The Babagon Dam

The importance of this dam has led the government to restrict socio-economic activities and livelihoods of these three Dusun communities to ensure the quality of water flowing from the Crocker Range. This means that the government has sought to take over from ancestral communities the landscape management and stewardship of the traditional territories (marked with red boundaries on the map above).  Moreover, the cultural relationships between the three neighboring villages have been fading because the dam at the center flooded the old routes up and down the valleys.   For Tampasak, farming has meant renting lands in other distant villages like Kolopis in the lowlands, where infrastructural development has, in turn, led to increasing floods.  Resettlement was implemented in a compulsory fashion and promised compensation and support was irregular and inadequate.  Confidence and trust of the communities in government agencies were deeply impacted by these events as were relationships with political leaders.  This tended to reduce further government attention to basic services, gazettement of village lands and so forth.

Combating Challenges and Building Resilience: Implementing the PES revenue deployment process.

To attend to these complex histories and issues, and after a four-month scoping exercise and one year PES Readiness Phase of consultation and training, Forever Sabah agreed to facilitate a multi-year process between communities, government and private stakeholders to design PES arrangements with project funding from Yayasan Hasanah, and supplementary small grants from the Roughley Charitable Trust and The Shared Earth Foundation.

This next phase, which was completed in November 2020, transformed community capacity and significantly shifted relationships between government and the communities. It ultimately successfully secured endorsement from the NRO-Led Committee for a set of institutional mechanisms that would create a Babagon Catchment Water Fund, upon which the communities would be strongly represented as Trustees alongside government and other stakeholders, collecting and paying out to the resident communities monies derived from a variety of potential funding streams and sources.  When approved by the cabinet, with the associated recognition of the communities’ territorial rights, these flows can enable permanent establishment of many green jobs (in such areas as water monitoring, catchment management and restoration).

‍

The project currently understands the institutional relationships and financial flows as illustrated below:

‍

Yellow lines/colors indicate money flowing

Red lines/colors indicate proposed action/institutions

This “heart” graphic represents that what we seek to build is to mirror the circle of clean water coming out of the forests of the indigenous territories of the Babagon Catchment with a corresponding circle of reverse flow in funding from those who take advantage of that environmental service.

Putting all this in place is the focus of the next several years of the PES project.