FoxHershockMappingCommunities

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COMMUNITY-BASED MAPPING: A TOOL TO GAIN RECOGNITION AND RESPECT OF NATIVE CUSTOMARY RIGHTS TO LAND IN SARAWAK purposes/objectives of mapping the communities' customary land boundaries. We also addressed issues such as how to organize the field survey and what information should be mapped, while taking note of their concerns regarding map usage. The community meetings were generally organized in the evenings when most of the longhouse/village members could be present. Yet not all would attend the meeting for various reasons. Some of these reasons included community members needed to work on their farms, for example during paddy planting and harvesting season; some members had moved away from their longhouse to settle in towns and cities in search for employment; and some members did not support community mapping activities or the cause of defending their land rights due to fear of being penalized by the state government or because they supported the government's plan to develop their customary land. During the day when most of the villagers were out in their fields, site visits were organized to survey the customary land boundaries, farm plots, gravesites, previous settlements or historical sites, communal forests, spiritual sites, and areas encroached upon and damaged by logging or plantation activities. Strategies on how and what to map were discussed based on what was seen during these site visits. For this research, we used questionnaires to interview members of the thirty-three communities, focusing on community leaders or villagers with an intimate knowledge of their customary land. In addition, a volunteer with the Borneo Project conducted interviews with officials from community-based organizations (CBOs) and local and international NGOs involved with community mapping activities in Sarawak. CBOs involved in this research are Keruan and UBRA (Uma Bawang Residents Association) while NGOs involved are BRIMAS, Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM or Friends of the Earth, Malaysia) and the Borneo Project. In the interviews, we asked how the NGOs got involved in community-based mapping, how they arrived at decisions on using different technologies, and how other socio-ethical issues of mapping related to the various actors. Discussion and information sharing with the Borneo Project took place through written correspondence. BACKGROUND The Borneo Project was formed in 1991 by a group of volunteers based in Berkeley, California to support Borneo's indigenous peoples, particularly in Sarawak, in their struggle to regain control of their ancestral lands. In 1995, the Borneo Project was instrumental in initiating the first community-based mapping workshop in Sarawak. Participants who graduated from this workshop have helped establish community-based mapping activities for NGOs and CBOs in Sarawak. Keruan is an association formed in the early 1990s by Penan community leaders who hail from the Upper Baram region in the Miri Division to look into land rights issues affecting the Penans. Their community mapping efforts began in 89
1994 and 1995 with community mappers producing hand drawn maps of the mid- and upper Baram regions. Keruan is based in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, RESEARCH FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS UBRA was formed in 1989 by the Kayan community living in the longhouse of Uma Bawang, Sungai Keluan, Baram to promote the rights and interests of individuals and the community. In 1995, UBRA began its involvement in community-based mapping through a mapping training workshop conducted by the Borneo Project. In 1996, UBRA produced a hand drawn community map of their customary land area. SAM, a non-governmental organization involved in environment and development issues in Malaysia, was founded in 1977. In the 1980s SAM became actively involved with environmental and customary land rights issues in Sarawak. Their community-based mapping effort in Sarawak began in 1995 after they had received training from the Borneo Project. Their mapping activities mainly focused on villages in the lower and mid-Baram regions. SAM is the first NGO to apply GIS in their community mapping activities. SAM's headquarters is in Penang, but it also has a base in Marudi, Sarawak. BRIMAS is a grassroots organization that was officially formed in 1993 to look into indigenous peoples' concerns regarding native customary rights, the environment, and development issues on the Dayak's customary lands. BRIMAS community mappers received training from the Borneo Project in 1995 and 1997. Initially, the community mapping activities were carried out in the lower Baram regions, but were later extended to other communities throughout Sarawak. Toward the end of 2002, BRIMAS began to adopt the use of GIS, with funding assistance from Europe to procure hardware and from ESRI (Environmental System Research Institute) for the software. Currently, BRIMAS is actively assisting communities in filing legal claims for native customary rights with community maps being used as evidence. Reasons for mapping Threats of encroachment into customary lands led to the demand by indigenous peoples to have the state government delineate their boundaries. The state government has been slow in responding to these requests, and do so only if the Dayaks would agree to submit to the state's land development policies–policies that actually violate the native customary rights of the Dayaks. As a result, many communities, together with the CBOs and NGOs involved in this research, felt the need to take it upon themselves to document and delineate their customary lands. The initial expectation for community-based mapping was that the community would use the maps as a tool for negotiations with other parties; this has had limited success. For example, after Keruan assisted in mapping the Penan areas, the villages in Upper Baram used the maps to show timber companies the extent of their customary land territory, forcing some companies to pay the villages “goodwill money” to compensate for logs extracted from the land. However, this did not mean that the companies would stop their encroachment nor would they acknowledge the native customary rights of the community. Community maps have been most effective as supporting evidence for native customary rights claims in court. The community maps could show communities' historical and continuous occupation of their land. For example, in the Rumah Nor case, the judge went to great lengths in his judgment to describe a definition of native customary rights that extends not only to the longhouse and the cultivated land around it but that also includes areas in the forest used by the people to hunt, fish, and obtain forest products. The court then judged that witnesses' testimonies regarding the community's chronological history of settlement, customary land boundaries, and utilization of the lands as consistent 90
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MAPPINGCOMMUNITIES ETHICS, VALUES,
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TABLE OF CONTENTS vi vii viii 1 11
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ACRONYMS AMA: adaptive management a
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INTRODUCTION MAPPING POWER: IRONIC
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COMPARATIVE STUDY OF PARTICIPATORY
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APPENDIX I: FORMAL INTERVIEWS AND G
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APPENDIX II: RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND
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land-use plans in various stages of
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egan to argue that these areas were
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conflicts. The NTFP also assists vi
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illegal logging activities and to s
Page 45 and 46: property is defined according to th
Page 47 and 48: the real outside pressure has not y
Page 49 and 50: 7. How well do NTFP staff members u
Page 51 and 52: further and further away from areas
Page 53 and 54: Methods Projecting aerial photograp
Page 55 and 56: RESEARCH QUESTIONS The underlying q
Page 57 and 58: In Samout Krom Village, villagers h
Page 59 and 60: who have not attended the sketch ma
Page 61 and 62: concrete sensorial experiences much
Page 63 and 64: CONCLUSION Based on mapping researc
Page 65 and 66: BACKGROUND According to the MIGIS p
Page 67 and 68: many schools, resulting in the clos
Page 69 and 70: members, the Beima, and villagers'
Page 71 and 72: tree cutting and animal grazing in
Page 73 and 74: the bio-gas project that was implem
Page 75 and 76: During the evaluation process we al
Page 77 and 78: 1 Mr. Zhao Yaqiao, Ms. Wu Chengrui,
Page 79 and 80: Events / Dates Bio-gas systems cons
Page 81 and 82: communities to take advantage of SI
Page 83 and 84: Hayfork based NGO focused on commun
Page 85 and 86: likely to be more knowledgeable abo
Page 87 and 88: planning processes, especially with
Page 89 and 90: and implement projects. Some NGOs a
Page 91 and 92: CONCLUSIONS SIT training provides p
Page 93 and 94: REFERENCES California Fire Safe Cou
Page 95: map strengthened the community's cl
Page 99 and 100: to the mapping. These disagreements
Page 101 and 102: CONCLUSIONS For too long now, the D
Page 103 and 104: APPENDIX B The table below lists th
Page 105 and 106: uncritically or simply misused. As
Page 107 and 108: However, the equipment acquired for
Page 109 and 110: degrees in social sciences, agricul
Page 111 and 112: photo: Martin Hardiono photo: Marti
Page 113 and 114: REFERENCES Herlihy, P. H., and G. K
Page 115 and 116: eserve boundaries, develop a common
Page 117 and 118: NGO that focused on facilitating co
Page 119 and 120: left their organizations within a y
Page 121 and 122: eadily use the available computer a
Page 123 and 124: local capacity both in terms of ski
Page 125: Nusa Tenggara Community Development
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