Indonesia Update Series. Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2016. xxii, 382 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$29.90, paper. ISBN 978-981-4762-08-3.
Who currently controls land in Indonesia, and who should control it? These are the two questions at the heart of this informative edited volume. Struggles over land are ubiquitous, as the 55 percent of the population who still gain their livelihoods from agriculture compete for space with forest reserves, extractive industries, expanding oil palm plantations, burgeoning infrastructure, and peri-urban sprawl. The constitution imagines a wise and benevolent state that holds sovereignty over land and manages it for the maximum benefit of “the people.” The 1960 Basic Agrarian Law declares that land has a “social function,” and is to be used to secure the wellbeing of disadvantaged sectors of society. Tragically, neither the Suharto regime nor its successors have been committed to these principles. A massive reverse land reform continues to appropriate land from “the people” and allocate it to the cabals of profit-seeking politicians, bureaucrats, and financiers who dominate in the fields of timber extraction, mining, plantations, and urban development.
Decades after independence, Indonesia still does not have a national framework for governing land in a just manner. Sectoral departments such as forestry and mining compete for territorial jurisdiction, and 68 percent of Indonesia’s land mass is reported to be under concession to timber, plantation, and mining corporations. Administrative decentralization and direct elections have spurred claims to “peoples’ sovereignty” at multiple spatial scales. Outside Java, these claims are often linked to ethnic territories and “customary communities,” while in some of Java’s city neighbourhoods, the urban poor also assert the right to rule in their own domain. Each of these spatially referenced “sovereigns” has a different plan linked to the particular set of benefits that land affords them as a homeland, as an economic resource, as a site of revenue generation or speculation, as a place to grow food, or a place to build a house and access services. The result of these competing sovereignties is not a benign pluralism but a patterned process of inclusion and exclusion of which the constant is that poor and relatively powerless people lose out.
The volume, edited by John McCarthy and Kathryn Robinson, offers powerful and richly textured insights on this complex terrain. The chapters are of uniformly high quality, which is especially admirable given the very rapid turnaround between the 2015 Indonesia update conference at the Australian National University where they were presented, and the 2016 publication. Chapters are written by noted experts, and strike a balance between overview and update. The result is a landmark volume that is both “of the moment,” and destined to stand the test of time.
An overview by the editors sets the scene with a discussion of notions of sovereignty and the challenges presented by competing land uses and unequal powers. It reviews the sorry history of stalled land reform, the unresolved question of customary rights, and the tangled thicket of land law, in which scores of overlapping and contradictory regulations make land transactions expensive and insecure. It also notes the dynamic processes that are changing peoples’ relations to land across the archipelago: land grabbing for plantations, population growth, migration, and the rise of global agendas stressing sustainability, climate change, human rights, and “corporate social responsibility.”
One cluster of papers foregrounds the dynamic processes and powers that shape the actual control of land in various settings. A chapter by Nancy Peluso on “the plantation and the mine” shows how crop booms and a gold rush, combined with the violent eviction of rural Indonesians of Chinese descent and a state-manipulated discourse of customary rights, configured land control in parts of West Kalimantan. Laksmi Savitri and Susanna Price show the very limited effectiveness of new regulations designed to protect the land rights of indigenous Papuans who must negotiate with large plantation corporations on vastly unequal terms. Afrizal and Patrick Anderson also note the disproportionate power of plantation corporations, but see some potential in global and industry standards for informed consent. Studies by Suraya Affif on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), and Kathryn Robinson on mining, show how (some) local actors have been able to make effective use of global discourses (around climate change, and responsible mining) to advance their interests. For Lesley Potter, state policies that favour corporations are somewhat balanced by the determination of smallholders to enter the lucrative oil palm sector; the dynamic in this case is furnished by migrants, both state-backed and spontaneous, who flock to frontier areas to buy up land at low prices, squeezing the original landholders onto ever smaller pockets of land.
A second cluster of chapters foreground schemes for state-backed land regulation, their promises and pitfalls. Modes of regulation include allocation, mapping, planning, zoning, taxing, licensing, and attempts to formalize existing customary arrangements. Pierre van der Eng takes a long historical view of colonial land law and official attempts to map and tax land. Adriaan Bedner outlines the main contours of Indonesia’s land law since independence, with a focus on the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, the New Order Forest Law, and the struggle for recognition of customary land rights that gathered pace in the post-Suharto period of reform. Chip Fay and Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee examine emerging options for the recognition of the land rights of indigenous communities. Jeff Neilson addresses the long-stalled process of land reform, and the different interests it could potentially serve. Aprilia Ambarwati et al. explain why distributive land reform based on the principle of “social efficiency” is still needed in rural Java, where the great majority of people who work in agriculture own little or no land. Delik Hudalah et al. and Jamie Davidson explore the inordinately complex procedures required to release land for the construction of urban housing and infrastructure, noting the unfair terms of compensation.
None of the writers expect that improvements to the regulatory regime will solve Indonesia’s land problem once and for all. A striking chapter by Patrick Guiness on Yogyakarta’s low-income city wards makes the counter-argument. He finds that urban residents already have an effective customary regime for regulating land access, complete with mechanisms to make investments in infrastructure and enforce community standards for managing common areas. He notes that top-down attempts to formalize rights tend to work against the interests of the poor. As several chapters point out, two-thirds of Indonesia’s rural and urban land parcels are not formally titled, hence informal or “customary” regimes are not limited to self-identified “indigenous people.” They are the operational basis for land control for much of the population. Taken as a whole, this is the dilemma that stands out most clearly from the book: terms like security, legal certainty, and recognition are very appealing, but strengthening the land rights of one set of actors usually means undermining the position of another set of actors (for example, migrants, women, landless people). The alternative approach to land regulation—based on flexibility, adaptation, and discretion, and building step-wise on existing informal practices—also sounds appealing, but it too has pitfalls: it exposes landholders to predation by officials who exercise these discretionary powers. Ironically, it is most often state-sponsored programs that promise to bring progress and development to “the people” that end up robbing ordinary people of access to land.
Tania Murray Li
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
pp. 630-632