Ian Dutton: A voice for Indonesia

Ian Dutton: A voice for Indonesia

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The departing Indonesia country director for U.S. non- governmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Ian Myles Dutton, wants to be a positive voice for Indonesia in Washington, where he will take up his new position as director for a conservation measures group.

"Indonesia doesn't have many good people speak about it outside of Indonesia. You know, most of the news is negative news, and in Washington I'm hoping that I can be a voice for Indonesia, for the environment, because people generally don't get that perspective otherwise," Dutton said in an interview recently.

A great man in his own right and eloquent about his views and beliefs, he said he had become attached to Indonesia, where he has worked for a total of 10 years doing conservation work, first with the government and in the last three years with TNC.

"I have to say this; Indonesia has been very good to me. It's been really wonderful for me to come to a country like Indonesia where everything you do has more significance of value than something you might do in a country like Australia," said the 47- year-old native of Tasmania.

"It's hard to describe that difference. In Australia, I used to work many years ago for the Great Barrier Reef Authority, and you know if you do something with the barrier reef, it was okay, but it was already well protected, it was already a good system.

"Whereas when you come to Indonesia, you do a small thing in a place like Wakatobi (Southeast Sulawesi) and it has a big impact, so it's really rewarding in Indonesia to do the work I've been doing. It's been wonderful to me to learn how to be effective here and just to see the benefits to the people and the places."

A former environmental planning lecturer at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, Dutton was no stranger to Indonesia, having helped with training and research here with the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) BIOTROP, the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Tropical Biology in Bogor, West Java, and various governmental institutions in the mid 1980s.

But his first lasting attachment with Indonesia came at the invitation of the Indonesian government to spend a year at Diponegoro University in Semarang, helping to develop a national curriculum on marine science in the early 1990s. It was there that he got in touch with the TNC and learned more about its work in Indonesia.

TNC is the largest environmental NGO in the United States, and it and the World Wildlife Fund are the two largest environmental organizations in the world.

Based in Virginia, TNC works in the United States, various countries in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as seven countries in the Asia Pacific, including Indonesia.

When his year at Diponegoro ended, Dutton returned to Australia, but apparently Indonesia was not finished with him.

"I kept getting asked to come back," he said, adding that he finally returned in early 1996 to Makassar to develop coastal management programs in South Sulawesi, North Sulawesi, Southeast Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua.

At the end of that time, Dutton gave up his job at the University of New England to become chief of party for USAID's coastal project in Indonesia.

"So I did that for five years, and then joined TNC in 2001 so it's kind of a natural progression in some ways."

TNC was first invited by the Indonesian government in 1991 to help manage and strengthen its national parks program.

Since then TNC has established 10 offices in Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Bali, Komodo Island, Wakatobi and Sorong, and employs 190 staff, of which 181 are locals.

The group's work here is fully funded by donors outside of Indonesia. When working with foreign donors, Dutton tries to stress to them the importance of Indonesia for the preservation of biodiversity on earth.

"Indonesia is the most important country in the world for biodiversity. If you look at the terrestrial biodiversity -- the plants and animals -- it ranks number three for highest diversity after Brazil and Columbia."

"But if you look at the marine side, it's number one, and it's daylights to the next country. It is the most important country by a mile for marine life, so when you put the two of them together, marine and terrestrial, Indonesia is clearly the most important country in the world for biodiversity."

The job, however, was not easy, as there has been so much bad publicity for Indonesia over the last couple of years.

"Most people outside Indonesia have a very negative impression of Indonesia. It's very hard to convince someone outside of Indonesia to give money for anything in Indonesia. They see the corruption, they see the terrorism, they see these negative things," Dutton said.

TNC's work in Indonesia includes a national program to help the government develop environmental policy, training and capacity building, a marine program based in Bali for the conservation of coral reefs and fish, a program focused on East Kalimantan and the conservation of coral reefs, orangutans and lowland rainforest.

There is also a program in Sulawesi. "We're now working with every province in Sulawesi to build up a conservation plan for all of Sulawesi. We're trying to develop a map that shows where abouts in Sulawesi are the critical areas to conservation."

A new program just started in Papua where the TNC is working to conserve the Raja Empat coral reefs, as well as cooperating with British oil and gas company BP to protect the largest mangrove forest in the world at Bintuni Bay.

At the end of a decade of working in Indonesia, Dutton said that "the thing I'm most proud of I guess overall, and TNC is just a part of that, is to look at how the capacity of key people has grown, through the work I've been doing with them, helping build their capacity".