cultural and environmental history of the
region, generated local interest in research
and support for the Kayan Mentarang con-
servation area, and documented forms of
local resource management, it remains
unclear whether C&C enabled conservation
managers to design better management
strategies. The uncertainty has less to do
with the quality of the data collected than
with current thinking in many conservation
organisations. Wells convincingly argued
that several “unproven and optimistic
assumptions” are often made in Integrated
Conservation and Development Projects with
regard to biodiversity conservation and sus-
tainable economic development, despite the
fact that results have for the most part fall-
en short of expectations.^9 Similarly, there
seems to exist a sequence of causally relat-
ed assumptions on the “presumed” key role
of local people in sustainable management
of protected areas: Indigenous people are
good conservationists, hence they would
make good managers of the conservation
area, and hence it is important to study
them. In these terms, the protected-area
management’s prevailing position of blaming
local residents for destroying the environ-ment in the past can easily turn into the
opposite, yet equally simplistic position — if
unsupported by hard evidence — of praising
local residents as the natural managers of
biodiversity.How should a research programme fit into
this framework? Must it set out to prove that
local people are good managers of the envi-
ronment or, rather, turn such a premise into
a working hypothesis that could or could not
be borne out in the final results? What les-
sons can be drawn from the C&C experi-
ence? Research can and should be effective-
ly used as a means to critically question and
test key assumptions implicit in the project’s
objectives. Reflecting on epistemological
issues, Dove maintains that social sciences
are in a position to address questions that
transcend discipline boundaries by prob-
lematising other fields.^10 In this case, ques-
tioning premises or unproven assumptions
made in the field of biodiversity conservation
and sustainable development is a task that
research programs like C&C can and must
undertake. Such assumptions may have aris-
en because of political reasons or financial
considerations, or they may be ideas taken
for granted and reproduced within the com-
mon discourse prevalent in conservation cir-
cles. According to Ingerson, for example,
the view that traditional knowledge and
practices of people in a conservation area
are keys to the sustainable management of
that area might have been encouraged by
anthropologists and advocates themselves,
who have made use of romanticised notions
of forest peoples as defenders of the envi-
ronment to prompt governments and inter-
national foundations to fund projects for the
participation of people in protected-area
management.^11Although the C&C programme did not initial-
ly set out to test the validity of certain
premises in the WWF proposal, successive
developments encouraged reflection on how
this and future research programs could
best fulfill this purpose. Most importantly,Conservation aas ccultural aand ppolitical ppractice
Figure 4.Indigenous people in Krayan Hulu.
their continuous presence in the territory, knowl-
edge of the forest and customary regulations for
the sustainable use of natural resources qualify
them as best managers for the conservation area.
(Courtesy Cristina Eghenter).