The Long Isun Community Rejects Carbon Funds to Protect Forests and Tradition

* The Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling Indigenous community was worried about the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility-Carbon Fund (FCPF-CF) program.
* The FCPF-CF is a carbon project by the World Bank and Indonesian Government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+).
* The World Bank offers an incentive of US$100 million until 2028 if Indonesia reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 22 million tons of CO2e.
* The first phase of the carbon money flows to 417 villages, 24 sub-districts, 143 community groups, and seven indigenous communities.
* East Kalimantan is a pilot region for performance-based carbon financing from FCPF-CF.
* Long Isun Village is one recipient of this money.
* The Dayak Bahau Umaq Suling community rejected the FCPF carbon fund offer.
* The community expressed concern that forest access restrictions could conflict with their life and customary forest reliance.
* The community has a tradition of farming and established rules regarding burning fields and boundary markers.
* The community has long proposed recognition and demarcation of customary forests totaling 108,450 hectares.
* A territorial conflict occurred with the timber company PT Kemakmuran Berkah Timber (KBT).
* One customary leader was criminalized for alleged extortion in 2014 related to a territorial conflict.
* The community faced intimidation regarding the carbon fund rejection and territorial recognition.
* The accountability counsel highlighted issues regarding consent based on prior information without coercion (padiatapa) or free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC).
* The process of MHA recognition for Long Isun Village is still pending.

The dynamic between large-scale environmental financing mechanisms and indigenous territorial rights reveals a fundamental misalignment in governance that perpetuates conflict rather than resolving it. The core tension lies in the imposition of externally defined metrics—like carbon reduction targets—onto land use systems rooted in ancestral knowledge and customary law. The structure of the FCPF-CF, which distributes benefits across broad administrative areas without ensuring genuine, informed consent from the specific communities holding the land, exemplifies a pattern of top-down resource allocation that bypasses legitimate local agency.
The attempts by the community to assert their rejection, particularly when faced with coercion and lack of meaningful socialization, expose a systemic failure in respecting established protocols like FPIC and customary tenure. The involvement of intermediaries and subsequent institutional reviews suggests that the process itself is designed more to manage risk for external stakeholders (World Bank) than to safeguard indigenous autonomy. The disproportionate benefit sharing plan—where indigenous communities receive only 10% while the provincial government receives the majority—reinforces a pattern of systemic inequity where the custodians of the resource bear the cost of the climate solution without adequate reward or control.
The escalation from local disputes over land demarcation and perceived criminalization to formal complaints against the World Bank points toward a predictable resistance strategy: when direct negotiation fails, recourse shifts to external accountability structures. The failure to resolve territorial conflicts or MHA recognition directly feeds into the legitimacy crisis surrounding the carbon funding; the project’s success is implicitly tied to the prior resolution of these unresolved historical injustices. Future efforts must focus not just on managing carbon finance but on establishing binding mechanisms that prioritize indigenous consent and recognize customary tenure as the foundational data point for any development agreement.
BRIDGE QUESTIONS:
How can international financial institutions restructure benefit-sharing mechanisms to ensure that recognized indigenous territorial rights, rather than broad administrative boundaries, are the primary determinants for project eligibility and distribution? What steps must be taken to formally integrate FPIC requirements into national and local land tenure recognition processes to prevent future coercion in climate financing negotiations? Does the established pattern of sidelining indigenous consent inherently necessitate an entirely new legal framework for recognizing customary forest governance within national environmental law?