FoxHershockMappingCommunities

INSTITUTIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF COUNTER-MAPPING
TO INDONESIAN NGOs
3. Watala
Watala was founded in 1978 as a nature lovers club by the
students of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of
Lampung. This Bandarlampung (Lampung) based NGO has
programs on outdoor activities and community
development. This organization also has programs in
environmental monitoring, environmental campaigns,
community organizing, and small-scale economic enterprise
development.
Watala learned counter-mapping when the Bogor (West
Java) based LATIN, a national NGO active in developing
community-based natural resource management models,
and the Southeast Asian Regional Office of the World
Agroforestry Centre (better known as ICRAF) involved this
local NGO in their joint Ford Foundation funded project on
the damar forests of Krui on the western coast of Lampung.
Their first mapping exercise took place in 1996 with the
assistance of Frank Momberg to map the lands of margas,
indigenous villages in southern Sumatra. ICRAF and Watala
continue their collaboration and have a new site in a
mountainous area of Sumber Jaya subdistrict where
migrants primarily from West Java settle on Ministry of
Forestry claimed forest areas. Watala actively carries out
mapping programs in this subdistrict and maintains a GIS.
4. Yayasan Tanah Merdeka (Free Land Foundation)
YTM was founded in 1992 in Palu (Central Sulawesi) by a
group that split from a local development NGO over their
decision to support the development of a hydroelectric
power plant in nearby Lore Lindu National Park (LLNP).
Since then YTM has been active in advocating indigenous
land rights, initially in the park and later in a nickel mining
concession in the southeastern part of the province. With a
paid staff of fifteen (as of June 2004), most of whom are
graduates of the local public university (Tadulako
University), this group is a leading NGO in Central Sulawesi.
Its programs include government monitoring, public
campaigns, and community organizing.
YTM adopted counter-mapping to provide a tool for
advocacy, to produce evidence of land rights, and to
document forest management. Arianto Sangaji, then the
head of its advocacy division, introduced mapping to the
organization. Its first mapping exercise took place in 1996
in a village at the boundary of Lore Lindu National Park.
Alix Flavelle, a Canadian geographer who had been active
in promoting counter-mapping in Southeast Asia and who
wrote a handbook on community mapping, taught the
basics of mapping. Villages around the park were the target
areas for the BSP funded national program of JKPP
(Jaringan Kerja Pemetaan Partisipatif, Indonesia's NGO
Network on Participatory Mapping) promoting countermapping
in the country. In 1998 a mapping staff member
attended a short training on mapping methodology in West
Kalimantan organized by PPSDAK. With these inputs, YTM
developed its own methodology and produces georeferenced
sketch maps.
CAPACITY IN SIT
The four NGOs in this survey have different capacities and
approaches in their mapmaking. The range from PPSDAK
with a mapping staff of ten and an active GIS unit to YTNS
with two part-time mappers and no mapping equipment,
and from computer generated maps (YTNS, PPSDAK, and
Watala) to the geo-referenced sketch maps of YTM. 3
Nonetheless, for all of them SIT was a new “budding” that
required a long process of adaptation to the technology.
When they decided to adopt counter-mapping, none of the
organizations had technical expertise in mapmaking, not to
mention cartography, GIS, and surveying. Only after making
that decision did their staff members began to learn the
basics of mapping. Among the staff members of these
NGOs, only two had formal training. One person, who is at
PPSDAK, graduated from a one-year diploma program in
surveying that he began after he had been involved in
mapping for a couple of years. 4 The other, who is with
Watala, obtained a three-year diploma in surveying and is
now the head of its GIS division; he joined the program
three years after the organization adopted countermapping.
Other staff members from these NGOs have first
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