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Policy Forum Article
Mitigating Tensions over Land Conversion in Papua, Indonesia
Mochamad Indrawan,*Julian Caldecott and Ermayanti
Abstract
In the south of the biodiversity-rich Indonesian
province of Papua, a large agricultural
program is planned for the districts around
Merauke, with the ostensible aim of helping
to meet Indonesia’sfoodrequirements.
Questions arise over the scheme’scompliance
with national laws and sustainability policies,
as well as its likely impacts on indigenous
livelihoods and biodiversity. It is also contrary
to the recent low-carbon development
priorities of the provincial and national
governments. For the initiative to be consistent
with law and policy, therefore, considerably
improved planning effort would be needed,
taking into account many factors that have so
far been ignored.
Key words: Papua, sustainable development,
low carbon, policy, land conversion
1. Introduction
The western half of the island of New Guinea
(Figure 1) has an area of 416,129 km
2
and
became a province of Indonesia through a
1961–1969 process that involved military
confrontation with the Netherlands, a tempo-
rary United Nations administration, and a
controversial plebiscite (Timmer 2007). It
was known as West Papua in 1961–1973 and
as Irian Jaya in 1973–2002, and the province
was managed primarily as a mining and petro-
leum resource region by the 1967–1998 regime
led by President Suharto. It was also the target
of a number of major proposals to use the
province’s land resources, including the
mid-1980s Scott Paper scheme that would
have involved a 790,000 ha Eucalyptus planta-
tion and pulp mill in Merauke district and the
mid-1990s Mamberamo scheme that would
have involved diverse agro-industrial invest-
ments over some eight million hectares of Irian
Jaya (Carr 1998; Marr 2011), and these were
respectively halted by international protests
and uncontrolled logging, followed by
abandonment. Meanwhile, the province also
received government-sponsored transmigrants
and other settlers from elsewhere in
Indonesia, resulting in a dilution of the indige-
nous Papuan share of the total population from
96 per cent in 1971, to 59 per cent in 2005, and
50 per cent in 2010 (Elmslie 2010). After 1998,
however, decentralising reforms affected the
whole of Indonesia and also resulted in Special
Autonomy for Indonesian New Guinea under
the new name of Papua. This gave the provin-
cial government powers to plan development
and formulate regulations based on local
conditions, as well as a 2 per cent share of the
*Research Center for Climate Change, University
of Indonesia, Depok 16424, Indonesia.
Corresponding author: Indrawan, email:
<mochamad.indrawan@gmail.com>
<Mochamad.Indrawan@ui.ac.id>.
Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies, vol. ••,no.•• ,pp.••–••
doi: 10.1002/app5.157
© 2016 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies
published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University.
This is an open access article under theterms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits
use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial
purposes.
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national budget’s block grant over 20 years.
Resistance to Special Autonomy came from
mining, plantation and settler interests, the
latter based particularly in western parts of the
territory. Political events then led to its parti-
tion into the two new provinces of Papua and
West Papua, which are collectively known
among many Papuans as Tan a h P a p u a (‘the
Land of Papua’). This partition was disputed
before the Constitutional Court, which
however ruled in 2004 that the creation of West
Papua was indeed lawful.
In 2008–2011, a succession of national
government recommendations, policies and
laws revealed the intention to develop the
Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate
(MIFEE) in south-eastern Papua (Zakaria
et al. 2011), this being justified in terms of
Indonesia’s strategic needs for food and
energy. The targeted area had previously been
zoned as suitable for plantations, and its flat ter-
rain and accessibility to the southern coast had
already attracted loggers and transmigration
projects (Haarstad et al. 2009). According to
detailed plans announced in 2010, the MIFEE
was to cover more than a million hectares in
the districts of Merauke, Mappi and Boven
Digoel and to be used for growing food crops
such as rice (Oryza sativa), maize (Zea mays),
soybean (Glycine max) and sugar cane
(Saccharum spp.), as well as oil palm (Elaeis
guineensis) and fast-growing Acacia tree spe-
cies for wood chips to be used in paper or as
an energy source. A national policy, namely,
Presidential regulation No 32 of 2011 ‘regard-
ing acceleration and expansion of the eco-
nomic development of Indonesia, 2011–25’
further strengthened MIFEE and its links to na-
tional food and energy-security perceptions.
At the end of 2014, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono (‘SBY’) was succeeded as
President of Indonesia by Joko Widodo
(‘Jokowi’), who further extended SBY’smora-
torium on issuance of logging licenses (which
had been introduced in 2011 and extended in
2013). The new president also set out new
Figure 1 Tanah Papua (map courtesy of Bruce Beehler)
2 Asia & the PacificPolicyStudies •• 2016
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targets for self sufficiency, involving the
doubling of palm oil production by 2020, a
23 per cent share of renewable energy in the
energy mix by 2025 and targets and subsidies
to encourage the use of biodiesel (i.e. palm
oil processed for use as a fuel oil). The
re-launch of MIFEE was announced by
President Jokowi during his visit to Papua in
May2015(Barahamin2015).
From the central government’s point of
view, the case for MIFEE is clearly based on
the need to assure an adequate energy and rice
supply for voters in the populous island of Java
and on the need for export revenues, with palm
oil expected to be especially profitable (CIFOR
2009). The quest for food security is every-
where deeply intertwined with politics, but
especially clearly so in Indonesia. For exam-
ple, Figure 2 depicts national rice production
from 1960 to 2010 and records the rapid
increase in rice production in the 1970s
induced by the ‘Green Revolution’, which did
much to stabilise and allow the full establish-
ment of the ‘New Order’Suharto regime after
the famines of the 1960s. It also shows the
downturn in rice production in the mid-1990s,
which drove the regime’s decision in 1996 to
establish the (subsequently failed) One Million
Hectare Peatland Development Project or
‘Mega Rice Project’in Central Kalimantan
(see the following).
But the MIFEE project seems less attractive
from the point of view of Papua province than
it does from that of Jakarta (Ginting & Pye
2013; Lang 2013; Takeshi et al. 2014), and in
many ways it encapsulates the conflict between
alternative visions of the role of Papua in
Indonesia: as a resource supplier to the nation
or as an ancestral homeland of traditional peo-
ples. Assuming the central government’swish
to establish the MIFEE by importing capital
and labour, expropriating and converting lands
as needed and directing the resulting revenue
streams, key points of concern expressed by
various stakeholders during interviews with
the authors are summarised subsequently,
alongside ways to reconcile these contrasting
visions, at least partially, through the compli-
ance of all parties with existing Indonesian
law.
This article is based on a synthesis of infor-
mation from a number of sources, ultimately
resting on interviews with knowledge holders,
direct observations, literature review and par-
ticipation in low-carbon development work-
shops for Papua and West Papua provinces.
Figure 2 Areas Harvested and Yield of Rice in Indonesia between 1960 and 2010
3Indrawan et al.: Land Conversion in Papua
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published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian NationalUniversity
The process began with a study leading to the
forestry and climate change update of the
EC’s Country Environmental Profile
(Caldecott & Indrawan 2009) and continued
through the formulation of EC-Indonesia cli-
mate change cooperation (Caldecott &
Indrawan 2010), both of which included exten-
sive dialogue with Papuan authorities sur-
rounding their low-carbon development
priorities. Further detail was provided through
subsequent participation (by senior author
Indrawan) in meetings in Papua and dialogue
and correspondence with provincial and other
stakeholders (e.g. Indrawan et al. 2011).
2. Concerns over the MIFEE
There are several kinds of concern over the
MIFEE proposal, reflecting the priorities of
different stakeholder groups. First, the provin-
cial and district governments of Papua and
Merauke have different views on how the
south-eastern part of Papua should be devel-
oped, with the district government being better
disposed to large-scale estate development. In
2007, for example, 4 years before the presiden-
tial regulation that authorised the MIFEE
development plan, the then regent of Merauke
established a Merauke Integrated Rice Estate,
and this plan by the district government served
as precursor of MIFEE (Hidayat & Yamamoto
2014; Takeshi et al. 2014).
Second, there is a general concern, wide-
spread in the outer islands of Indonesia (i.e.
the islands beyond the national ‘core’islands
of Java, Bali and Madura), about central gov-
ernment initiatives that result in sudden,
large-scale land-use change. This arises from
the historic cancellation of traditional rights to
lands and forests in the 1960s, the allocation
of those resources to central government
control and their uncompensated consumption
by non-local interest groups ever since. An
example of this process was the One Million
Hectare Peatland Development (or Mega Rice)
Project in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian
Borneo. This involved the logging and
draining of forested deep peatland and the
movement of about 100,000 migrants into the
area, where they were expected to grow rice,
thus shoring up official targets for both assisted
transmigration and rice production. Once
logged and drained, the peatland became
fire-prone as well as being unsuited to rice
growing, so the initiative led to an ecological
disaster that produced desertification, local
extirpation of forest-dwelling species, the
release of an estimated 150 million tonnes of
carbon-based greenhouse gases (GHGs) in
1997 alone (Rieley & Page 2008) and eco-
nomic calamity for in-migrants and indigenous
people alike. The MIFEE initiative is of a scale
that invites comparison with the Mega Rice
Project, and with this as a precedent, there is
the expectation within Papua that most of the
financial benefits flowing from the MIFEE will
be captured by stakeholders outside the
province, while the greatest environmental
and social costs will be borne locally. There
is also the probability of massive GHG release
due to planned and unplanned forest conver-
sion as the MIFEE is developed. The area is
drought-prone and vulnerable to fire during El
Niño events, and has burned extensively
during the current severe El Niño (Jong 2015;
WRI 2015).
Third, there is the fear that the MIFEE
would involve extinguishing the resource
tenure rights of local people, replacing ecosys-
tems that have provided them with important
resources for millennia, displacing communi-
ties to new and unsuitable locations and
importing up to eight million workers and their
families from other parts of Indonesia
(Pangkali 2010; Yudhistira 2011). Papua as a
whole has long been receiving flows of sponta-
neous migrants (Barter & Côté 2015), and fear
of in-migration is particularly intense in
Merauke, which in 2010 had a population of
only 250,000, half of whom were already mi-
grants (Zakaria et al. 2011).
A fourth kind of concern draws on indigna-
tion that Special Autonomy is being infringed
by pressure to accept an initiative originating
outside Papua, other than on terms freely
negotiated, understood and accepted by
Papuans. Connected with this is the fact that,
while MIFEE was being designed and
activated, the provincial government was for-
mulating its own low-carbon development
4 Asia & the PacificPolicyStudies •• 2016
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(LCD) plan for Papua (Suebu 2009). Papua
Province has developed its sustainable
development vision, also known as Papua
2100, which includes the aim of maintaining
90 per cent of the territory under forest with
two-thirds of this being totally protected. The
resulting provincial spatial plan for
2013–2033 was formalised by provincial regu-
lation in 2013.
The LCD plan envisioned greatly reducing
deforestation for oil palm, saving up to four
billion tonnes of GHG emissions (4 GtCO
2
e),
and quickly attracted the interest of official
donors and potential investors (Caldecott &
Indrawan 2009, 2010). The LCD plan ruled
out large-scale development projects unless
geared to green investment and established
principles including recognition of traditional
rights, free prior informed consent and effec-
tive conflict resolution, as well as the effective
establishment of conservation areas. A starker
contrast in intent and impact can scarcely be
envisioned than that between the provincial
government’s LCD plan and the central
government’s MIFEE initiative. One key issue
was the historical licensing and permitting
system for forest use, which did not allow the
implementation of alternative land uses, and
implied an urgent need for more open-access
data to support spatial planning at all scales,
including synchronised data between the
national and subnational levels.
Afifth kind of concern is that the MIFEE
conflicts with the Government of Indonesia’s
own policies to reduce GHG emissions. These
have been prominent since the President’s
commitment in 2009 to reduce emissions by
26 per cent against a business-as-usual estimate
of emissions in 2020, leading to a huge amount
of policy, legislative and executive work in
order to make meeting this target achievable.
To begin with, the earlier 5-year development
plan (RPJMN 2010–2014) addressed climate
change through the three cross-sectoral themes
of food security, energy and environment and
disaster management. This is continued within
the current medium-term development plan
(2015–2019), which puts climate change under
the main national development agenda, along
with the direction of and policies for sectoral
development. The 26 per cent target was
increased to 29 per cent in 2015, as part of
Indonesia’s Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions commitment under the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change. At the subnational level, the
medium-term development plan for Papua
Province (RPJMD Papua 2014–2018)
mandated the involvement of traditional
communities in safeguarding ecosystem
sustainability including climate change mitiga-
tion and adaptation. All these paralled a
presidential regulation in 2011 that mandated
GHG reduction measures through action plans
at national and provincial levels. Because
63 per cent of Indonesia’s Intended Nationally
Determined Contributions-defined GHG
emission reductions are estimated to be found
in the land use, land-use change and forestry
sector, and about a fourth of these are available
from altering land conversion plans in Papua
(Suebu 2009), it can be seen that MIFEE is
deeply contrary to these priorities. With about
200,000 ha of tropical moist forest immedi-
ately exposed to conversion by MIFEE
(Greenomics Indonesia 2012) there is little
chance that a centrally planned MIFEE will
achieve lower emissions over a comparable
time scale than the small-scale land conver-
sions that are already happening in the region.
Thus, the MIFEE constitutes a forgone oppor-
tunity to stem high carbon development in
Indonesia, and it could fatally undermine
Indonesia’s credibility as a serious actor in
addressing the challenge of climate change.
A sixth concern is that complications arise
with the national government’s policy to
recognise land tenure rights. The Constitutional
CourtrulingNo35inMay2012stipulatedthat
the land rights of peoples living by customary
law (Masyarakat Adat) must henceforth be
recognised fully by government. Yet, MIFEE
is expected to infringe on 2.5 million hectares
of ancestral lands belonging to the Malind-
Amin community (Barahamin 2015).
Numerous ecosystem services have yet to be
factored in to the aforementioned concerns.
There are compelling lessons from Aceh,
another well-forested special autonomous
province at the opposite end of Indonesia, that
5Indrawan et al.: Land Conversion in Papua
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published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian NationalUniversity
was subjected to conversions for large-scale
monoculture and/or subsistence farming. The
studies showed that floods, including inunda-
tion of rice fields, caused net economic loss
across the landscape, with direct costs conser-
vatively estimated at US$27 million per year
(van Beukering et al. 2003). Increased produc-
tivity per unit land area through improved
husbandry and investment would greatly
relieve pressure on forests; for instance, a
5 per cent per year increase in productivity
would halve demand for 220,000 ha of land
for oil palm conversion in Aceh under the
business-as-usual scenario for 2015–2019
(Leggett et al. 2015).
Further, there are issues related to the loss of
biodiversity, for instance, the Malind
community’s traditional staple food is not rice
but a mix of sago, sweet potatoes, fruits and
wild meat. In terms of wildlife richness, the area
in question is characterised by major seasonal
concentrations of migratory water birds and a
diverse and endemic-rich biota (Johns et al.
2007; Polhemus & Allen 2007). The potential
ofbiodiversityasaresourceforsustainablede-
velopment is appreciated by the provincial gov-
ernment and integrated in their LCD planning
(Indrawan et al. 2011), so the destruction of
biodiversity assets in the MIFEE area is an ad-
ditional unwelcome factor that is of concern to
international and local observers alike.
Finally, spontaneous in-migration is likely
to constrain development in Papua the prov-
ince which is deemed as the most lagged be-
hind in Indonesia in terms of human
development index, and deeply challenged by
the lowest scores in Indonesia for incomes, ed-
ucational levels, and life expectancies, which
contrasted with the highest maternal and child
mortality rates in the nation (BPS 2014).
Not all of these concerns can be fully accom-
modated within a development program in the
Merauke area that depends on wholesale
conversion of natural forests to plantation
agriculture. While it is possible to imagine
alternatives, in which sustainable wealth would
mostly be captured locally and would mostly
come from green initiatives of various kinds,
the process of large-scale land development is
already underway, albeit probably in a more
fragmented way than originally conceived
because of patchy soils and drainage and
practical difficulties of access and supply. In
these circumstances, with declining but still
available opportunities to do so, the aims
should be to minimise harm and maximise
sustainability. This would depend, however,
on modifying the MIFEE approach by apply-
ing existing Indonesian and Papuan policies
and laws that were developed with these aims
specifically in mind. Some ways in which this
might be achieved are considered in the follow-
ing sections.
3. Opportunities to Mitigate Conflict
There remains scope to minimise tensions
among policy priorities at the local level (e.g.
self-determination, equity and environmental
security), the national level (e.g. food security
and export revenues) and the global level
(e.g. GHG emission reductions). Some of these
issues require choices between incompatible
objectives, which may be contested by differ-
ent stakeholders. The process by which the
MIFEE is being developed provides an oppor-
tunity to apply mitigation measures based on
the following principles, which are offered as
a potential checklist for negotiators.
3.1 Free prior and informed consent
A negotiated rather than an imposed outcome
requires the recognition by all parties that each
has a legitimate interest in what happens.
Active participation in decision-making is
needed by the provincial and district govern-
ments, with priority given to the resolution of
issues related to land rights traditionally
claimed by local communities. One way to
promote free prior and informed consent would
be to increase effectiveness of the formal
processes of Musrenbang (‘participatory forum
for yearly development planning’)whereby
stakeholders work together to protect bottom-
up planning from intervention by outside
interests. Conflict resolution mechanisms
involving local stakeholders are mandated by
Papua province’s medium-term development
plan (2014–2018).
6 Asia & the PacificPolicyStudies •• 2016
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published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University
3.2 Transparency
Closed-door decision-making can be the
enemy both of justice and of sustainability,
because it offers opportunities for corruption,
collusion and nepotism and prevents the
growth of public understanding and potential
support for decisions. Act 14/2008 on Public
Information Transparency obliges public
entities in Indonesia to reveal all public infor-
mation under their control, the content of
deliberations and outcomes of decisions, all
policies that apply to the public entity con-
cerned and all of its agreements with third
parties. Papua is among the first provinces of
Indonesia to have developed open-access data
on spatial planning, known as Simtaru (‘infor-
mation system for the management of spatial
planning’; BAPPEDA 2015), and this system
displays the province’s spatial planning regula-
tion from 2013. Agencies and offices that hold
sectoral data are obliged to upload their data
into the system, thus helping to build a single
development map as a tool for avoiding plan-
ning conflicts.
3.3 Inclusive policy framework
Decisions on initiatives on the scale of MIFEE
should involve public welfare, security,
agriculture, forestry, village development and
other viewpoints while also considering
Papua’s LCD plan and climate change aspects,
not only in terms of GHG emissions but also
the vulnerability of the investments themselves
to climate change and the scope for adaptation
to it. The relevant Presidential regulation (i.e.
No 32 of 2011 regarding acceleration and
expansion of the economic development of
Indonesia, 2011–2025) would need to be
reviewed and replaced to provide for such an
inclusive policy framework. The implication
would be to expose MIFEE to a much higher
level of public consultation, including through
national, provincial and district parliamentary
dialogue. Fiscal incentives might be used to
encourage companies to set parts of their land
holdings aside where they are of particularly
high environmental or cultural value.
3.4 Ecosystem goods and services
Changes in land use have consequences that
include the loss of ecosystem goods and
services (e.g. water catchment functions, flood
control, carbon storage, biodiversity and sacred
areas) and substitute others that may have
lower, less inclusive or shorter-term socio-
economic utility. Hence, there is a need for
detailed comparative analysis of costs and
benefits that include all known ecosystem
goods and services, even if they cannot be
quantified, and the interests of all stakeholders,
coupled with a precautionary approach and a
preference for maintaining existing goods and
services where possible, or adequately com-
pensating for them if lost. The potential use
of ‘green budgeting’, in which social and
environmental factors are fully integrated with
the economic paradigm, is now being
promoted as a development tool in several
Indonesian provinces (Qibtiyyah et al. 2015).
3.5 Environmental change management
Where land conversion for a food estate has
been agreed or is unavoidable, the process is
legally required to be undertaken in a measured
and step-wise manner. Compliance is manda-
tory with Act 32/2009 concerning environmen-
tal management, which requires strategic
environmental assessments (SEA) and then
for individual projects (such as concessions)
environmental impact assessments (EIA). This
obliges the central government to provide
backstopping and capacity-building support
to the district governments concerned, so that
they can perform adequate assessments. Again,
the main challenges lie in compliance and
enforcement.
3.6 Principles of spatial planning
A key part of the process by which decisions on
land conversion are made in Indonesia is spa-
tial planning, as mandated by Act 27/2007,
which obliges governments at the central,
provincial, district and municipal levels to dis-
seminate information relating to spatial plan-
ning, including to local communities. This
7Indrawan et al.: Land Conversion in Papua
© 2016 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies
published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian NationalUniversity
contributes to transparency but is also intended
to allow stakeholders to articulate their devel-
opment visions and priorities in relation to irre-
versible decisions on the use of resources
before those decisions are made. Papua prov-
ince’s own regulation for spatial planning regu-
lation thus prioritises sustainability and has
been approved by central government authori-
ties including the Ministry of Planning, but
the process needs to be enforced so that forestry
licenses can be handled with proper reference
to spatial planning beforehand. There is also a
need for better alignment between provincial
and village spatial plans.
3.7 Private sector participation
Policy instruments should provide more than
mere fiscal and infrastructural incentives, and
from the very beginning, private capital inves-
tors should be required to design, and locally
consult on, their contribution to the social and
economic sustainability of Papua. In practice,
this would mean that business plans are
reviewed both by government and by local
communities and positively screened for such
contributions. Here, it can be helpful to define
accurately what constitutes a ‘resource’to the
communities (Banks 2008), followed by par-
ticipatory analysis leading to conflict manage-
ment plans (Warner 2000).
4. Conclusions
The process of integrating Tanah Papua into
Indonesia presents both opportunities and
hazards. Among the latter is the fact that the
whole area is exposed to decisions made far
away, by people acting under pressures that
are powerful to them but alien to the circum-
stances of most Papuans. Following reforms
since 1998, however, provincial governments,
particularly in Papua, have much more power
than before to reject any plan imposed by
central government. Hence, at least on paper,
any major decision on the scale of MIFEE
simply has to be made through consultation
and mutual agreement. Lessons from Aceh
special province are especially relevant
because of numerous parallels involving top-
down decision-making and implementation
that resulted in degradation, deforestation and
net loss of sustainability and productivity.
The drivers of demand for MIFEE are
complex and include corporate land-hunger,
for areas to use for speculation, for harvestable
resources such as wood pulp and for export
crops such as palm oil, as well as a political
requirement to be seen to safeguard national
rice supplies. Papuans may or may not benefit
from opportunities linked to land speculation
and commodity exports, but in any case, they
seldom eat rice. The growth in demand for rice
is driven largely by population growth within
Indonesia, and food estates are not a long-term
solution to this challenge, which instead
requires a sustainable relationship between
human numbers and the productive capacity
of ecosystems. Meanwhile, the global econ-
omy is now recognised as being constrained
by environmental limits, notably by climate
change, so the days of freely liquidating
carbon-storing ecosystems in order to export
food and biofuels are clearly numbered.
Indonesia has already begun participating in
efforts to create a lower-carbon world econ-
omy, and this participation is important and
should continue as a matter of urgency.
On the immediate matter of MIFEE, how-
ever, we have listed key principles that if
applied consistently and together in accordance
with Indonesian law would greatly mitigate the
impacts of MIFEE and similar schemes, or else
greatly change their nature so they contribute
to building sustainable human development,
rather than undermining it. Contained in this
issue, however, is the challenge of making
choices between paths that lead in different
directions, whereby decisions need to be justi-
fied through the complete understanding of
costs and benefits of all options, and the conse-
quences of decisions fully explored. Where
ecosystem change is decided upon, educational
dialogue is essential to build consensus around
new ways of relating to the affected resource.
This applies also to in-migration, because
indigenous Papuans have much to share with
settlers about how to live sustainably in a land
very different in climate and biota to where
they came from. Whether settlers can learn to
8 Asia & the PacificPolicyStudies •• 2016
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published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University
respect and use this local knowledge, or will
remain as inflexible as those who tried to intro-
duce European farming systems into Australia
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
(Flannery 1994), remains to be seen but should
be a topic for environmental education of
newcomers in Papua. Meanwhile, as a new
common vision is developed, revenue sharing,
arbitration, new investment, compensation and
compulsion will all then have their places in
putting it into effect. Applying these principles
to the MIFEE initiative would be consistent
with Indonesian law and with the desires of
those who seek sustainable outcomes among
the central and provincial governments, local
people and other concerned citizens of
Indonesia. Conversely, one may question the
taking of decisions that are not consistent with
law and evidence. By summarising the issues
and opportunities raised by the MIFEE initia-
tive, we hope to support more effective public
debate on a subject of critical importance to
Papua, to Indonesia, and to the world as a
whole.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The manuscript was developed following dis-
cussions by senior author Indrawan with mem-
bers of Commission VII of the Indonesian
Parliament. Resources for the preparation of
the manuscript were provided by the Univer-
sity of Indonesia, the Asian Public Intellectual
Fellowship, the Nippon Foundation, and the
Indonesian Institute of Sciences (Indrawan),
and Creatura Ltd (Caldecott). Data on rice
harvesting trends were kindly provided by
Professor Soichi Ito (Kyushu University).
Constructive comments were provided by Dr
Bruce Beehler, Ms Helen Bellfield, Dr Manuel
Boissière, Dr Jim Davie, Dr Matt Legget, Mr
Neville Kemp, Dr Jeffrey Luzar and Ms Mary
Monro.
September 2016.
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The opinions expressed in the Policy Forum are
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sarily reflect those of the Journal’s Editors and
partners.
11Indrawan et al.: Land Conversion in Papua
© 2016 The Authors. Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies
published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd and Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian NationalUniversity