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The State of Sarawak recognised the need to put aside areas for the purpose of conservation and protection of wildlife and their habitat in the 1950s: the Wild Life Protection Ordinance was enacted in 1957 and the National Park Ordinance in 1958. These ordinances provided for the establishment of Totally Protected Areas (TPAs), either Wildlife Sanctuaries or National Parks. The State also recognised that there are local communities living or using resources within areas needed as TPAs, and the Ordinances required that their rights to these resources be respected. This resulted in the granting of rights and privileges for local people to continue use the resources within the TPAs, and even, in some cases, to reside there.

The general view of the local communities was that TPAs were an obstruction to their traditional way of lives, and that they needed to defend their rights constantly. Management generally saw these rights as externally-imposed constraints which made their conservation objects difficult or impossible to achieve, but which were beyond their control. This often resulted in an atmosphere of conflict between the Forest Department and local communities.

Managing TPAs in Sarawak represents full control by the Forest Department with little or no input from the local communities. Local communities may be informed of the Department’s policies and involved in conservation education. Some socio-economic projects target the local communities, such as the ICDP project in Batang Ai NP, park guide and boat operator training in Bako NP and Mulu NP, and income-generation projects related to bird-nest trading in Niah NP.

The current Ordinances — the National Parks and Nature Reserves Ordinance 1998 and the Wild Life Protection Ordinance 1998 — make the same provision. They recognise rights held by natives or native communities when the legal process of constituting a TPA begins, provided that the right dates back at least to the 1950s.

The rights and privileges conceded to the local inhabitants living within or near TPAs depend on the degree of use of the area prior to establishment, and vary widely from one TPA to another. Details are given in Appendix 1. The following key points should be noted:

• Rights and privileges are set out in the Declaration establishing the TPA; there is no mechanism for reviewing them at a later date.
• In many cases no restriction was placed on the use of the resources harvested, and they can be harvested for sale. This applies to the older TPAs, when it was probably assumed that trade in wild animals and plants would be insignificant.
• Several TPAs have enclaves which are legally excluded from the TPA, even though they lie within the TPA boundary. In most cases, these enclaves are alienated land with well-defined boundaries registered under the Land Code. In two Parks the enclaves consist of land subject to Native Customary Rights; the extent and position of these was not defined at the time of establishing the Park, and it is not clear which land comes under the jurisdiction of NPWD.
• Apart from these enclaves, the only people who may reside in a TPA are the nomadic Penan in Mulu NP.
• These rights and privileges do not permit holders to harvest protected or totally protected species as listed in the Wild Life Protection Ordinance, or to trade in wild meat from mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians.

Apart from specifying the area allocated to each community, these Declarations place no restrictions on how these resources are managed. The underlying assumptions were that community institutions existed for resource management, and that they would continue to be effective. In many cases these institutions may never have existed: the resource was abundant and harvesting by the small number of local people had little impact and did not need any form of management. In other cases, institutions have come under strain due to movement of outsiders into the area, commercialisation of natural resources, and scarcity of resources as human populations grow and forested areas shrink.

Wildlife surveys carried out in the early 1990s showed that hunting is causing some animals to become rare or locally extinct in the State. This applies to TPAs: in some TPAs hunting by people with rights was considerable and harvesting levels were clearly unsustainable (Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department 1996). Indeed, the number of people with hunting privileges is so high that their needs for protein far outstrip the productivity of the land involved if they obtained all their protein by hunting (Tisen et al. 1999). Unsustainable harvesting makes it impossible for a TPA to fulfil its legal purpose of conservation. A new approach to TPA management, one which would include management of harvesting, was clearly needed.

Two broad approaches to managing the exploitation of TPAs by local people were considered: integrated conservation and development projects and collaborative management.

ICDPs promote development in or around a TPA with the aim of curtailing the use of resources in TPAs by local people in a way which will be politically and economically acceptable. They are intuitively appealing, because they are in line with the perception that developed societies use manufactured rather than natural products. More specifically, they assume either -

• that local people will forgo harvesting in the TPA if they are offered a development project (school, dispensary, road, etc) as an incentive; or
• that local people harvest in the TPA because they have no alternative, and they will stop if alternatives are provided.

The assumption that development will automatically favour conservation is not supported by the facts. An early study of ICDPs world-wide (Wells, Brandon and Hannah 1992) concluded that they were effective in meeting development objectives, but very few had any significant positive impact on conservation within the targeted TPA.

In Africa, funding by major bilateral and multilateral donors to protected areas is in the form of ICDPs. After investigating more than 50 projects in 15 African countries, Newmark and Hough (2000) attribute the lack of success of many ICDPs to the assumptions made by project designers. The assumptions they highlight include -

1. Assuming that incentives to communities in the form of public goods (schools, roads, etc) will be effective in changing individual behaviour. Even when the benefits can in principle be distributed to individuals, putting that into practice can be challenging (Metcalfe 1994).
2. Assuming that the community is homogenous. The groups within the communities who benefit from incentives may not be those that benefit from harvesting in the TPA.
3. Assuming that people are economically rational, and overlooking the social importance of many activities such as hunting.
4. Assuming that a fixed rate of off-take can be set for the future. Productivity of natural systems varies over time, but ICDPs managers are under pressure to maintain a constant flow of benefits. Reduced harvesting in a bad year may alienate local people, while maintaining harvesting levels will degrade the resource. Large mammal harvesting schemes associated with many ICDPs in Savanna ecosystems may become unsustainable because wildlife populations in this ecosystem are inherently variable. ICDPs which rely on harvesting natural resources may therefore be unsustainable over the long term.
5. Assuming that the development activities of an ICDP are entirely benign, and neglecting negative environmental impacts. For example, in East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania, an ICDP promoted fishponds as an alternative to hunting as a source of protein, but the fishponds were placed in an important wetland and severely disrupted a scarce riparian habitat.
6. Assuming a high level of compliance by communities. Even when there is a clear, binding agreement with the community (which is seldom the case), enforcement is still necessary to ensure that all members of the community comply with it. This may once again bring TPA management into conflict with communities, especially when the ICDP does not provide alternative livelihoods or when the benefits of the ICDP are not evenly spread among the community. The organisational structure is still strongly top-down, with the TPA agency attempting to maintain control of resources and harvesting.

ICDPs have become Indonesia's approach to biodiversity conservation (Wells et al. 1999). The first ICDPs were launched in the 1980s and by 1997 there were more than a dozen at various stages of implementation. These projects targeted TPAs with an area of 8.5 million hectares, 40 percent of the country's total.

Evaluators argue that after a decade of launching ICDPs, successful and convincing cases where local people’s development needs have been effectively reconciled with TPA management are notably lacking. ICDPs have ignored important lessons from the field of rural development and been unable to establish coherent linkages between their development activities and their conservation objectives.

The term collaborative management is used to describe a wide range of situations in which some or all of the relevant stakeholders in a protected area are involved in management activities. These situations are variously referred to as comanagement, participatory management, joint management, shared management, multi-stakeholder management, or round-table management. There is a whole continuum of management arrangements between total control by a government agency at one extreme and total control by local people at the other, as shown in Figure 1. Note we are here discussing de facto situations, regardless of underlying tenure rights, policies and legislation. If supportive policy and legislation exist, they strengthen a management partnership.

Kakadu NP in Australia is a good example of a management system near the middle of the range. The land belongs to the Aboriginal community and is leased to the National Parks and Wildlife Service on payment of a nominal rent. The community has a majority of seats on the management board and its members are trained and employed as Park staff. The contribution of expertise and human resources by NPWS is essential for effective management of the Park for conservation and to meet the cultural needs of the community. The community can terminate the lease at short notice if they wish.

The arrangement in Batang Ai NP is rather like this, as part of the land is under the jurisdiction of local communities. This has led to de facto joint management initiatives: for example, neither NPWD nor local communities want outsiders hunting in the Park, so enforcement is carried out by local people employed by NPWD.

The model of figure 1 is a useful framework for thinking about the issues, but it depicts TPA management as a single entity. In reality, situations exist where the PA agency has full control over some aspects of management and other stakeholders have full control over other aspects: we might term this "split management". This is the case in many Sarawak TPAs, where local people effectively control the resources subject to privileges, while NPWD control the rest of the ecosystem. Management of ecosystems for conservation or sustainable harvesting requires some sort of unified or collaborative system, and the challenge is to move from split management to joint management.

NPWD’s policy in the past was to concentrate on managing TPAs within the constraints of harvesting rights and privileges, and no systematic attempt was made to influence management of harvested resources by privilege-holders. This policy has been reviewed in the light of information from surveys showing that harvesting rates in many TPAs are unsustainable and threaten the integrity of the protected ecosystems.

The Master Plan for Wildlife (Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department 1996) recommended that a Special Committee be established for each TPA, bringing together the Forest Department and local people with legal rights or privileges in the TPA. This would not only provide a forum for collaboration in resource management, but it would also be a means of channelling the benefits of the TPA to local people. For example, part of the entrance fees collected from visitors or researchers could be used by the Special Committee for projects benefiting local people, and this could be used as compensation for voluntary reductions in harvesting. This represents a move from the left towards the middle of the continuum shown in Figure 1.

This required changes in the law, and in 1998 revised ordinances for national parks and nature reserves and for wild life protection were passed by the State legislature. These make provision for Special Park Committees and Special Wild Life Committees to be formed from representatives of the Department and local communities to assist in the protection and management of the TPA and to advise the Controller on management issues. The new law also allows for the Committees to control a proportion of the income collected by the Department from entrance fees. Final authority still rests with the Controller, who is charged under the law with managing TPAs for conservation. The Terms of Reference for the Special Committees were approved on 18^th August 2000 (see Appendix 2).

No Special Committees have yet been formed, but one of the tasks of the DANCED project due to begin in 2001 will be to implement this policy in some of the TPAs where they will be working.

Currently, the management approach for TPAs in Sarawak is sited close to the left end of the continuum shown in figure 1, with NPWD having full control. NPWD does interact with local communities, but does not involve them in decision-making. Meanwhile, in many TPAs, local communities have total control over harvesting of certain resources, and this ‘split management’ endangers ecosystem integrity.

Those TPAs subject to rights and privileges should move towards the centre of the collaborative management continuum, with local people involved in decision-making for the ecosystem as a whole and working towards conservation and sustainable harvesting. They should also benefit from conservation of the TPA, in particular through visitor fees collected, but this must be clearly linked to the success of management in conserving the area. The legal mechanism for this, through the Special Committees, is now in place.

A similar process is appropriate in those Parks where part of the land is under the jurisdiction of local people, though it should move further, with a high degree of sharing of authority and responsibility.

ICDPs should be treated with caution and the underlying assumptions should be examined critically. The idea that development can ‘compensate’ people for loss of harvesting rights is untenable. Consideration should be given to developing activities which fill a gap in local people’s livelihood strategies when they no longer harvest in the TPA, but the link must be clear. It would help if such projects were seen as an integral part of an overall strategy to reduce harvesting to sustainable levels, driven by the Special Committee.

TPAs in Sarawak have already suffered from ‘urban drift’, as people move into the area seeking jobs in the Park or in Park-related tourism; this intensifies the pressure on the TPA. The design and siting of development activities must not draw additional people towards the TPA, but should rather seek to encourage migration away from the boundaries of the TPA.

The TPAs in Sarawak are very varied and management approaches must be tailored to the situation of each. In those subject to harvesting rights or privileges, or with undefined enclaves subject to Native Customary Rights, those with rights should be brought into a collaborative management structure based on the Special Committees. In some cases, the Committee may evolve into a mechanism for sharing authority in a formal way. The Special Committee should develop strategies to bring harvesting down to sustainable levels, or even to eliminate it from the TPA, and those strategies may involve use of entrance fee monies or developing activities to substitute for the resources harvested; but such development must be clearly linked to conservation and must not result in intensified pressure on the TPA.

Borrini-Feyerabend, G. (1996) Collaborative management of Protected Areas: Tailoring the approach to the context. IUCN Social Policy Group. Switzerland.

Metcalfe, S. (1994) The Zimbabwe Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE). Pages 270-279 in McNeely J, ed. Expanding Partnerships in Conservation. Washington DC: Island Press.

Newmark D. W. and Hough J.L. (2000) Conserving Wildlife in Africa: Integrated Conservation Development Projects and Beyond. BioScience Vol.50, No 7; 585-592

Tisen O.B., Ahmad S., Bennett E.L. and Meredith M.E (1999). Wildlife conservation and local communities in Sarawak, Malaysia. Paper presented at the Second Southeast Asia Regional Form of the IUCN World Commission for Protected Areas, Pakse, Lao PDR. 6^th to 11^th December 1999.

Wells M, Brandon K, Hannah L. 1992. People and Parks: Linking Protected Area Management with Local Communities. World Bank, USAID, WWF-USA, Washington DC

Wells M., Guggenheim S., Wardojo W. and Jepson P. (1999) Investing in Biodiversity: A review of Indonesia's Integrated Conservation and Development Projects. The World Bank, East Asia Region. Washington, D.C.

Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department (1996). A Master Plan for Wildlife in Sarawak. Wildlife Conservation Society and Sarawak Forest Department, Kuching Sarawak.

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