Judul: Women conservation movement in Nyungcung : a result of an interaction between poverty, patriarchy and NGO's influence
Abstrak: Over the decades, people’s ability to fulfill the basic needs has been eroding with the decline in land and other natural resources, due both to degradation and to shifts in tenurial rights away from community hands to state and business parties hands. The formation of community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) groups in recent years represents various resistances to processes of privatization. While there are many ‘success’ stories related to such groups, numerous CBNRM groups’ initiatives have failed for a variety of reasons. In particular, a number of ground experiences shows that those initiatives often lead to the exacerbation of inequalities within the group involved. This condition applies with special force to the issue of gender equity. To contribute to the understanding of the causes of success or failure for the CBNRM groups’ initiatives and movement from feminist perspective, this research focused on the local women peasants’ initiative in re-nurturing bare lands in Nyungcung Hamlet, Malasari Village, Bogor District. This raises some critical questions, such as: who are the women peasant and how they carried out their initiative? What are the factors determine their initiative? What are the results of their initiative? This research demonstrates that the growing initiative on the part of women -who are mainly from social groups of landless and tenant - as they respond to ecological distress and livelihood security, caused by PERUM PERHUTANI Unit III, and to Decree of Forestry Minister No. 175/Kpts-II/2003 that expands the area of Gunung Halimun National Park (from 40,000 ha to 113,357 ha, covering the Halimun and Salak mountain ranges). Together with men peasants, they worked collectively to re-nurture the PERUM PERHUTANI’s bare lands through a series of planting and mapping activities, currently known in local term as Leuweung Hejo Masyarakat Ngejo or, in public advocacy terms, as the Kampung dengan Tujuan Konservasi (KDTK) movement. However, in order to gain public support, assert elements of basic rights, and secure Nyungcung People’s genuine benefits from the presence of the Gunung Halimun – Salak National Park and PT. Aneka Tambang, those women peasants have not actively participated as much as before. In these further activities, men peasants take a lead. This current performance of local conservation movement is becoming a masculine pattern. I argue that the interaction between poverty, some forms of patriarchy like gender segregation of public space, female behavioral norms and gender division of labor, and the absence of women empowerment activity (through ‘sekolah perempuan’) facilited by local NGO, RMI, as well as the existence of ‘unworkable’ contextual factors in ecological and political aspects take them out from their further participation in the Leuweung Hejo Masyarakat Ngejo movement. Those women peasants are becoming increasingly distanced from their gendered knowledge; gendered rights to land and forest resources, both in quality and quantity; as well as gendered environmental politics and grassroots conservation that had been articulated in their distinctive agenda and demonstrated by the leadership from some of them during their participation in the Leuweung Hejo Masyarakat Ngejo movement.
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