Growing Trees, Losing Land: Power, Accountability, and Local Resistance to Land Commodification in Aceh, Indonesia

Abstract

Several global and national initiatives link tree-growing and ecosystem restoration with land tenure reforms to strengthen local rights and promote sustainable land use. Policymakers implement agrarian reforms with tree-growing programs in forest areas to encourage reforestation, promote rural livelihoods, and reduce conflict. Key objectives include improving the management and protection of natural resources and reducing poverty. However, when these two policy approaches intersect in practice, their outcomes often become complex, contradictory, and varied, an intersection that remains insufficiently understood. This raises a central puzzle: what happens when these two policy approaches occur together? How do these intersecting initiatives shape land management, socioeconomic, and environmental outcomes in contexts of overlapping tenure and legal pluralism? And why do similar policy interventions produce such divergent outcomes? To consider these questions, this thesis investigates how land formalisation and tree-growing approaches shape land management and socioeconomic and environmental outcomes in Indonesia, where state-backed tree-growing initiatives and agrarian reform (Tanah Objek Reforma Agraria/TORA) programs coincide. The thesis considers the case of Aceh, Indonesia, where overlapping tenure, legal pluralism, and elite-favoured resource control occur together. Methodologically, this study adopts a qualitative case study approach, utilising ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews to explore the processes and dynamics shaping outcomes in landscapes with broadly similar contextual and structural conditions. The literature suggests that secure land and tree tenure, reliable markets, sensitivity to local land-use histories, inclusive participation, supportive socioeconomic contexts, and coherent governance frameworks with appropriate incentives and institutions enable successful smallholder tree-growing. While this thesis concurs with these findings, it shows that when tree-growing and land formalisation occur within contexts of overlapping tenure, legal pluralism, and elite-favoured resource control, they can generate widely divergent outcomes depending on local governance capacities and relational dynamics. In such settings, tree-growing initiatives can morph into forms of land grabbing. This occurs where investors and brokers can exploit and consolidate control over land. Conversely, in other cases, strong communities mobilise customary institutions, historical memories, moral frameworks and effective leadership to defend alternative (adat) land regimes and enforce accountability. In these circumstances, communities uphold communal norms and protect equitable land relations, curbing the excesses of land commodification. Where collusive networks of elites, brokers, and officials weaken accountability, the same reforms facilitate land commodification and the erosion of communal rights. This divergence reflects an underlying tension between commodification and resistance, or in Karl Polanyi's framework, disembedding liberalising forces and countermovements to the 'disembedding' of land tenure from customary systems. Hence, the thesis demonstrates that land governance outcomes emerge as relational processes shaped by accountability and power influence policy intentions and shape implementation pathways. This study enriches the understanding of how tree-growing and land formalisation programs unfold amid overlapping tenure, legal pluralism, and elite-favoured resource control. It shows how elite and brokerage networks adapt to state-led reforms to turn them into opportunities for accumulation; why similar policies produce divergent outcomes through the mediating roles of relational power, social cohesion, and accountability; how communities draw on customary authority to resist commodification; and how the strength of adat governance lies less in legal recognition than in its adaptability within evolving power rela Show more