Tourism has long been sold as a win-win for development: a way to unlock foreign exchange, create jobs, and preserve ecosystems by turning them into revenue-generating assets. However taking part in the Ecotourism, Nature Conservation and Food Security: Synergies or Tradeoffs summer course of the Department of Resource and Environmental Economics, Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) and undertaking the excursions through Bogor’s botanical gardens, the pristine beaches of Payung Besar, the beautiful coral reefs of Payung Kecil and the mangrove edges of Pari Island all located in the One Thousand Islands regency in Jakarta, Indonesia, complicate that promise. They revealed the blunt truth: the same industry that sustains local livelihoods through ecotourism is also a vector for pollution, privatization, as well as ecological fragility. Walking the thin white sands and swimming in the crystalline waters, one could easily forget the lurking shadows of plastic waste, eroded coral reefs, and communities fighting to keep their islands from being swallowed by rising seas as result of climate change and also private corporations aiming to maximise their profits. Ecotourism, in this context, is neither panacea nor poison; it is a very ugly battlefield where food security, conservation, as well as livelihoods intersect in ways that demand sharper and evidence-based policy thinking.

What made the encounters highly valuable was their human dimension. In Pari Island, a conversation we have with women leaders there who have been fighting against climate change and encroachment by private corporations depicts the deep stakes of survival. For them, climate change is not an abstract model but the saltwater that creeps into their wells, the tourism operators who privatize the beach, and the narrowing space for sustaining small-scale fisheries that feed their families. Their fight is not concentrated on preserving scenery for tourists; it is also about defending the right to remain on lands they have lived in for decades under growing threats from environmental and corporate displacement. It also echoed more broad debates in the Global South, where ecotourism often becomes a double-edged sword, used as a justification for conservation that excludes locals, or as a survival strategy that empowers them when inclusively and sustainably designed.

In addition, policy debates too often treat “synergies” and “trade-offs” as neat binaries. But the everyday reality in Jakarta's peripheries shows how blurry the lines are. Mangrove planting is frequently hailed as a very vital climate adaptation strategy because of high natural carbon sequestration ability, yet poorly designed projects risk becoming photo-ops for visiting tourists rather than serving as long-term coastal protection. Snorkeling activities help to showcase vibrant marine biodiversity, but unchecked foot traffic can accelerate coral degradation when stepped on. Also, food stalls catering to visitors bring immediate income, but they at the same time increase dependence on imported goods, thus undermining local food systems. These contradictions did not just happen in a vacuum; they are structural features of how tourism economies are organized. Unless they are governed with nuance, the very tools of sustainability can become instruments of fragility.

The global literature is also not silent on these dilemmas. Honey’s Ecotourism and Sustainable Development (1999) warned that commercialization without community ownership tends to reproduce inequalities. Similarly, Scheyvens (1999) argued that empowerment is the litmus test: when communities set the terms of tourism, conservation can correspond with better livelihoods; when they are sidelined, ecotourism just morphs into greenwashing. The women of Pari Island serve as a very good example of this struggle for empowerment, demanding not only a seat at the table but also the power to define the menu. Their demands also resonate with Elinor Ostrom’s (1990) insights on common-pool resources: governance works best when rules are co-designed and carried out with the support of those who depend on the resource most directly.

The policy challenge, therefore, is not to choose between nature conservation, food security, as well as tourism, but to reconfigure and reorganize governance so that trade-offs are minimized and synergies are also maximized. This means completely rejecting and doing away with the notion of “ecotourism” as an automatic good and instead embedding it in broader socio-ecological planning. Local governments must move beyond seeing islands as commodities for visitors and start recognizing them as socio-ecological systems requiring highly strong adaptive management that is responsive to challenges and opportunities. At the national level, Indonesia’s blue economy vision risks falling into the trap of growth-first that only cares about the metrics,  unless it embeds community resilience and rights in everything. Internationally, climate finance can play a role in supporting island communities who both mitigate and adapt, but funding should flow to grassroots initiatives rather than top-down heavy projects.

Therefore, what would a paradigm shift look like? One, Repositioning ecotourism away from spectacle and toward stewardship. Imagine snorkeling tours that include education on marine plastic and  also fund waste management systems; mangrove planting not as a one-off photo activity but as part of community-led monitoring programs; or culinary tourism that prioritizes locally grown food and at the same time reduces dependence on imports. These are not utopian fantasies or a future that is impossible but practical recalibrations of incentives. Crucially, they require giving communities, especially women, the authority to manage, monitor, and benefit from these activities. Without that, ecotourism will remain extractive, however green its branding.

The sites we visited, Bogor, Payung Besar, Payung Kecil, Payung Pari as well as the Java Sea represent more than picturesque landscapes but also encompass classrooms of complexity. They showed that the future of ecotourism in Indonesia is precarious, suspended between opportunity and peril. To treat it as only a development tool is to miss its political economy: who owns the land, who benefits from the tourists, who bears the risks of climate change. It is here that academic reflection meets everyday lived reality, and where the Global South must articulate alternatives to models imported wholesale without further refinement from the North. Ecotourism in Indonesia and other parts of the Global South must evolve from being an industry of leisure to becoming an institution of resilience.

Looking at all of these, the struggle for Indonesia's One thousand Islands encapsulates this transformation. If the islanders and activists succeed, they will have demonstrated that ecotourism can be reclaimed as a form of climate justice, that aligns conservation with food security and also dignity. If they fail, the islands risk becoming another casualty of a global tourism economy that consumes beauty even as it advertises and calls for sustainability at every instance. For policymakers, scholars, travelers, tourists and students like us, the choice is stark one: to collude in that consumption, or to side with communities and activists charting a different course.

Ultimately, ecotourism is not about finding balance between conservation, tourism, and food security as if they were weights on a scale. It is about reimagining the entire governance of nature itself. That requires great courage to dismantle entrenched hierarchies, humility to learn from island communities, and honesty to admit that not all trade-offs can be neatly resolved. The summer course was not just a series of excursions but an invitation to rethink what sustainability means when livelihoods, ecosystems, and futures are bound together. The answer, we believe, lies not in chasing perfect synergies but in building solidarities across the fragile edges of our shared planet.