Shrimp aquaculture versus mangrove in Indonesia : Power contestation, environmental degradation, and a coevolutionary environmental history in the Ujung Krawang (Muara Gembong) mangrove protected forest

Political ecology has been able to critically examine the debate around man-grove ecosystem and prolific intensive shrimp aquaculture. This approach has shown the negative impacts of such practices—in terms of generating social conflicts, environmental hazard, and impoverishment of coastal communities—through an ‘interdisciplinary understanding’ used to complement the analytic tools. Yet, it did not clearly bind with coevolutionary studies which also concerned with the interrelated issues of environmental change, social, and economic. This study is intended to indicate the need of incorporating a co-evolutionary framework into this approach in order to understanding the more complex social forces in extensive shrimp farming area. Life history interviews is employed as the main research technique, apart from participant observation and secondary data collections. The objective is to obtain thorough information about the environmental and social (including political and economic) transformation of a particular village which is located in the (mangrove) protected forest of Muara Gembong, Indonesia. It was a productive extensive aquaculture area (shrimp and milkfish farming) for a few decades. A greater attention is therefore given to narratives about the past in chronological order: pre-productive, productive, and post-productive periods. The result of this research reveals the power contestation over the protected area, mangrove depletion, and coevolution between the environmental change and social dynamic in the Ujung Krawang protected forest.