The local community is an essential and key partner in managing protected areas, especially for national parks in Indonesia. Therefore, there is a need to establish adaptive collaborative management (ACM) between the park authorities and the local community. In 2000, several local leaders established a new organization to develop an ecotourism package called the Tangkahan Ecotourism Organization or Lembaga Pariwisata Tangkahan (LPT) and set up the Community Tour Operator to manage the ecotourism activities. Our study used a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis through focus group discussions (FGDs), interviews with related stakeholders and key informants, and carried out a literature review. It was found that ensuring local community could generate alternative income from ecotourism was an effective way to protect the park from any illegal activities. Additionally, the results about sustainability from the FGDs show that all three categories: Social Process, Adaptive Natural Resource Management, and Impact/Condition are interrelated, meaning that the collaboration and adaptive management in Tangkahan have resulted in high levels of humanistic well-being and the maintenance of ecological values, supporting collaboration processes and adaptive levels. Finally, our study can be used as a basis for a model of national parks focusing on ACM.

Background: Previous studies have suggested that exposures to heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, and selenium) may be associated with differences in blood pressure. However, the findings of these studies have been inconsistent. This study was performed to examine the associations between urinary heavy metal concentrations and blood pressure among residents of four Asian countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam). Methods: This cross-sectional study examined 1899 adults in four Asian countries. Urinary concentrations of heavy metals were measured by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. A questionnaire survey was administered regarding individual characteristics. Anthropometric measurements (height and weight) were performed. Systolic and diastolic blood pressures were measured after a short rest. Multiple linear regression models were applied to investigate associations between urinary heavy metal concentrations and blood pressure after adjustments for age, sex, and body mass index. Results: The geometric means of the urinary concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, lead, and selenium were 84.6, 0.885, 2.09, and 16.5 μg/g creatinine, respectively. The urinary arsenic concentrations were slightly higher than those typically reported in non-polluted populations, while urinary cadmium, lead, and selenium concentrations were equivalent or slightly lower. The urinary lead concentrations were positively associated with both systolic and diastolic blood pressure, but urinary selenium concentrations were negatively associated with them. Conclusions: Variations in the urinary concentrations of lead and selenium were associated with blood pressure at low levels of exposure/intake.

Indonesia’s government anticipates waste problems by managing them through a large number of waste reduction programs. From a governance perspective in Indonesia, it is known that actors from diverse governmental levels and across sectors are involved in waste management, and their involvement largely depends on their institutional goals and problems. Hence, they are expected to coherently collaborate by developing and implementing sustainable instruments and resources for improving waste management problems. However, it is necessary to understand how supportive or restrictive the governance of waste reduction programs is to encourage successful trash reduction. This study was designed to evaluate and examine the application of community-based solid waste management (CBSWM) in Makassar. In this research, the Governance Assessment Tool (GAT) was applied to analyze the governance context of the waste reduction programs in Makassar qualitatively. In the assessment, contexts can be described as either supportive or restrictive of the processes of implementing public policies on waste management. As a result of such an assessment, this study shed light on some opportunities to improve the governance of waste management implementation’s impact on reducing waste in Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The conclusion of this study is that the most important actors are affiliated with the local government and the community. Moreover, this study shows that the assessment of contextual governance is that it is predominantly restrictive.

This paper analyses the implementation of renewable off-grid technologies in rural areas, especially where an extension to the national electricity grid was not considered economically feasible. Implementation of remote, stand-alone, electricity technologies as alternatives to a grid connection to provide sustainable electricity access have often failed with many planned projects not realised or abandoned. Our initial assumption was that stand-alone electricity project exhibiting higher scores on sustainability indicators would benefit communities more and make their endurance more likely. However, the impact of the stand-alone technology was often overruled or its quality weakened by government preferences wishing to realise a connection to the central electricity grid. Empirically, the study compares three cases of stand-alone micro-hydropower projects and three cases of stand-alone solar photovoltaic projects in Bogor Regency, Indonesia. It is based on qualitative document analysis, complemented by multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews and observations. The paper assesses the extent to which each project met indicators of technical, economic, social, environmental, and institutional sustainability. The paper tries to explain the endurance of the project from these sustainability scores and uses additional explanations from Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. The findings show that, for the studied local communities, the attractiveness of a grid connection overrules the virtues of a stand-alone electricity project, despite its quality, successful operation and impact. Our research also shows that government policy priorities changed in the rural electrification programme for some communities. In these situations, the off-grid rural electrification programme predominantly provided only temporary access to sustainable electricity for remote local communities that remained waiting and hoping for a grid connection to connect them to fossil fuel-dominated electricity.

Studies on the social impacts of oil palm development have focused on various communities with distinct characteristics. Due to the rarity of comparative investigations, this study aimed to examine the impact of oil palm plantation expansion on the Suku Anak Dalam, Jambi Malay, and the Javanese transmigrant, the three communities with different socio-economic characteristics. In-depth interviews and observations were conducted to understand the communities’ interaction and dependence on forest resources. The study also conducted a household census to assess 67 Malay and 66 Javanese transmigrant families. However, a household census could not be conducted to asses 45 families of the Suku Anak Dalam due to some limitations. This necessitated indirect data collection through the community leader. The results showed that the oil palm development significantly and negatively impacts the Suku Anak Dalam more than the Malay community and the Javanese transmigrant. The Suku Anak Dalam face difficulties in meeting their basic needs because the conversion of forest areas into oil palm plantations has reduced their access to these resources. In contrast, the Malay community and the Javanese transmigrants have enjoyed various benefits, such as ownership of oil palm gardens, employment opportunities as daily laborers, and partnerships with companies through the nucleus-plasma program. Therefore, it is crucial for the government to protect the Suku Anak Dalam community from the negative impacts of oil palm plantation development activities.

Policies aimed at the exclusion of local communities from forest management are inappropriate, especially in a densely populated area with a low level of land ownership. Here we demonstrate that termination of the Tumpang Sari program, which allowed local communities access to areas for controlled cultivation in several parts of the state forest area in West Java, Indonesia, did not cease illegal cultivation of the forestland. Moreover, illegal cultivation continues to be conducted by many people. This has created not only a land degradation problem but also has affected other forest resource users, the fuelwood collectors and the dairy cattle farmers. Therefore, the re-involvement of local communities in better forest management is required to avoid further environmental degradation as well as enhance poverty alleviation programs.