Politics, power and participation : a political economy of oil palm in the Sanggau District of West Kalimantan

Abstract

Participation is commonly accepted to be a process that brings stakeholders together to define critical issues, develop common goals, and create mutually beneficial outcomes. In the fields of development and natural resource management, participation is such a widely accepted part of policy that it is rare to find a project that does not exhort the critical need for participation and stakeholder engagement. Indeed, the unanimity for greater participation has reached such a level that it is now underpinned by its own particular development discourse. There are however two broad approaches to considering participation: one that automatically promotes participation across its many diverse interpretations; and another approach that is more reflexive, which urges a greater awareness of issues such as context, representation and power when evaluating participation's purported benefits. This second more critical approach towards participation has evolved due to the growing realisation that participation is often problematic both in its practical implementation where there is a significant power disparity between stakeholders, and in terms of the assumptions underpinning participation in much of the relevant academic literature. Despite the considerable orthodoxy advocating greater participation and stakeholder engagement in development, the political processes and power relations underpinning such engagement are rarely analysed in detail. This is particularly the case with oil palm plantations in Indonesia, where the focus has been on the environmental effects of plantations, and minimal research has appraised how plantation expansion affects the plantation-smallholder relationship. Given the prevalence of participative terms such as sosialisasi (awareness-raising) and kemitraan (partnership) throughout both Indonesian plantation legislation and in plantation company documents, the thesis examines how smallholders engage with oil palm plantations in West Kalimantan and how such engagement relates to the broader theoretical critiques of participation. It undertakes a detailed political economy analysis of how institutional arrangements and political processes affect plantation-smallholder participation in the Sanggau district of West Kalimantan. The use of a power relations analysis enables a move beyond a conventional narrative of participation and investigates how power manifests between a plantation and its smallholders. The multi-voiced qualitative research approach creates a more sophisticated understanding of how the politico-legal-economic environment affects plantation-smallholder engagement. After introducing the research topic and method, the thesis details how national and district legislation favours plantation development. Plantation legislation is one of a series of critical institutional arrangements that underpin the development of a particular national development orthodoxy in which plantations are seen as the only practical way to increase rural development in many of the frontier oil palm areas of Indonesia. Such an orthodoxy keeps particular issues and alternative livelihood approaches away from consideration through the operation of institutional practices that reaffirm existing oil palm structures and policies. By keeping the political economy and power-related discussions to a minimum, these arrangements and practices largely determine the modes of engagement between smallholders and plantations. The cross-case comparison of three plantation case studies provide further insight into the critical differences between plantation-smallholder outcomes at the Sanggau plantations, and enable the development of a series of key research propositions that account for such differences. The key research propositions include: that plantation land ratios between the company plantation and the adjoining smallholder plantation are reflective of the broader relationship; that poverty as a form of structural disempowerment perpetuates power imbalances between plantations and smallholders; and that the extent of incorporation of adat (local customary traditions) into plantation-smallholder engagement processes often indicates how a plantation and its smallholders interact. The thesis finds that oil palm plantations in Indonesia are framed discursively as an answer to relative poverty whilst serving to structurally entrench plantation benefits disproportionately towards particular district actors. It concludes that the structural and informal modes of participation between a plantation and its smallholders reinforce power imbalances and limit the transformative potential of participation for smallholders, and finds ultimately that although many thousands of smallholders have benefitted from oil palm plantation, plantation-smallholder engagement remains overwhelmingly nominal in nature.