Detecting Latent Environmental Conflict: A Meta-ethnography for the Reform of National Ecological Security Assessment: Meta-Etnografi untuk Reformasi Asesmen Keamanan Ekologi Nasional

Defrida Suzana Lukuaka; Prilly Adolfina Lukuaka

Authors

Defrida Suzana Lukuaka ASNATARA ID, Bogor Green Resort Blok G No.4, Bogor, 16320, Indonesia https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9849-3252
Prilly Adolfina Lukuaka Politeknik Pertanian Negeri Kupang, Jl. Prof. Dr. Herman Johanes, Kota Kupang, Nusa Tenggara Tim. , 85011, Indonesia

Keywords:

latent environmental conflict, meta-ethnography, ecological security assessment, local knowledge, Governance

Abstract

Indonesia's current National Ecological Security Assessment instruments remain technocratic, quantitative, and top-down in nature, rendering them unable to detect signals of latent environmental conflict that accumulate at the community level. Dimensions such as the erosion of trust among indigenous communities, symbolic resistance, and ecological violence concealed by development narratives escape the existing security detection radar. This study employs a Meta-Ethnographic approach (Noblit & Hare, 1988), structured through seven iterative phases, to synthesize ethnographic and qualitative literature on environmental conflict in Indonesia, with study selection following the PRISMA 2020 protocol. The synthesis produces a taxonomy of three pathways of latent conflict: (1) the erosion of trust and the activation of parallel customary institutions, (2) ecological violence concealed by development narratives, and (3) governance fragmentation as a vulnerability multiplier. These findings reveal three fundamental gaps in existing instruments, namely the dominance of a technocratic paradigm, the inability to read non-military threat multipliers in an integrated manner, and the absence of community-based signal-capture mechanisms. The study recommends a reform toward a Transformative Ecological Security Assessment that integrates the dimension of justice, recognizes local knowledge as an early-warning system, and epistemically decentralizes security data collection from the community level into the national security architecture.

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