al, and economic interests of forest-depend-
ent people?
The experience of the Culture and
Conservation research programme^2 , a
research endeavor that lasted seven years
in the interior of Indonesian Borneo, 1991-
1997, is a rare window from which to exam-
ine real and ideal contributions of social sci-
ence research towards the achievement of
environmental sustainability and social jus-
tice. It also allows us to examine both fail-
ures and successes that have shaped the
challenging partnership between conserva-
tion managers and social scientists.^3
The Culture & Conservation pro-
gramme and Kayan Mentarang
National Park
The “Culture and Conservation,” research
programme (C&C Program) was born of
the collaboration between the Ford
Foundation and WWF Indonesia in order
to: “document and support traditional
rights of tenure and local resource man-
agement... and contribute to the cultural
history and the forest ecology of the
region.” The project was implemented in
conjunction with efforts to develop the
management plan for the Kayan
Mentarang conservation area (then a
Nature Reserve) by WWF Indonesia.^4 The
C&C programme focused research on the
interconnection between society and the
natural environment in and around Kayan
Mentarang in order to better understand
the modalities of interaction of the com-
munities with the forest around them. The
main assumption was that traditional
knowledge (social, ethno-botanical, eco-
logical, and cultural) would help the plan-
ning and management of the nature
reserve, and would allow the elaboration
of community-based conservation strate-
gies. The success of nature conservation
was seen as depending upon the preser-
vation of indigenous cultures and, mostly,
the maintenance of traditional practices of
land tenure and natural resource manage-
ment. Field studies were focused on three
main themes: linguistics and oral litera-
ture; land tenure and traditional legal sys-
tems; and regional history of societies and
the forest. These were carried out by
about thirty scholars and students, most
of whom were Indonesian, who spent
three to six months in the field. Recruiting
and training intentionally targeted Dayak
researchers from communities in and
around the Kayan Mentarang area. They
were expected to have an interest in both
investigating local cultures and enhancing
communities’ awareness of social and
environmental issues.The Kayan Mentarang conservation area,
in the far interior of East Kalimantan, is
the largest protected area of rainforest in
Borneo and one of the largest in
Southeast Asia. About half of the reserve
consists of species-rich dipterocarp low-
land and hill forest while mountain forest
ranges up to Kayan Mentarang’s highest
mountain at 2,000 m. Forty percent of the
park has an elevation above 1,000 m. The
area is considered to be one of the world’s
10 biodiversity hotspots, which contain a
disproportionately high level of species
diversity in a relatively small area. Kayan
Mentarang National Park has also been
identified as one of the Global 200 biologi-
cally outstanding ecoregions that best rep-
resent the world’s biodiversity.The history of the natural landscape of
the park is deeply intertwined with the
history of its people. Extensive archaeo-
logical remains in the area are witness to
a long history of human settlement.
Nowadays, about 21,000 Dayak people
live in or near the conservation area,
depending on swidden agriculture, wet
rice farming, hunting, fishing, collecting
and trading of forest products to fulfill
their subsistence and other needs. The
conservation area was gazetted in 1980 as