify ILO Convention 169. They should endorse the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the establishment of a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples at the UN.

• Governments must both accept and then respect novel political arrangements which provide indigenous peoples with more autonomy in their regions and territories.

• In close consultation with indigenous peoples organisations, land and forest tenure regimes should be reformed to recognise the right of indigenous peoples to the collective ownership of their ancestral domains.

• Legislation should be revised to provide scope for the exercise of customary law under indigenous jurisdiction, subject to respect for international human rights principles.

• Forestry laws and policies need to be reformed to give priority to indigenous peoples' interests and promote community-forest management.

Donor Agencies

International development agencies have an important role to play in helping to promote these social, legal and policy reforms. For too long they have supported conventional government forestry projects and other development programmes which have marginalised and impoverished indigenous peoples, thereby entrenching discriminatory and unjust national policies.

• Following the lead of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and European Community, the development agencies need to adopt clear policies that recognise indigenous peoples' rights and ensure their active and informed participation in any development projects funded on or that will affect their territories.

• Adequate resources and training and incentives then need to be provided to ensure that staff are able to adhere to these policies scrupulously.

• Effective measures need to be instituted at national and international levels for the redress of grievances and the open and transparent evaluation of complaints about internationally-funded development projects.

• Innovative funding mechanisms must be developed in close consultation with indigenous peoples to provide direct support to indigenous organisations. Funds should be provided not just for community-managed development and conservation initiative, but to build up the capacity of indigenous institutions, provide training, improve communications, promote regional experience-sharing and secure adequate indigenous participation in national, regional and international fora.

• Wherever possible donor support through government agencies should be complemented by both prior and then simultaneous direct support for local indigenous organisations and for broader civil society mobilisation, to help ensure effective participation.

NGO Support

Other players in the region will also need to revise their approach to indigenous peoples. Non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) have often been important allies of indigenous peoples and indigenous peoples have made clear that they warmly welcome alliances with other sectors of civil society. But NGOs are also prone to imposing their own agenda without taking into account the realities and priorities of indigenous peoples.165

As indigenous peoples become increasingly adept at dealing with national and international bureaucracies, NGOs need to be careful that they support indigenous peoples to occupy political space instead of occupying it themselves. They need to take time and care to inform themselves of indigenous perspective and priorities and respect indigenous decision-making processes.

General Lessons

A key finding of this review is that while experience sharing between countries and regions has been well used for transferring skills such as mapping and community-based natural resource planning, experience sharing on legal and institutional issues has been inadequate. Lessons learned in one country or region, such as those sketched in above, are not being shared with the indigenous movement in others. In particular the legal and institutional experiences of Indigenous Peoples in the Americas are very little known in Asia.

There is a need for:

• The lessons from the mapping experiences need to be shared again within the region. Thailand has now fallen far behind the rest of Asia. It is much clearer now that mapping is just a step (or a tool) in a larger strategy: IPOs need to learn from each other how to build such strategies. Alliance building is a key part of such strategies.

• More focus needs now to be put on the build up of long term experiences in natural resource husbandry. Crucial first steps in boundary surveying, resource mapping, resource inventories and community resource zoning now need to be followed up with longer term engagements with communities to help them build up new rules to manage resources regulate access to common properties and control marketing and contracts with outsiders.

• Para -legal training should be provided to community leaders on the various concepts of land ownership, types of titles, the bundles of rights in titles and the importance of legal personality.

• Regional workshops should be carried out to share indigenous experiences on how they relate to local administration.

• There is a need for a wider and better informed debate about Indigenous Peoples, Autonomy and Regionalization to look into the advantages and disadvantages of working with centralised Federal agencies or State/Provincial agencies.