All of the chapters in this part attempt to present the perspectives of local communities in the Malay Archipelago whose members have been confronted with a paradigm of conservation that is often alien to them. Unlike the other parts presenting views from conservation biologists and lawyers, this part presents the perspectives of mainly anthropologists, who have worked closely with local communities in an attempt to understand both their knowledge of their environment and the social institutions that form the framework of their practices in regard to it. While conservation biologists tend to look at the problem of conservation from the planetary perspective of maximizing biodiversity, including avoiding species extinction, and lawyers tend to look at the problems of the legal frameworks put in place to safeguard protected areas, hence often concentrating upon the national context of these laws (though in the context of global conventions and frameworks), anthropologists are concerned with the ecological and political-cultural consequences of the global and the national at the level of the local.

Some environmental ethicists and conservation biologists have recently advocated a return to a more exclusionary stand against local communities living in the vicinity of protected areas, what Wilshusen et al. (2002) refer to as a ‘resurgent protection paradigm’ (cf. Rolston 1996). In contrast, all of the chapters in this part call for more nuanced understandings of local situations that take into account the history of the peoples who live in or near protected areas, what their relationships with their environment have been, and the political and economic relations that have made their environments of interest to the global and national communities.