Landscapes of anxiety between the cave and the oil palm trees: local legitimation in East Kalimantan

Abstract

This thesis examines the intersection between international environmental governance initiatives for social forestry, smallholder palm oil cultivation, local struggles for land access, and the politics of indigeneity and citizenship in a changing Indonesian political economy. It uses a combination of discourse analysis and ethnography, guided by theoretical lenses of assemblage thinking and institutional bricolage, to interrogate two distinct types of land legitimation struggle practiced by members of Merabu village, located in the Berau District in East Kalimantan; one for social forestry and one for smallholder palm oil cultivation. It considers how land legitimation practices occur in contexts of the institutional pluralism and ambiguity in ways that aim to render some land claimants and their claims legitimate, allowable, and/or legal, and others not. Summary of findings suggest that practices of local land legitimation in Merabu involve productions of collective identity, social relations, and technologies of recognition in ways that render some actors, interests, and land claims legitimate and others subaltern, representing potential issues of injustice and alienation occurring through environmental governance practice. Villager strategies for repurposing assets and powers from one land rights context to another in attempts to render legally ambiguous claims legitimate reflect everyday struggles for citizenship in a democratizing Indonesia. This raises critical questions for how land rights, legality, and political subjectivity may be better understood within the contexts of environmental governance and Indonesian democracy in regards to the pursuit of justice. Analysis is guided by three core research questions: 1)How are contemporary local land struggles contextualized within neo-colonial histories of racialized socio-spatial control and their contestation? 2)How do environmental governance projects shape some local subjectivities, interests, and land use practices as legitimate and others illegitimate? 3)In what ways are denials of legitimacy contested and resisted by local land claimants in the pursuit of their interests and political inclusion? Following conceptual frameworks introduced in Chapter 2, and case study context in Chapter 3, I address these questions in my empirical chapters. To answer the first question, in Chapter 4, I conduct a deliberative discourse analysis on land policy texts and their political/historical contexts to trace how contestations over authoritative ways of conceptualizing land legitimacy shape productions of forest dwelling subjectivities as legitimate or illegitimate vis-à-vis land rights and political participation. Findings show that histories of contestation between multiple policy storylines of land legitimation affect systematic forms of alienation and subalternity for forest dwelling people, like the Lebbo. These alienations shape struggles for legitimation in contemporary contexts of environmental governance, wherein pluralist authoritative institutions and discourses of rights recognition interpellate forest-dwelling subjectivities in ambiguous and problematic ways. I answer the second question in Chapter 5, where I conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Berau over the course of 12 months in 2015-2016 to examine how the Berau Forest Carbon Project (BFCP), a subnational REDD+ demonstration project, worked to territorialize Merabu subjects and spaces within the REDD+ environmental governance assemblage at the project’s early stage. Findings suggest that essentializations of villager identities and interests draw on tropes of indigeneity while simultaneously denying formal indigenous rights or self-determination. Subject productions as such, combined with facilitation of capacities for legibility by State authorities, render villagers and their land claims to their ancestral forest legitimate insofar as they adhere to what Li calls the “non-market slot” (2014). I answer the third question in Chapter 6, where I draw on key-informant interviews collected during fieldwork in 2022, at the end of the BFCP project cycle, to examine villagers’ efforts to legitimate land claims for smallholder palm oil cultivation, i.e. outside the “non-market slot”. Here, I observe villagers repurpose technologies of legitimation gained through their participation in the BFCP for deployment in other contested legitimation claims with district government authorities in order to render themselves and the claims legitimate in what would otherwise be considered a restricted form of land use, in what I characterize as acts of bricolage. Here, I draw on insights from previous chapters and critical scholarship on citizenship in post-colonial Indonesia to argue that such legitimation practices in legally ambiguous contexts represent vital struggles for everyday citizenship amidst the incomplete project of Indonesian democratization. I my summation, I reflect on the fluid, reflexive relationship between indigeneity and citizenship in the Indonesian context in relation to the political ambitions of historically marginalized people in pursuit of autonomy, survival, and development