Abstract
Involving local communities in ecosystem service research can improve the relevance, quality and, ultimately, outcomes of natural resource management. Local engagement can also contribute to solutions to ecosystem management challenges by diversifying the range of options and contextualizing their applicability. The benefits to local communities of ecosystem service-based policies relative to other interventions, such as oil palm development, are, therefore, best understood from the perspectives of the local communities themselves. We used observations, focus group discussions, and interviews in four villages along the Belayan River, East Kalimantan, Indonesia, to explore how local communities in different oil palm development contexts perceive Ecosystem Services (ES). The main livelihood activity differed across these villages, which were either fishing, oil palm smallholder communities, or forest-dependent communities. Perceptions about ES varied across villages, though three services were perceived to be crucial in all four villages, namely fish provision, water quality, and land availability. These services can be a common concern entry point for discussions on landscape management. Despite common recognition of the negative impacts of oil palm development on these crucial services, all communities are nevertheless choosing to expand oil palm. Communities identified a wide array of direct and indirect drivers underlying this trend, including social influence, financial capital, ecological factors, and subsidies from local government. Early engagement of local policymakers, oil palm companies, and local communities is essential to the maintenance of crucial and widely recognized ecosystem services in oil palm landscapes
Highlights
Local communities should be included in ecosystem services (ES) assessments, as they are the primary users and beneficiaries of many ecosystem services and have direct access to local resources provided by the ecosystems of which they are a part (Folke et al, 2005)
We aim to explore the condition of the ecosystems in Kutai Kartanegara as perceived by local communities living in different contexts of oil palm development
Categorizing Ecosystem Services (ES) into provisioning, cultural, supporting regulating services according to 2005 Millenium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA) framework yields 29 different ES, as shown in Table 3, which shows that every village has various numbers of identified ES
Summary
Local communities should be included in ecosystem services (ES) assessments, as they are the primary users and beneficiaries of many ecosystem services and have direct access to local resources provided by the ecosystems of which they are a part (Folke et al, 2005). Involving local communities in ES assessments facilitates more accurate evaluations of the importance of the ecosystem services and the factors that determine social preferences and trade-offs associated with land use change and decision-making (MEA, 2005). Governance, legal rights, and justice all play a role in shaping decision-making by local land users (Chaudhary et al, 2015). Local participation during the process will, increase the quality of decisionmaking (Sayer et al, 2013). Such integrative collaboration provides a better understanding of the role of societal and cultural processes on ecosystem changes (van Oudenhoven et al, 2018) and the ways in which ES are supplied and distributed (Bennett et al, 2015)
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