The value of ethnoecological knowledge of the Minahasans: repositioning traditional biocultural knowledge in Indonesian environmental planning

Indonesian strategic and statutory environmental regimes have drawn directly from conventional Western models of environmental planning and natural resource management. These models are often at odds with, do not connect with, nor appreciate generational traditional biocultural knowledge and information from regionally-specific Indigenous communities in Indonesia. This knowledge, and the voice of the custodians of this knowledge, has been overlooked and circumvented in the name of broadscale nationalistic co-ordinated strategic planning. The problem is that nationalist planning, in a multicultural archipelago full of a diverse set of communities often with their own languages, dialects, cultural relationships to landscape, and mixed connectivity to different cohorts of colonial (European and Asian) and religious affiliations means that a deep understanding of environmental information at local and regional level is negated and denied legitimacy. This paper offers a platform to discuss this issue, the difficulty of nationalistic planning and its failings at the Minahasan regional level in Indonesia, and the wealth of cultural and environmental answers the Minahasan culture can bring to the table to better management its landscape sustainably and culturally. This paper’s purpose is to question conventional and generic environmental planning systems in Indonesia and charts an alternate culturally-attuned agenda that can offer to inform and better manage landscapes sustainably and culturally. The tipping points are deep questions about how to regionally manage landscapes sustainably and culturally in deference to a nationalistic agenda before the latter dooms the former producing a 'one-fits all' or generic Indonesian biogeographical landscape devoid of cultural nuances.

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia occupies the mainland area east of India and south of China, as well as the archipelago between the mainland and Australia, west of the Pacific Ocean. The region is self-identified by its geographic proximity, although cultural commonalities across the region occur mostly at the level of consensus gentium rather than as an overarching mode of regional distinction. Its peoples derive from a broad East Asian racial grouping, dividing primarily along linguistic lines into four families of languages. These linguistic families thereafter quickly devolve into hundreds of ethnic groups, many of which have been bound together in postcolonial states that, to various degrees, comply or otherwise with precolonial polities. While some states have a strong sense of coherent national identity, others have had to consciously construct such an identity, with varying degrees of success and not a little resistance.