1 - Working around the state: conservation's desperate turn to capital in Borneo

Presentation Abstract
For much of the modern era, nature conservation has been in the first place a role of the state. In Borneo, however, corruption and the commodity booms of recent decades have rendered state institutions all but incapable of playing that role. Forest departments were first stripped of their autonomy, and customary land rights extinguished, to clear the way for unsustainable logging. In Sarawak and Sabah, corrupt chief ministers crafted whole political systems based on the distribution of the resulting rents, and used them to stay in power for decades. In Indonesian Borneo the allocation of timber concessions to cronies of Suharto helped stabilize the New Order regime, while subsequent democratization and decentralization led local politicians to use the same means to fund costly election campaigns. New windfall rents from oil palm estates and coal mining operations served to further cripple the state as an agent of conservation or sustainable resource management. Spurred on by these conditions, but also following a worldwide trend, the transnational organizations to which the task of protecting Borneo's environment increasingly falls have tended to bypass the state by dealing directly with the very private sector actors that are immediately responsible for the environmental damage. Their tactics range from appealing to the better instincts of timber and palm oil tycoons, to damaging their profits with bad publicity. This paper provides an overview of the attempt by conservationists to ride the tiger of resource capitalism in Borneo, tame it, and make of it a partner in forest stewardship.