Negotiating Environmental Crisis within Forest Ecosystem Restoration Projects in Puncak and Lombok, Indonesia

The Forest Ecosystem Restoration (FER) project is a technological-science attempt to restore the damaged landscape as part of the environmental crisis mitigation. To some extent, the adoption of FER has also altered forest land use practices adopted by rural farmers as part of their livelihood. In rural-urban perspective, FER projects might be considered as a process of transferring environmental burdens from urban-downstream to rural-upstream communities living in the watershed areas. Our qualitative research in two FER project Puncak and Lombok, however, demonstrates how multiple actors, including local communities, actively influence the crisis defining process throughout problematization, mediation, apprehension stages. Such a procedure is crucial in the transition from horticulture to agroforestry system, the perceived solution for the “negotiated” crisis. We argue that the discourse of environmental crisis is co-produced, negotiated, and being effectively used in mobilizing funds, scientific research, and technology to change the practices of rural farmers. With its embedded social-oriented procedure, FER project has capacity to enable the creation of a new socioecological landscape that can mitigate the environmental calamities in downstream urban area while benefiting the economy of farmers in the upstream rural area. By highlighting such a potentiality, this article shows the significance of integrating social, economy, and ecological approaches in dealing with environmental problems at the local level and might be essential in dealing with climate change challenges.