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Abstract
Rural development advocates are increasingly favouring policies that recognise community land rights in Indonesia, suggesting that recognition will protect forests and support livelihoods. In this article, we examine the effects of recognition by asking who benefits, and to what extent recognition impacts on livelihoods. Our case study focuses on an iconic site, the Kajang community of South Sulawesi, because advocates often point to that community as a model case. Based on over three years of field research on tenure and conflict among the Kajang, we highlight the discrepancy between the effects of recognition and existing livelihood realities. We show that communal territory in Kajang is a site of contestation, entangled in conflict over who can claim cultivation rights. We thus argue that representation of Kajang as harmonious forest communities governed by communal tenure is misleading. As advocates continue to promote similar policies elsewhere, we show that this kind of misrepresentation serves to further obscure the lingering land insecurity of rural Indonesians.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge with thanks the funding assistance provided by Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions (ATM) towards the production of this special double issue.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 CIFOR (Citation2015) convened a discussion between government and activist leaders that particularly influenced the thinking of those advocating for indigenous community land rights. It was argued in the discussion that plantations are proven to provide limited benefits to local communities, and that recognition keeps authority local, thus providing more secure livelihoods.
2 The Kajang refers to the adat community; the Ammatoa refers to the spiritual and cultural leader. For more detailed insight into the Kajang see Samsul Maarif (Citation2012) and Martin Rössler (Citation1990).
3 Kajang became a strategic site and the first community for recognition due to various factors, including support from external actors, the associated history of a plantation conflict, and a mapping process that highlighted a widespread area that recognised the title on a small sacred forest. For a more detailed description, see Fisher (Citation2019).
4 See, for instance, Wahyu Chandra's (Citation2015) description of the Kajang case, in which a regional official stated that [translated from the original Indonesian] ‘this local regulation can be followed as an example for other local governments that have indigenous communities living in their regions’.
5 See, for example, the excerpt from FAO's Voluntary Guidelines in the leading quote to this article.
6 From a 2016 speech by former AMAN Secretary General Abdon Nababan.
7 The five main commodities at the time of field research were rice, corn, cloves, rubber and black pepper
8 Pasang literally means ‘message’ and constitutes an oral tradition that incorporates guidelines passed down through the generations.
9 Those who consider themselves Kajang are not limited to the jurisdictional boundaries of the Kajang subdistrict but also include people living in neighbouring subdistricts.
10 Over 65 per cent of Indonesia’s land territory is under the authority of the Forestry Ministry and categorised as state forest. The ministry set this land aside for conservation and development purposes. Activist groups refer to the designation of a state forest as a process that has marginalised indigenous communities and taken away their ancestral and livelihood rights to these lands.
11 In 2014, the Ministry of Forestry was changed to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, combining two ministries. The MoEF claims authority over 65 per cent or 126 million hectares of Indonesia’s territorial area.
12 This is either in the form of a district regulation (peraturan daerah) or district head decree (surat keputusan bupati), according to Ministerial Regulation 32/2015 of the Forestry Ministry on private rights forest (hutan hak). This regulation provides the procedural steps to be taken for adat forests to be designated and released from the state domain. Article 6 provides that masyarakat hukum adat or hak ulayat must be recognised by regional government (produk hukum daerah).
13 CIFOR helped to implement a joint fact-finding approach to provide the data to legitimise recognition and AMAN also provided legal support to translate MK35 into local policy.
14 The regulation did not, however, make any mention of how land rights would change with the recognition of areas of Kajang cultural influence.
15 Fisher, interview with Buyung Saputra, 24 November 2016.
16 However, even the expanse of sacred forest in the past had ‘zoned’ uses. See M. Asar Mahbub (Citation2013) for the various forest classifications around the sacred forest.
17 See, also, Workman (Citation2015) and Fisher (Citation2019)—both describe how the forest rangers work together with the Ammatoa as a co-management system in Kajang.
18 See Fisher (Citation2019) for details about the role of rice in Kajang
19 All rice lands described herein are sawah, or irrigated wet-rice cultivation. Traditional varieties are also grown on sawah.
20 Also see Tania Li (Citation2014) and Hall, Hirsch, and Li (Citation2011) who use the terms ‘capitalist relations’ and ‘intimate exclusion’ to describe the crop booms that result in processes of dispossession amongst kin on indigenous frontiers.
21 See Davidson and Henley’s (Citation2007) discussion on the deployment of adat by movements for recognition.