THE SUSTAINABILITY of ECOTOURISM in INDONESIA Fact and Fiction

11 THE SUSTAINABILITY OF ECOTOURISM IN INDONESIA Fact and fiction Janet Cochrane Traditional forms of tourism, particularly mass tourism to resorts and beaches, have well-documented detrimental effects on the regions and countries visited, ranging from marine pollution and coastal erosion to cultural dislocation of host populations. In the last decade sustainable tourism and ecotourism have been vaunted as answers to the problems of mass tourism and as a contribution to conservation of the world’s wild places and the welfare of indigenous peoples. This chapter will examine the theory and practice of ecotourism and sustainable tourism with particular reference to national parks and other protected areas in Indonesia. TOURISM IN NATIONAL PARKS In nineteenth century America, John Muir and other conservationists believed in ‘the revitalising powers of wild landscapes in an increasingly complex society’ (Pigram, 1983, p. 151), and thought that, if nature’s resources could be protected and opened up to serve the recreational needs of the general population, the public would in turn become motivated to support the parks. Similar arguments are used to support the establishment of protected areas in developing countries nowadays. ‘Some [Indonesian] planners believe that, over the long term, domestic tourism may be the most effective means of developing broad-based social awareness and support for nature conservation and parks’ (Robinson and Sumardja, 1990, pp. 210–11). The first North American parks were remote and difficult to reach, as many Indonesian parks are today, which meant they received few visitors. It was only much later, in the second half of the twentieth century, that carrying capacity for both the environment and the visitors themselves began to be exceeded. This was due to a variety of influences and lifestyle factors for people in industrialized countries, including the development of mass transportation systems and the availability of greater disposable income and more leisure time, and an increasing desire to spend this leisure time in natural areas. The management of visitor flows in national parks in industrialized countries therefore became a pressing issue. 228 OPTIONS The 1969 definition of national parks drawn up by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) stressed that the protected ecosystems should not be ‘materially altered by human exploitation and occupation’ (IUCN, 1985, cited in Stankey, 1988, p. 12) and that steps should be taken ‘to prevent or eliminate as soon as possible exploitation or occupation in the area’ (ibid., p. 12). Tourism was also one of the aims: ‘Visitors are allowed to enter, under special conditions, for inspirational, educational, cultural, and recreational purposes’ (ibid., p. 12). But as North American, European and Australian parks became more crowded, tension between conservation and tourism emerged and strategies were sought for dealing with the problems. In the Kings Canyon National Park in California sensitive upland meadows were being damaged by the horses and mules used to carry visitors and camping equipment, so the park authorities restricted the use of certain trails and camp sites to protect these areas (Edington and Edington, 1986). Over a nine-year period in the 1980s the National Trust in Britain spent £1.25 million on repairing erosion caused by walkers to paths in the Lake District (English Tourist Board, 1991). By the late 1980s the valley of Dovedale, in the Peak District National Park in Britain, was attracting around one million visitors per year and experiencing considerable damage, particularly erosion of footpaths. The car park most people used to reach Dovedale was reduced in size by almost half, which resulted in a drop in the number of visitors (ibid.). The tensions between tourism and conservation have been exacerbated by the failure of the tourism industry and the parks managers to understand each other. The world of tourism has tended to view the national parks in terms of a tourist attraction rather than as a means of protecting increasingly rare ecosystems, while the national parks services have traditionally understood the parks in terms of biota and animal behaviour but not in terms of tourists’ needs. Objections by field biologists to tourism in protected areas are that any form of tourism will jeopardize the integrity of the ecosystem the national park is designed to protect. As Gunn (1994, pp. 95–6) says, Parks and conservation areas have been established, planned and managed as isolated oases of special natural and cultural resources. Commendable as has been their protection of these resources, handling visitors has been treated mostly as non-conforming and only to be tolerated. At worst, communication between the parks authorities and the public consisted of ‘a Big Brother act comprizing signs telling the users what not to do and occasionally roaring past in a four-wheel-drive vehicle to let them know they’re watching’ (Robertson, 1988, p. 31). In the 1980s conservationist philosophy altered course towards a more ‘people- friendly’ approach. The 1982 World Congress on National Parks (held in Bali) was in many ways a watershed. While still stressing the need to preserve ecological processes and genetic diversity, the emphasis was no longer on ECOTOURISM IN INDONESIA 229 ‘eliminating exploitation’ of natural resources to protect them from change and interference, but on ensuring that through wise management utilization of these resources is sustainable (MacKinnon et al., 1986). These ‘benign’ principles of people-oriented conservation are codified in the tenets of Integrated Conservation Development Projects (ICDPs), which recognize that people around the parks often bear substantial costs to their income potential while receiving few benefits in return (Brandon and Wells, 1992). ICDPs were designed to involve local people and win their co-operation in protecting the area near which they live by providing them with alternatives to exploiting the plants and animals within the reserve: in other words, social or economic development was specifically linked to conservation. However, in an analysis of twenty-three ICDPs in fourteen countries, it was found that: while many projects received a great deal of attention from international donors and conservation organizations eager to claim ‘success’, few projects could in fact match the claims put forward about them or had met their stated goals of linking development to protected area management. (ibid., p. 561) One of the problems was that poor households did not automatically switch from illegal, unsustainable activities such as poaching or cultivation of protected land to the legal activities offered by the development programme: they simply used the provision of legal activities as an additional way to increase their income. Other problems were that there was a failure to involve local people in designing projects, and that project managers failed to ensure that local people understood the link between the development projects implemented and the goals of conservation. In the case of tourism, the benefits tended to accrue to local élites rather than to the community at large. Another problem with ICDPs is that the income-generating projects act as a magnet for poor people from outside the project area, with a resulting inflow of population and increase of pressure on resources in the protected area. By the 1990s the philosophy of the conservation movement had evolved to the extent that, in their policy document on ecotourism, the WWF went so far as to say that ‘biological diversity of natural resources can be preserved only if populations who are dependent on these resources for their livelihood are offered viable alternatives to use the resources in sustainable ways’ (Boo, 1990, p. 3). One of these alternatives is tourism: at the 1991 Pacific Area Travel Association conference, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands said on behalf of the World Wide Fund for Nature: ‘Tourism in parks and reserves emerges as an alternative that can provide a variety of local economic incentives for sustainable protection, while simultaneously offering substantial national income’ (Jakarta Post, 13.4. 1991). It is by now largely accepted that the visiting public and people living around the protected areas must be welcomed and even embraced if the aims of protecting particular species and biological diversity are to be achieved. 230 OPTIONS There are risks, however, in over-reliance on economic arguments. If an area is to be protected because it generates revenue through tourism, then if greater economic benefits can be gained from exploiting the resource in other ways, protecting the wildlife would be a low priority (Tudge, 1991). The National Conservation Plan for Indonesia (Food and Agriculture Organization, 1982, p. 4) warned that ‘if a heavy investment is made dependent on developing tourism through wildlife and the investment predictably never shows a profit, this could have severe counterproductive effects on the attitude of central government budgetters towards the conservation department in future.’ But a decade later it seems that the ‘conservation through tourism’ reasoning may be holding sway. An analysis of funding to seventeen national parks in Indonesia between 1988– 91 suggested that: The correlation between funding allocation and parks with biological and/ or ecological value is negative. This also holds true for parks with an assessed conservation threat. In contrast, more

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