Promoting indigenous peoples' rights on oil palm plantation development

WALHI is the largest grass-root environmental advocacy network in Indonesia. The network was established and in 1980 and has developed as a national network with regional offices in 24 provinces in Indonesia, representing more than 500 member organisations. WALHI is seeking financial support to assist its three regional offices in their efforts to facilitate Dayak indigenous peoples of three districts in West and Central Kalimantan and Jambi Province (Sumatra) to defend their livelihood sustainability threatened by unfair and unjust expansion of large-scale oil palm plantation. In general, the impacts of large-scale plantation developments on indigenous communities are characterised by increased deforestation, increased poverty; and increased conflict. All three-problem areas have their social, cultural, economic and ecological aspects. The key factors linking these are land rights, access to natural resources and the issue of free and informed consent. This is the prime area of concern in the areas: local communities have lost their land to plantation, and therefore their main means of feeding their families and making a living. They now fear they have nothing to leave their children and grandchildren. WALHI regions of West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan and Jambi have started their activities three years ago with the community through several activities such as field study, community mapping, people organising, policy dialogue and environmental campaigning; and now are assisting the communities towards a multi-stakeholders dialogue and further conflict resolution stages. The main activities are basically designed to assist and facilitate communities as a major stakeholder in forest management policy particularly in plantation sector policy in Indonesia and increase capacity of local NGOs. Through these three cases WALHI National would like to develop a broader perspective of indigenous peoples’ rights into policy decision-making processes, propose policy formulation for best-practise and inform international financial institutions to support better environmental and social standards in tropical forest areas particularly in the oil palm plantation sector.

This project has achieved most of it planned objectives and reached quite significant result in the project sites. Local and indigenous community groups in three project locations (Jambi, West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan) understand how to respond to the conflict with companies. Local NGOs are better able to cooperate with the local communities to secure community rights on a regional and national level. This includes presentation of clear demands, particularly concerning the incorporation of indigenous peoples rights especially, into appropriate dispute resolution mechanism and policy dialogue process. Multistakeholder (government, private sector, NGO and local communities) in project sites start dialogues in issues related to oil palm development and community rights. Finally, this project contributes to WALHI capacity to work on national and international level.