Contesting State Forests in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Authority Formation, State Forest Land Dispute, and Power in Upland Central Java, Indonesia

This article explores the ongoing conflict over state forest land between the local population and the State Forestry Corporation (SFC) in a village in upland Central Java with regard to authority formation. It looks at how different agents draw on different sources of authority in the course of the conflict and its negotiations. The principal questions are to what kind of sources of authority villagers refer to and how the formation of authority informs the relations between the state and society in the land dispute. The article is based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork and focuses on the central figure of Pak Wahid who took a leading position in the forest land dispute and in mobilising peasants in the village. The article argues that in post-Suharto Java, leadership in the struggle for state forest land at the village level is embedded in the interaction of Javanese ideas of power and authority as well as administrative authority. Due to political and institutional reforms, new sources of authority could be invoked while there are no real changes in the power relations within the village or between the SFC and the villagers. ----- Dieser Artikel untersucht den anhaltenden Konflikt um staatliche Waldflächen zwischen der lokalen Bevölkerung und der State Forestry Corporation (SFC) in einem Dorf im Hochland von Zentral- Java in Bezug auf die Entwicklung von Autorität. Es wird untersucht, wie sich unterschiedliche AkteurInnen im Rahmen des Konflikts und dessen Verhandlung auf unterschiedliche Bezugsquellen von Autorität beziehen. Die zentralen Forschungsfragen in diesem Zusammenhang sind, auf welche Bezugsquellen von Autorität sich DorfbewohnerInnen beziehen und wie die Entwicklung von Autorität die Beziehungen zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft im Rahmen des Landkonflikts beeinflusst. Der Artikel basiert auf einer 11-monatigen ethnografischen Feldforschung und fokussiert auf die Person von Pak Wahid, der eine Schlüsselrolle im Konflikt um die staatlichen Waldflächen und in der Mobilisierung von Bauern und Bäuerinnen einnahm. Der Artikel argumentiert, dass Führung im Kampf um staatliche Waldflächen in post-Suharto Java in einem Zusammenspiel zwischen einer javanischen Vorstellung von Macht und Autorität und administrativer Autorität eingebettet ist. Aufgrund von politischen und institutionellen Reformen konnten neue Bezugsquellen von Autorität aktiviert werden, während keine wirklichen Veränderungen in den Machtverhältnissen innerhalb des Dorfes sowie zwischen SFC und den DorfbewohnerInnen zustande kommen

Contested values and climate change mitigation in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Climate change mitigation pilot projects (REDD+ - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) affect and interact with the local population in Central Kalimantan and many other parts of Indonesia. Rather than being politically and economically neutral activities, climate change mitigation projects tend to objectify the value of carbon, land and labour, contributing to a process of commodification of nature and social relations. In this specific case study, a set of values - equality and autonomy - central to the Ngaju people, the indigenous population in Central Kalimantan, become contested in the course of the climate change mitigation project. These central values are produced in everyday activities that include mobility and the productive base - subsistence and market-based production - among the Ngaju people. On the other hand, the climate change mitigation project-related environmental practices and actions produce values that point to individual (material) benefit and stratification of the society. The aim of the paper is to draw attention to and create understanding of value production and related tensions in the efforts to 'fix' environmental degradation problems through the climate change mitigation pilot project in Central Kalimantan.Peer reviewe

Sovereignty and Violence: Contested forest landscapes in Central Java

The article explores the ongoing dispute connected with land rights in the district of Wonosobo, Central Java, within the framework of state formation and sovereignty. It is argued that in many places in Indonesia and Central Java, local landscapes have become sites of violent struggles for sovereignty more broadly. An analytical distinction between modern and traditional forms of power is made and ethnographically explored, but it is argued that, rather than being separate entities, both forms become conflated in the struggle for sovereignty in various spheres, creating hybrid forms of power. Keywords: dispute, forest landscape, Java, power, sovereignty, state, violenc

Erasing memories and commodifying futures within the Central Kalimantan landscape

Peer reviewe

Introduction: Frontier Making Through Territorial Processes. Qualities and Possibilities of Life

In recent years, the concept of ‘frontier’ has become an important analytical device to discuss resource-making in connection with state formation, procurement of labour, environmental destruction, transformation of landscapes, and climate change. Current rapidly shifting frontier situations suggest that the frontier becomes a useful concept in connection with territorialization, since frontiers, as open or liminal areas, give rise to efforts to map, regulate, expand, and extract in them. We propose that frontiers are spatial, temporal, and relational situations that involve territorial processes that qualify landscapes and relations between humans and other beings, such as plants, animals, and so forth. In this special issue, the authors focus on different aspects and qualities of frontier making, namely questions about territorialization, the spatio-temporal dynamics of frontiers, and the possibilities of life under frontier conditions in the Indonesian Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Finnish Lapland, and the Brazilian Amazon. In all these areas, large-scale resource extraction and struggle over different tenure regimes are on-going. The various cases show that natural resources are not generic, they are specific natural elements that are revalued as commodities and resources that can be extracted in frontier situations. The articles of this special issue show that these nature elements, beings, and lives bear a great significance on different ways frontier dynamics and territorializing processes unfold in specific locations. The papers argue that these transformative processes lend specific qualities to socionatural relationships and limits to possibilities of life.Non peer reviewe

Palm oil expansion in tropical peatland : Distrust between advocacy and service environmental NGOs

Tropical peatland suffers from rapid degradation due to expansion of palm oil plantations. In Indonesia, Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs) have an important role in peatland protection. This paper discusses the implications of responsibilization in the relation between advocacy and service ENGOs in the context of tropical peatland protection and the expansion of palm oil in Sumatra, Indonesia. Drawing on the scholarly discussion on responsibilization in environmental management we show that responsibilization in peatland protection increases distrust among the ENGOs by generating a diversity of actors with different material support, burdens and principles of work, and even polarized opposition between the networks. Such distrust has a bearing on the effect of the actions, networks, and material support of advocacy and service ENGOs. Advocacy ENGOs share similar interests with their donors, which allow them to perform their expected actions autonomously, while service ENGOs are more dependent on donors' programmes and aims. The research utilized methods such as face-to-face semi-structured interviews with advocacy and service ENGOs, state and non-state actors, palm oil farmers, palm oil associations and three leaders of local communities, combined with participant observation. We argue that responsibilization should be explored case by case because different responsibilization processes lead to differing burdens among different types of ENGOs. Contrary to expectations, responsibilization in peatland protection may thus decrease the possibilities for peatland protection in the area.Peer reviewe

Kansalaisyhteiskunnan muodostuminen Indonesiassa

Peer reviewe

Jatkuvuus ja muutos Keski-Kalimantanilla : Ilmastonmuutos, luonnon rahallistaminen, ja sen vaikutus arvo orientaatioihin

Peer reviewe

Remaking of wetlands and coping with vulnerabilities in Mexico and Indonesia

This article analyses people’s water-land relations in transformed wetlands through a lens that conceptualises aquatic and terrestrial aspects in wetland-dwellers’ living spaces as blurred and shifting. By drawing on empirical research in Tabasco, Mexico, and Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, we examine how wetlands have been recurrently remade amidst multifaceted development interventions and how local people perceive and experience waterscape changes in their lives and livelihoods. There has been a strong emphasis on wetness and fluidity in research on riverine, deltaic, and other amphibious environments; however, we argue that privileging water as an analytical concept makes it hard to understand changing water-land fluctuations in wetlands as wet-lands. By combining ideas from political ecology, critical geography, and anthropology of water, our analysis shows how local people engage in making watery areas more solid in order to get their land rights recognised and to cope with socially differentiated vulnerabilities within multifaceted state territorialisations and corporate resource-making