The name 'Borneo' evokes visions of constantly changing landscapes, but with important island-wide continuities. One of the continuities has been the forests, which have for generations been created and modified by the indigenous population, but over the past three decades have been partially replaced by tree crops, grass or scrub. This book, the first in the series of Asia-Pacific Environmental Monographs, looks at the political complexities of forest management across the whole island of Borneo, tackling issues of tenure, land use change and resource competition, 'tradition' versus 'modernity', disputes within and between communities, between communities and private firms, or between communities and governments. While it focuses on the changes taking place in local political economies and conservation practices, it also makes visible the larger changes taking place in both Indonesia and Malaysia. The common theme of the volume is the need to situate local complexities in the larger institutional context, and the possible gains to be made from such an approach in the search for alternative models of conservation and development.

The international legal framework for valuing the carbon stored in forests, known as 'Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation' (REDD+), will have a major impact on indigenous peoples and forest communities. The REDD+ regime contains many assumptions about the identity, tenure and rights of indigenous and local communities who inhabit, use or claim rights to forested lands. The authors bring together expert analysis of public international law, climate change treaties, property law, human rights and indigenous customary land tenure to provide a systemic account of the laws governing forest carbon sequestration and their interaction. Their work covers recent developments in climate change law, including the Agreement from the Conference of the Parties in Paris that came into force in 2016. The Impact of Climate Change Mitigation on Indigenous and Forest Communities is a rich and much-needed contribution to contemporary understanding of this topic.

This edited book is the first major review of what has been achieved in Borneo Studies to date. Chapters in this book situate research on Borneo within the general disciplinary fields of the social sciences, with the weight of attention devoted to anthropological research and related fields such as development studies, gender studies, environmental studies, social policy studies and cultural studies. Some of the chapters in this book are extended versions of presentations at the Borneo Research Council’s international conference hosted by Universiti Brunei Darussalam in June 2012 and a Borneo Studies workshop organised in Brunei in 2012. The volume examines some of the major debates and controversies in Borneo Studies, including those which have served to connect post-war research on Borneo to wider scholarship. It also assesses some of the more recent contributions and interests of locally based researchers in universities and other institutions in Borneo itself. The major strength of the book is the inclusion of a substantial amount of research undertaken by scholars working and teaching within the Southeast Asian region. In particular there is an examination of research materials published in the vernacular, notably the outpouring of work published in Indonesian by the Institut Dayakologi in Pontianak. In doing so, the book also addresses the urgent matters which have not received the attention they deserve, specifically subjects, themes and issues that have already been covered but require further contemplation, elaboration and research, and the scope for disciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration in Borneo Studies. The book is a valuable resource and reference work for students and researchers interested in social science scholarship on Borneo, and for those with wider interests in Indonesia and Malaysia, and in the Southeast Asian region.

Research on women and food security in Southeast Asia has been limited. The collection of chapters in Ensuring a Square Meal: Women and Food Security in Southeast Asia is one of the first attempts at providing a lens into the linkages between women and food security at the household, community, national, and transnational levels. More broadly, the chapters examine women's contribution in households, resource distribution to produce food, and the purchasing power to buy food. In analysing the various facets of food security in relation to gender, the analyses focus on the meanings of 'private' and 'public', and the extent to which the effects of the two spheres spill over into each other. Given women's critical role in food production and provision, the book assesses the structural forces enabling women to access productive resources and, in turn, ensure sustainable strategies for food security; as well as it evaluates how governments might address the constraints women face in this vital role.

Since the 1960s, Southeast Asia's agricultural sector has experienced phenomenal growth, with increases in production linked to an energy-intensive capitalization of agriculture and the rapid development of agrifood systems and agribusiness. Agricultural intensification and territorial expansion have been key to this process, with expansion of areas under cultivation playing an unusually important role in the transformation of the countryside and livelihoods of its inhabitants. Borneo, with vast tracts of land not yet under crops, has been the epicenter of this expansion process, with rubber and oil palm acting as the spearhead. Indonesia's Kalimantan provinces and the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak have all undergone major changes but the time frames have varied, as have the crops involved. Agricultural expansion in Borneo is both an economic and a political process, and it has brought about profound socio-economic transformations, including deforestation, and development of communication networks. There has also been rapid population growth, much faster than in either Indonesia or Malaysia as a whole, with attendant pressures on employment, housing and social services. Until the end of the 20th century, agricultural expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia was largely state driven, with the goal of poverty reduction. Subsequently, as in Borneo, boom crop expansion has been taken over by private corporations that are driven by profit maximization rather than poverty reduction.

This book explores the forces reconfiguring local resource governance in Indonesia since 1998, drawing together original field research undertaken in a decade of dramatic political change. Case studies from across Indonesia’s diverse cultural and ecological landscapes focus on the most significant resource sectors – agriculture, fisheries, forestry, mining and tourism –providing a rare in-depth view of the dynamics shaping social and environmental outcomes in these varied contexts. Debates surrounding the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and environmental governance have focused on institutional considerations of how to craft resource management arrangements in order to further the policy objectives of economic efficiency, social equity and environmental sustainability. The studies in this volume reveal the complexity of resource security issues affecting local communities and user groups in Indonesia as they engage with wider institutional frameworks in a context driven simultaneously by decentralizing and globalizing forces. Through ground up investigations of how local groups with different cultural backgrounds and resource bases are responding to the greater autonomy afforded by Indonesia’s new political constellation, the authors appraise the prospects for rearticulating governance regimes toward a more equitable and sustainable ’commonweal’. This volume offers valuable insights into questions of import to scholars as well as policy-makers concerned with decentralized governance and sustainable resource management.

In Indonesia, logging and oil palm concessions attributed by the government have caused high rates of deforestation and forest degradation. Community land rights have been generally ignored, on the pretext of development needs and general interest. In reaction, a growing number of civil society organizations (CSOs) have addressed these environmental and social issues at the national level. With the introduction of the decentralization process following the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998, land-use planning became relevant at the province and regency levels. The Kapuas Hulu regency in West Kalimantan revised its land-use plan in 2010. A variety of CSOs have tried to influence land-use planning (LUP) processes and community land-rights issues in Kapuas Hulu. Few international conservation NGOs have used soft lobbying approaches with the Kapuas Hulu Government. They contribute to the policy decision-making process and to field project implementation. At the same time, at the province scale, a large Indonesian CSO coalition challenged the government and criticized the lack of civil society participation and community land-rights recognition during the LUP process. Thus, CSOs play various roles in LUP and community-rights issues using different strategic approaches at different scales.