The original title of the workshop from which these chapters were drawn was ‘Conservation for/by whom: Social Controversies & Cultural Contestations regarding National Parks and Reserves in the Malay Archipelago’. That main title was meant to interrogate not only issues of allocating agency – by whom – in the project of conservation in this region, but also issues in evaluating the hierarchy of beneficiaries – for whom – of conservation initiatives. It thus situated this project in the larger re-evaluation of environmental justice being carried out by academics, government officials and, of increasing importance, non-governmental organization (NGO) activists (Zerner 2000). As Lynch and Harwell (2002) point out, central to the project of creating a new paradigm of environmental justice is the recognition of community-based property rights, often (though not universally) defined by local custom or adat. Protected areas provide not only a conceptual space in which to think through these issues, as suggested by Afiff and Lowe in Chapter 12, but also a practical field in which the issues of resource rights are being daily negotiated, sometimes violently. In these contexts such terms as ‘collaboration’ and ‘participation’ now define the parameters of expectation guiding the conduct of these practical negotiations.

The chapters of this part both document the complexities and failures of collaboration in designing and managing protected areas and present parameters for envisioning possible changes that can raise the currently limited status of participation by local communities located in and around such areas to a more collaborative level (chapter 13).