Kota Kinabalu: Much of the ongoing conflict between forest authorities and local communities in Southeast Asia can be traced back to old colonial land laws, according to Wageningen University’s Prof Dr Meine van Noordwijk.
“These colonial land laws declared that any land not already being farmed or lived on belonged to the state,” he said at the recent International Conference on Tropical Forestry 2026, here.
“Malaysia passed a similar law during the colonial days in 1872,” said Noordwijk, a Distinguished Science Fellow at the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and Emeritus Professor in Agroforestry at Wageningen University.
He said the colonisers were not actually interested in maintaining forests, but in granting companies and concessionaires rights to convert forest land into plantations.
“They (colonisers) were not actually interested in maintaining the forest, they were interested in giving rights to companies and to concessionaires to convert that forest to plantations,” he said.
Noordwijk said many of today’s disputes between forest departments and local communities could be traced back to these old colonial rules, which continue to shape how forest land is classified and controlled.
He said local communities must be given real power to manage forests, rather than merely being given permission to enter them, if social forestry is to genuinely succeed.
“We call it social forestry, but social forestry is not very social yet,” he said.
“Forest institutions unfortunately can be very resilient and very much try to keep the world as they think it should be,” he said.
He pointed out a step-by-step system of forest rights, beginning with the right to enter a forest, followed by the right to collect resources, manage the land, keep others out and, finally, sell or pass the rights down.
However, he said most social forestry programmes stop before communities reach the stage of having real management power.
He cited Lubuk Beringin, an Indonesian village that became the first in the country to receive full rights to manage its own forest. The decision was partly influenced by pressure during international climate talks under the REDD+ programme, which rewards countries for reducing deforestation.
Citing the case of Krui, also in Indonesia, Noordwijk said villagers who had been planting resin trees since 1827 later found that the mature forest they had developed was classified by the government as available for logging.
“The community said, no, no, no, wait a minute, this is our grandparents who planted those trees,” he said.
He said the dispute eventually ended with the area being recognised as Indonesia’s first legally accepted agroforest.
Noordwijk also brought up Sumberjaya, where coffee farming was blamed for a decline in water supply to a nearby hydropower plant, saying later research found that the claim was untrue.
“We showed, working with the university partners, that actually coffee agroforestry, maintaining a good litter layer, maintaining the soil, is as good in providing hydrological services as that forest that they had,” he said.
He said the case demonstrated that forests managed by farming communities could protect water supplies just as effectively as untouched natural forests.
Noordwijk said this year marks 50 years since the term agroforestry, referring to the practice of growing trees together with crops and livestock, was first used, adding that many of the problems that led to its development remain today.
“It was the strong critique on agriculture with its focus on monoculture production systems alone, but it was also a strong critique on the way forestry was not matching the expectations of society,” he said.
He said foresters need to be trained to understand history and society, rather than focusing solely on technical forestry skills, so the profession can move away from old colonial thinking that treats all forest land as belonging to the government alone.
“That is, I think, a challenge to you, the challenge to people in Sabah, it is the challenge to all people in Indonesia as much as the challenge in Europe and everywhere,” he said.