Impediments to Establishing Adat Villages: A Socio-Legal Examination of the Indonesian Village Law

Abstract

As adat revivalism has begun to influence regulatory, legal and administrative outcomes in Indonesia, adat (tradition or custom) has also found a place in one of the largest policy reforms reshaping Indonesia’s local governance systems: the Village Law. The 2014 Village Law includes a specific mechanism for villages to be recognised as ‘adat villages’. However, five years after promulgating this law, no adat villages have yet been completely established. In this article I take a socio-legal approach to examine the challenges of adat village establishment. A case study in South Kalimantan illustrates how the district government utilised the flaws in the legislation to undermine a customary community’s demand for recognition and to justify the stagnation of adat village establishment in their area. In a broader context, adat recognition through the 2014 Village Law tends to incorporate adat into the existing administrative village, instead of empowering the adat communities.

Keywords:

• Village law
• Local Governance
• Adat Village
• Decentralisation
• Adat Recognition
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges with thanks the funding assistance provided by Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions (ATM) towards the production of this special double issue.

Notes

1 Adat means ‘tradition’ or ‘custom’ (kebiasaan—Bahasa Indonesia). Adat is a concept loaded with various meanings. In this article, the term adat is used to contextualise political resurgence (adat revivalism), indigenous community (adat community) and traditional village (adat village).

2 To avoid confusion, this article uses ‘ordinary village’ interchangeably with ‘administrative village’ to refer to ‘village’ (desa) in contrast to ‘adat village’ (desa adat).

3 Legislation related to the recognition of adat communities and/or their rights includes the Basic Agrarian Law (No. 5/1960), the Forestry Law (No. 41/1999), the Law regarding Management of Coastal and Small Islands (No. 27/2007), and the Law regarding Environment Protection and Management (No. 32/2009).

4 In Siak District, eight adat villages are recognised under District Regulation (Perda Kabupaten) No. 2 of 2015, while in Rokan Hulu, 89 adat villages are regulated under District Regulation No. 1 of 2015. In Jayapura, the recognition of 35 adat villages did not come from a district regulation as mandated by the Village Law, but from The Decision of District Head of Jayapura No. 320 of 2014.

5 In 2016, the government granted 1.14 billion IDR (113,375.62 AUD) for each village. In 2017, the funds increased to 1.3 billion IDR (129,287.99 AUD) on average for each village per year (Ministry of Finance 2017).

6 On 2 April 2019, Provincial Regulation No. 5/ 2019 concerning Desa Adat was enacted in Bali. Instead of following the pathway provided by the national law, this provincial regulation persisted to maintain the duality of ‘administrative’ village and adat village.

7 Infrastructure that facilitates wireless communication between devices—mostly cell phones and the network providers.

Additional information

Funding

Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions (ATM) provided funding for language editing for the papers in this special double issue.