More than 50 million people inhabit Indonesia’s rainforests, many pursuing traditional livelihoods including small-plot farming, bamboo harvesting, and fruit and honey collection. In addition to income, forests typically provide a variety of subsistence foods, materials, and spiritual and social values. In recent decades, these forests have been increasingly plundered for valuable hardwood that is smuggled overseas, often with the complicity of corrupt officials. Much of this illegal timber finds its way to China, Malaysia, and Singapore on its way to supply Western furniture markets (Schroeder-Wildberg and Carius 2003:24-33; EIA/Telapak 2002:12-15).

Since the fall of former Indonesian President Suharto in 1997, illegal logging and its impact on poor rural forest-dwellers has become a major issue for Indonesia’s government, its Western trading partners, and its evolving civil society and media. In part, this reflects the fact that nongovernmental organizations and journalists are now able to comment critically on government policy with less fear of repression. While bureaucratic corruption remains widespread, the Indonesian government at all levels has become more responsive to public scrutiny and civil-society pressure (Anderson and Hidayat 2004:12).

Against this backdrop, two prominent NGOs—the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), based in the United Kingdom and the United States, and Telapak, based in Indonesia—began an innovative program to train communitybased NGOs to document and disseminate evidence of criminal logging activity in their forests. The project was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DfID) under its Multi Stakeholder Forestry Program, which funds efforts to increase poor forest-dwellers´ influence on forest policymaking.

The project was based on the premise that the timber industry offers only short-term benefits to a small minority of Indonesians, and that forest loss means that livelihood alternatives for forest dwellers are dwindling fast, especially for the rural poor (MFP 2000:5; Anderson and Hidayat 2004:12). “Every year, two million hectares of forest disappear, eroding the livelihoods of as many as one million people,” says David Brown, a forest economist with DfID. “Meanwhile, only 200,000 people are employed in that segment of the Indonesian log felling and processing industry that operates illegally. Slowing down Indonesia’s illegal logging industry will make the forest-linked livelihoods of Indonesians more secure” (Brown 2004).

During the four-and-a-half-year project (2000-2004), Telapak and EIA trained over 300 civil-society representatives from 70 NGO and community groups. Participants were trained in basic camera and video skills, and 13 sets of surveillance and documentation equipment were distributed nationwide as a communal resource. In addition, nine local NGOs were trained in advanced film editing and given computers and software editing facilities. They now serve as regional resource centers for community activists working to fight deforestation and promote sustainable alternative livelihoods. In 2004 some of these regional NGO partners organized their own media training sessions to expand the video network and pass on their video skills to other communities. Total cost of the project was about US$2.3 million.

In setting up the video training, inclusiveness and diversity among the trainees were important guiding principles. Participants represented human rights and women’s groups as well as local and regional NGOs working specifically on forestry issues. In each region, attendees were chosen by a local NGO, which in turn was chosen by Telapak. “The groups we trained ranged from informal community groups with a local dignitary as their head to organized NGOs with 15 staff,” explained Dave Currey, EIA director. “We tried to be as inclusive as possible, to encourage those taking part to see illegal logging from a wide social and economic perspective and to encourage networking between civil society groups operating in the same communities. Corruption and intimidation in Indonesia’s forests, for example, affects the whole of community life, so you can’t discuss illegal logging without talking about human rights, the judicial system, and local governance. We were not prescriptive in how participants used their training. They knew the local conditions and decided themselves how to best use the skills they learned” (Currey 2004).