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Abstract
Swidden has historically been one of the most widespread land uses in upland Southeast Asia. In recent decades, swidden systems across the region have undergone rapid transformation. While most analyses focus on swidden as a livelihood practice, we direct attention to the political nature of swidden. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork and household surveys from two villages in East Kalimantan Province, Indonesia, we examine the politics of swidden along two key dimensions. First, at the household level, we describe swidden as a land control strategy. We identify territorialization and speculation as drivers of ‘contentious land change’ in swidden systems under pressure from expanding plantations and mines. Second, at the village and district levels, we examine the politics of swidden within new forest governance arrangements. Control of swidden has provided a focus for multi-stakeholder forest governance, but with ambivalent effects, developing village land management and livelihoods at a cost of temporary increases in swidden clearing and with minimal impact on deforestation for industrial land uses. Our analysis suggests forest governance efforts will be ineffective in eliminating contentious land change or reducing district-level deforestation until they address plantation and mining expansion as the dominant direct and indirect drivers of forest conversion.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the inhabitants of Long Kelay and Gunung Madu, the partners who supported implementation of CIFOR surveys, and the staff of TNC-Indonesia. The first author thanks Zachary Anderson for collaboration on fieldwork in East Kalimantan. We are grateful to Carol Colfer, Christine Padoch, William Sunderlin, Kai Thaler and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, and to Eka Rianta for assistance with the map. The authors assume responsibility for any remaining errors. An earlier version of this contribution was presented at the conference ‘Land grabbing, conflict and agrarian-environmental transformations: perspectives from East and Southeast Asia’ in June 2015.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The Indonesian word ‘ladang’ is widely used and understood, while terms for swidden plots in local dialects differ.
2 A classic description of an upland rice swidden system is Conklin’s (Citation1957) work on Hanunóo agriculture in the Philippines. Descriptions of swidden systems in eastern Indonesian Borneo include Inoue and Lahjie (Citation1990), Jessup (Citation1991), Colfer and Dudley (Citation1993), and Colfer (Citation2008).
3 ‘Dayak’ and ‘Punan’ are generic terms for indigenous agriculturalist and hunter-gatherer groups, respectively, and encompass a variety of different ethnicities of indigenous Christian or animist people, though distinct from the Muslim Kutai and Malay populations (C.J.P. Colfer pers. comm., Dounias et al. Citation2007). Settled Punan may also refer to themselves as ‘Dayak Punan’, and we refer in this paper to all settled, upland, predominantly Christian or animist indigenous groups as ‘Dayak’.
4 In late 2014, the Ministry of Forestry merged with the Ministry of Environment to form the new Ministry of Environment and Forestry.
5 While contentious land change in swidden systems has received little attention, much has been written elsewhere on the relationship between insecure land tenure and deforestation. See for example Deacon (Citation1994), Alston, Libecap, and Mueller (Citation1999), Geist and Lambin (Citation2002) and Margulis (Citation2004).
6 Unless otherwise cited, details in this section on Long Kelay come from the first author’s field notes, April 2015.
7 Unless otherwise cited, details in this section on Gunung Madu come from the first author’s field notes, March 2015.
8 This sum is not insignificant, considering the national poverty line is set at just over IDR 300,000/person/month.
9 In Gunung Madu, speculation is evident through the location of swidden clearing, not the total amount of clearing by a household. Households are still clearing and planting plots of roughly 1 ha, but in some cases they are siting these plots strategically based in part on possible future compensation. Household resources for clearing and planting to establish land claims are limited, so runaway speculation involving larger scale clearing has not been observed.
10 Dove (Citation1993) points out that rubber may not actually be understood as an ‘alternative’ to rice, since there remains in many Dayak communities a strong cultural emphasis on rice cultivation and the subsistence sector.
11 A similar shift to rubber occurred in Long Kelay, where the percentage of households planting rubber in new clearings went from 0 to 35 percent. Planting in new clearings is only indicative of larger land use shifts towards rubber, as these statistics do not reflect the planting of rubber in plots previously devoted to other crops.
12 Reserve land in principle would be set aside for management by future generations.
13 New clearings usually average about 1 ha in size, but not every household clears land every year, explaining the average annual clearing of less than 1 ha/household. Clearing in 2014 may have been higher than in 2013, given incentives for rubber production. If all 39 households estimated to have cleared forest in 2012–2014 cleared new ladang in 2014 specifically, then a lower bound for the proportion of contentious clearing would be 4 out of 39 ha, or 10 percent.
14 The Gunung Madu hutan desa petition was facilitated by TNC, who led the participatory mapping process with the community and liaised with government bureaucracy. For more on hutan desa, see Akiefnawati et al. (Citation2010).
15 The development of ‘collaborative forest management’ between communities and timber companies in Berau came in the early 2000s and was also supported by TNC. It marks an important chapter in the development of forest governance in the district, but space constraints preclude more detailed discussion here.
16 This statement entirely neglects the cultural value of swidden, a point we owe to Carol Colfer. For more on the cultural value of swidden, see Colfer (Citation2008), Dove (Citation1993, Citation1998) and Gönner (Citation2000).
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Notes on contributors
Gregory M. Thaler
Gregory M. Thaler is a PhD candidate in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He researches tropical forest governance in Brazil and Indonesia and the role of transnational environmental NGOs in environmental politics. In 2014–2015 he was an affiliated researcher with the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.
Cut Augusta Mindry Anandi
Cut Augusta Mindry Anandi is a coordinator for sustainable land use planning at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) LESTARI project in Indonesia. She works on landscape approaches for sustainable land use through zoning, spatial planning, strategic environmental assessment, and licensing tools at the sub-national level in three key landscapes in Indonesia: Aceh, Central Kalimantan and Papua. In 2012–2016 she was a research officer and field research supervisor at the Center for International Forestry Research working on REDD+ projects in Aceh and East Kalimantan and smallholder oil palm certification in Riau, Sumatra. Email: [email protected]
