Decades of unsustainable marine governance in Indonesia have benefited extractive land-based economic activities, costing the environment and marginalized communities whose livelihoods depend on the ecosystem, a new paper has found.
Marine spatial planning in Indonesia over the past 300 years has been designed systematically to support large-scale infrastructure development and other profit-oriented activities at the cost of the ocean ecosystem, researchers from Indonesia and Australia said in their analysis published June 14 in the journal Marine Policy.
They added that the unsustainable governance of marine resources in the world’s largest archipelago had excluded the values of environmental protection and marginalized coastal communities, leading to the displacement of their lives and livelihoods.
“This dynamic is not unique to Indonesia, and is indeed common in many countries where colonization established institutions that incentivize resource extraction with little to no regard for its social and environmental consequences,” the paper read.