Indonesia - 30 June, 2020
Tropenbos Indonesia facilitated participatory mapping in several villages in Ketapang District. The results are scaling up and will be adopted in district spatial planning.
Missing or poorly defined village boundaries are still a problem for many Indonesian villages. In the Ketapang District, for example, only 17 of the 253 villages have official maps determined by the district government. As a result, a necessary instrument for spatial planning is lacking. Decree No. 45/2016 of the Ministry of Home Affairs (Guideline to plan and define participatory village boundary) makes villages responsible for spatial planning. Contributions from the Village Fund should enable them to do this. However, the district government has limited personnel and funding. Therefore, collaboration is set up with NGOs and companies through the government agency Community Empowerment for Village Development.
Participatory mapping (PM) is carried out, not only for the village to determine boundary mapping as a support to the district program, but also to identify natural resource potential and to use the results of the mapping to develop village spatial planning.
Participatory mapping is a bottom-up process in which the community members participate and contribute their knowledge. The result is a map that determines where the municipality boundaries are and where economic and non-economic activities take place within the municipality. Once the map is complete and agreed upon, the municipality can develop policy, and issue and enforce permits.
Women and young people play an important role in PM. Women usually have a better understanding than men of their village and are able to provide more accurate information about their village’s natural resource potential.
Ketapang is an average district, but has a national park within its boundaries with forests of outstanding quality. The park is surrounded by an oil palm company and villages, so the chance of encroachment is high. This underlines the importance of mapping.
Tropenbos Indonesia facilitated Ketapang to be able to do participatory mapping by providing training (on PM and the use of GPS) and by providing assistance during the mapping process. In 2017–18 the funding for PM was provided by TI, but in 2019, TI encouraged villages to use their own village fund for this purpose. However, TI still provides the training for village members to do the PM, and still provides technical assistance during the process.
Since 2017 maps have been made in seven villages. A number of them were made with the support of TI; other villages paid for the mapping with their own village fund. One village received PM training, delivered by TI, but has not yet conducted the mapping. The village governments of three villages have used the results of the mapping to develop land-use planning and green mid-term development plans.
In the follow-up process, lobbying and advocacy will be directed to the District Development Agency (Bappeda) to use the results of the mapping as a reference in the development or review of the district’s spatial planning.
Published in the Annual Report 2019