generate revenue from the tourist industry. The state’s overdependence on tourism-derived revenue made wildlife conservation a priority in their development planning; hence, a dynamic was created to furthering the planning and implementation of other development programs designed to facilitate wildlife conservation projects. Wildlife conservation and tourism took priority over agricultural production and resources extraction (Neumann 1991). Neumann’s article illustrates how commoditization of natural resources (tourism industry in conjunction with wildlife conservation) can play a vital role in a state’s capacities building (revenue generation). Expansion and extension of state mechanisms of control and surveillance over rural society thus derived from the need to secure commoditization processes. Going back to the context of forest lands, articles reviewed argue that forest zoning was done to facilitate the state or state-promoted natural extraction activities. As we can see, the demarcation of forest was always accompanied by the control and management over forest resources and products. This, I believe, is due to the ideology of “scientific forestry” management developed during the colonial period which still serves as the base of forest management in many post-colonial states (Peluso 1994, Sundar 2001, Peluso and Vandergeest 2001). According to Nandini Sundar: “Historically, scientific forestry involved institutionalizing certain sorts of territorial claims on the basis of timber quality and its potential for revenue generation and criminalizing those activities that competed with this goal, like shifting cultivation.” (Sundar 2001, 330) From this explanation we can see that forest management is actually designed for revenue generation through effective and efficient timber exploitation. As explained by Sundar, “The classification of existing lands into a hierarchy of value on the basis of
timber contained was not in any sense natural or obvious…A timber-based
classification of forests often meant transforming lands to make them correspond
more closely to the official ideal…It also meant transforming people to make
them worthy of the good forest they inhabited. For instance, tribes with their
“wasteful” shifting cultivation were seen as underserving of good forest.”
(Sundar 2001, 334-5) In the Indonesian context, the perception of shifting-cultivation as “wasteful” practices by traditional or customary communities is often connoted with a perception and