Sarawak rainforests on the international stage

1In the context of the predatory logging characteristic of the 1980s, a transnational environmental campaign began to unravel, notably launched by the Penan who felt that their humanity was disregarded by government officials, loggers, and police officers (Brosius, 1997a). Various communities began erecting a dozen blockades against timber companies in the Baram and Limbang Districts of the State in 1987, calling attention to the impact of logging on wild game availability, the siltation and destruction of fisheries, the destruction of forests, and the disregard of their customary land rights by the state and logging companies. Followed by arrests and trials, these acts of civil disobedience were supported on the ground by the Malaysian NGO Sahabat Alam (Friends of the Earth) Malaysia and most notably by Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser1, who lived among nomadic Penan between 1984 and 1990 and contributed to their political organisation before founding the Swiss NGO Bruno Manser Fonds in 1991 (Brosius, 1997a).

2In the context of increased environmental awareness in the North, the campaign quickly resonated among Euro-American, Australian and Japanese activists and publics. The events were then internationally publicised by Sahabat Alam Malaysia, Survival International, and the Rainforest Action Network in the US (Gale, 1996, 109). Direct action was organised by NGOs in these contexts, presenting the image of a pristine rainforest inhabited by timeless, innocent indigenous peoples, immediately threatened by bulldozers. A great sense of urgency was created by this essentialist image, along with slogans about constant logging and the few months left before the absolute disappearance of forests and their inhabitants alike.2 Galvanised by these threats, the campaign reached incredible momentum in the 1990s as then US Senator Al Gore and the UK’s Prince Charles publicly supported the cause, which was then extensively covered by Western media, newspapers and cinema (Brosius, 1997a).

3While initially disorganised and easily dismissible as defensiveness, the Malaysian response soon began to organise into a public campaign of what they considered to be the right and true information about their timber politics. In the surge of the campaign’s internationalisation, the Malaysian government launched a manoeuvre to suppress critics and flooded global media with positive images of Malaysian environmental stewardship and management. They began making compelling counterarguments by criticising Northern environmentalists for romanticising the Penan and hypocritically subjecting the country to ‘Eco-imperialism’, in the words of then Prime Minister Dr Mahatir Mohamed in 1992 (Dauvergne, 1995, 214, Brosius, 1997a). Malaysian officials raised questions about double standards of sustainability and the focus of activists on tropical rainforests as opposed to temperate forests in the North, but also on the role of Northern consumption in perpetuating forest destruction in the South. Joined by Malaysian activists, state officials’ arguments led to a shift in attitude among Northern environmentalists in concentrating their efforts in the North and undertaking campaign activities in Malaysia only if requested by their local counterparts. As Japanese and European environmentalists were increasingly successful in influencing and decreasing consumption of tropical timber, they also began to engage with their governments and timber retailers. The absence of certification schemes made it impossible for consumers to determine the origin of timber products, and calls for boycotts posed problems to the entire timber industry. As a complete boycott of timber seemed out of reach or undesirable in encouraging genuinely sustainable production, Northern environmentalists entered a consensus to tend towards defining sustainability and promoting certification accordingly (Brosius, 1997a).

Sustainable development and environmental managerialism

4In the 1980s, amid growing global acknowledgement of the anthropogenic nature of ecological and climatic crises, capital underwent a significant shift as it discursively began to incorporate nature, previously considered a mere passive, external and exploitable domain. The new global discourse of ‘sustainable development’ emerged in the aftermath of the various reports published by the Club of Rome in the previous decade. Prompted by various social movements’ contestation of brute accumulation and environmental degradation, this narrative paradoxically made possible the reconciliation of economic growth and preservation of the environment. The release of the Brundtland report, titled ‘Our Common Future’ (1987), is recognised as the birth of this new institutional and discursive restructuration of economic development. In this report, responses to ecological degradation are formulated through the ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ approaches of planning and management, to which technical fixes can be brought without the need for significant action. Drawing back to the poststructuralist, post-development and postcolonial insights provided in the first section of this paper, this discourse appears as a regime of governmentality described by Escobar as ‘environmental managerialism’ (1995, 194). It allows for the increased subjection of vast areas of life to regulation by administrative apparatuses, and the advance of discourses of modernity in all of these areas, echoing Foucault’s biopower or Habermas’ colonisation of the lifeworld (Silva, 2019). Through scientific and technological expertise, social change can successfully be engineered, with only minor corrections to the market system. A continued pursuit of growth is still considered necessary to eliminate poverty, portrayed both as a cause and effect of environmental problems (Escobar, 1996; Brosius, 1999). The effects of ecological degradation on economic growth are emphasised while their inverse is obscured.

5As highlighted by Luke in his analysis of the geo-power and eco-knowledge deployed in mediation of ecological issues, ‘Nature’ is transformed into ‘the environment’ (1995). ‘Nature’ used to possess a certain agency in traditional societies and European Romantic art literature of the nineteenth century, in which it was perceived as an active entity and source of life. Sustainable development and environmental managerialism confine Earth and the nonhuman world to a passive role, as it is transformed into ‘the environment’, an economised resource made up of ‘raw materials’ and ‘products’, which ought to be used as efficiently as possible without threatening the survival of humans. Scarcity of natural resources is an accepted premise, and beyond allowing for their continued physical depletion, this discourse reduces them symbolically (Escobar, 1996). Moreover, postcolonial insights point to the universalising and essentialising features of this discourse, as it holds all of humanity responsible for ecological degradation and fails to account for historical domination and power asymmetries between countries, regions, classes and communities. Blame and visibility are shifted away from large Northern industrial polluters, toward poor ‘irrational’ peasants ‘and their “backward” practices such as slash-and-burn agriculture’ (Escobar, 1996, 330). While seemingly raising much-needed global awareness on ecological issues and creating opportunities for their betterment, environmental managerialism precludes other possibilities. It privileges certain actors and discourses, namely bureaucratic and technoscientific approaches, and marginalises others, such as more radical moral and political imperatives. In concrete terms, this institutionalisation often obstructs ‘meaningful change through endless negotiation, legalistic evasion, compromise among “stakeholders”, and the creation of unwieldy projects aimed at top-down environmental management’ (Brosius, 1999, 38).

Birth of the ITTO and the neoliberalisation of conservation

6In parallel, the prominence of tropical forest protection in global discussions eventually created a favourable context for the creation of a tropical timber bureau, as had been proposed within the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) decades prior. The International Tropical Trade Agreement (ITTA) came into force in 1985 upon gathering 70 producer and consumer states making up the vast majority of the tropical timber trade. These states were brought together over a concern for promoting investment in the timber industry and ensuring long-term steady supply of stocks, as well as price stability (Nagtzaam, 2009, 254). The stated aims of the ITTA were notably that of cooperation between consumers and producers and the diversification and expansion of timber trade. It emerged as a conventional commodity agreement which evolved to incorporate environmental dimensions. Conservationist language was inscribed at a later stage by environmental NGOS (ENGOs) who did not however succeed in making it a priority in the eyes of states. During ITTO negotiations, the International Institute for Environment and Development, Survival International, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace3 and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) were granted a mere observer status (Gale, 1996, 109). The international tropical timber regime, administered by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) was confined to a debate between conservation and exploitation in which ENGOs such as the WWF and Friends of the Earth harbouring conservationist stances were initially provided insider voices (Nagtzaam, 2009). The ITTO was thus founded on the assumption that timber extraction and conservation could be coupled, with the unspoken rationale that conservation of forests was important ‘with a view to ensure their optimum utilisation [...]’, as stated in the ITTA Preamble (ITTA, 1983, 120). According to the ITTO, timber is a commodity and the forest a resource base to be maximised.

7Exploitation is notably privileged by the structure of the Organization itself, as its flawed voting system grants more weight to producer countries exporting the greatest volume of timber, thus encouraging forest destruction and favouring the interests of exploiters. The large voting power granted to producer countries, along with the consensus-based voting process, made the defence of environmental ends particularly difficult for ENGOs. Powerful veto coalitions emerged with Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia coming together to defend producer countries’ interests, and Japan,4 the European Union and the US uniting to demand secure sources of tropical timber for consumer states (Gale, 1996; Nagtzaam, 2009, 271). Throughout the years, the Organization came under fire for facilitating the ‘orderly extraction of tropical timber’5 (Nagtzaam, 2009, 253). In stark contrast to their initial enthusiasm, the coalition of ENGOs which partook in negotiations for many years without ever holding real bargaining power against global actors within the Organization, eventually denounced the ITTA as ‘little more than a front for the tropical timber industry’ in a review endorsed by about 20 ENGOs, concluding that the ITTO has become ‘an alibi for inaction at the international level and a diversion from effective change at the national level’ (Gale, 1996, 104).

Defining and measuring sustainable forest management

8Following the aforementioned global environmental campaign targeting Malaysia, the country’s timber industry and government began witnessing a decline in consumption from Northern countries. Their response shifted in the 1990s as they deployed the rhetoric of ‘sustainable forest management’ (SFM). Under this principle, the country began demonstrating its long-standing tradition of regulation and management of timber extradition and of environmental stewardship. Inherent to this rhetoric was the premise that forest management was intended primarily for the harvest of timber. Previously framed as ‘sustained yield management’ following independence, the shift to ‘sustainable forest management’ inscribed itself in the discursive contours of sustainable development. The lexical proximity of the terms further allowed the long-standing nature of this commitment to sustainability to be asserted (Brosius, 1999).

9Whether it be according to Northern governments and NGOs, to Malaysian ones, or to transnational development agencies such as the ITTO, the term had yet to be clearly defined. In that same decade, the ITTO attempted to provide clarity on the balance between sustainable utilisation and conservation of forests, and more precisely to agree on a universal definition of the concept of sustainable forest management, a concept it proselytised.6 Despite calls for all tropical timber to be ‘sustainably produced’ by different deadlines (1995, 2000), no action was taken. Attempts for the global introduction of sustainable labelling by an extensive scientific and technical apparatus were inevitably watered down and relentlessly delayed, before eventually being dropped altogether.

10In parallel, and in trying to coordinate and substantiate its response to the environmental campaign, Malaysia founded the Malaysian Timber Council (MTC) in 1989, as the primary timber market promotional agency. With a focus on reaching European consumers and dissipating their concerns, the MTC7 was aided by two major international public relations firms, Burson-Marsteller and Hill and Knowlton. A message of transparency was conveyed through the publication of a monthly Malaysian Timber Bulletin and the provision of what they considered to be accurate information about timber. Delegations were sent to Europe and the US to convey a message of openness to cooperate in achieving their goal of sustainable development. These communication efforts contributed to the softening of the image of the Malaysian timber industry, through admission of past wrongs and declarations of willingness to cooperate with genuine8 actors interested in furthering the goal of sustainability. This elaborate public relations apparatus was erected to divert attention from moral and political imperatives towards more technical and institutional matters (Brosius, 1997a). In the process, corporate and statist actors became knowledge producers while obscuring the highly destructive extractivist system in place.

Timber certification in Sarawak

Figure 2: PEFC and FSC logos

11The Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC) was created as an independent organisation in 1998 by the Malaysian Minister of Primary Industries and the Malaysian Timber Council. It was initiated under the ITTO Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management, published in 1992. The MTCC operates the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme, a PEFC approved system. The Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) is one of the two international accreditation bodies for forest certification systems, along with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The certification scheme is based upon the voluntary assessment of ‘forest management activities’ in Forest Management Units (FMU) by independent certification bodies9 (MTC, 2023). Timber manufacturers and exporters selling PEFC-endorsed timber products thus benefit from the international legitimacy of this label. While not mandatory, this process has been deemed increasingly necessary by timber companies in order to appease foreign buyers, particularly from the West, who often require such certification.

12Moving beyond this cloud of acronyms, the concrete underlying principle for FMUs is that timber production funds from one section of these government-granted concessions are supposedly used to conserve forest in another section of the unit, all of which is assessed by auditors appointed by timber companies themselves (Lee Tian Tong, 2021). Within the proposed UBFA lies the 148,305-hectare Gerenai FMU, a concession owned by the Samling group, which also owns the 117’941 hectare Ravenscourt FMU in the Limbang division located in the north of the state. Both areas have been audited by the Samling-appointed SIRIM QAS certification body, in 2020 and 2018 respectively (FDS, 2023). In the first audit of the Gerenai FMU, issues with the timber company’s processes of community consultation were pointed out, without however preventing the granting of MCTS certification as the FMU was found to have complied with SFM principles (SIRIM QAS, 2020, 8). The report deemed community consultation procedures to be insufficient, which was confirmed by SAVE Rivers members whom we met while in Miri.10

13Various NGOs, including BMF, SAVE Rivers, and Keruan, as well as individuals organised into community groups11 have mobilised to denounce flaws linked with FPIC and Samling’s refusal to share social impact and environmental impact assessments with communities. Furthermore, the lack of transparency about the relations between auditors and timber companies has been pointed out, as MTCC certification bodies are thought to potentially be paid by their clients (the timber companies) to do the auditing, which would create an egregious conflict of interest between the two in the issuing of certificates (Lee Tian Tong, 2021; SAVE Rivers et al., 2022). Finally, communities and NGOs have called for attention towards the ineffectiveness of the MTCC complaints mechanisms12, the Council’s inability to protect stakeholders being targeted by illegitimate lawsuits13 as well as to suspend or withdraw certifications – a power left to the auditing body.

14Involved in activism for rainforest preservation and indigenous rights in Sarawak, the aforementioned NGOs have collaborated throughout the years and now form a crucial intermediary point between timber and statist entities, and local communities. Their involvement has notably played a crucial role in the defence of local people’s rights in the context of FMUs and forms an important part of the UBFA project.

NGO coalition and legal intimidation

15Upon being assigned the BMF-solicited research project, my group and I got to partake in the NGO’s May 2022 General Assembly in their office in Basel, Switzerland. A delegation from Sarawak was present, including members of SAVE Rivers and Keruan, as well as a member of The Borneo Project14 and other advocacy workers and researchers.

16Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF), co-founded by the aforementioned Swiss activist Bruno Manser15 along with some of his friends, has been one of the leading entities advocating for the conservation of tropical rainforests biodiversity as well as the respect of indigenous rights, with a particular commitment to the Penan with whom Manser lived. The NGO undertakes various campaigning activities and projects both in Switzerland and in Malaysia, focusing on human and indigenous rights, biodiversity and cultural conservation, health, education, and infrastructure, as well as corruption and transparency (BMF, 2023). For decades, BMF has collaborated with Sarawak-based, indigenous-led organisations including Keruan and SAVE Rivers.

17Keruan is an Eastern Penan grassroots organisation which has been working to defend the preservation of Penan culture and the group’s various rights, including land rights in the face of timber logging. As early as the 1990s, Keruan was involved in various projects focusing on infrastructure and schooling, as well as community mapping with the support of BMF, to work towards the recognition of Native Customary Rights and document Penan culture, traditions and ancestral knowledge (BMF, 2018).16

18SAVE Rivers emerged in 2011 as a grassroots network in an attempt to stop the construction of hydroelectric mega dams in the context of the ‘Sarawak Corridor for Renewable Energy’ (SCORE) project launched by their state government three years prior.17 The network has since undertaken various advocacy projects geared towards the defence of communities to be affected, displaced and resettled by the construction of these dams, as well as their social and environmental impacts. It has also engaged extensively with the defence of indigenous land rights and campaigned against timber logging on their ancestral lands, with a particular focus on non-Penan indigenous groups.

19All three of these organisations have collaborated in the past, notably for the ‘Stop the Chop’ campaign geared towards tackling illegal logging in Sarawak, and are listed as stakeholders of the ITTO-sponsored UBFA project. The aim of the organisations’ joint May 2022 trip was to discuss this project as well as the aforementioned campaigns, and to raise awareness about the shortcomings of the MTCS, particularly among the Dutch government which is a big purchaser of its certified timber.18 Part of the crucial aims of this gathering was also to discuss plans of action in two upcoming Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) cases, one against BMF executive director Lukas Straumann19, and one against SAVE Rivers, which has yet to take place. SLAPP cases are brought by corporate or statist entities with the intention of censoring, intimidating and dissuading critics by burdening them with high legal defence costs towards the abandonment of their opposition. SLAPP suits by definition hold no valid legal claim.20

20Through these back-and-forth negotiations, actors of the timber industry successfully stall calls for proper consultation with and consent from communities, while deforestation continues. By subjecting non-governmental entities to lengthy administrative impediments and unfruitful complaints mechanisms, certification bodies prove to partake in the technocratisation of ‘sustainability’ and conservation. Growing attention paid to indigenous rights as components of these debates, propelled by various NGOs and activists around the world, has increasingly been incorporated into development and conservation projects of all kinds.