Timber plantations in Indonesia: approaching the predicaments of a modern utopia

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dc.contributor.authorBubandt, Nilsen_AU
dc.date.accessioned2003-11-17en_US
dc.date.accessioned2004-05-19T18:23:27Zen_US
dc.date.accessioned2011-01-05T08:54:18Z
dc.date.available2004-05-19T18:23:27Zen_US
dc.date.available2011-01-05T08:54:18Z
dc.date.created1998en_AU
dc.description.abstractThe plantation is, I believe, an excellent prism for looking at the politics of society. Because the plantation is about the administration of a community, I feel it gives me an opportunity to look at the specific and often highly exotic workings of government bureaucracy in Indonesia as well as its way of implementing ‘development’, a key term in Indonesia politics, on the one hand, while continuing my interest in the local conditions of life in Halmahera, on the other. In the plantation one gets a digestible serving of the national and the global cooked to the specifications of a local cuisine. The suggestion I would like to make here is, quite simply, that the plantation as a form of social organisation is uniquely modern. I see the plantation as a model for administrative, bureaucratic modernity. With apologies to Philip and a recent British movie, I think that in the plantation one can see modernity ‘go the full monty’. It is a place where the dreams and hopes for a particular kind of society have been able to evolve. The plantation expresses the utopian ideas inherent in modernity and may be seen as a concerted institutional attempt to implement these ideas. The utopia, however, always recedes as the implementation proceeds because ‘something’ seems to transform the process of ordering into disorder at another level. With examples from the plantation in Halmahera, I will describe the forever frustrated and unfinished process of ordering in modern institutions. By looking at the plantation ‘from below’, from the perspective of those managed by the institution - in the case of the timber estate, transmigrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds - one can see that the attempts of social ordering continuously fail because the transmigrants navigate the rules and structures according to a multifaceted array of cultural strategies aimed at optimising their own livelihood on the estate according their varied perception of ‘the good life’. In order to highlight the plantation as a modern utopia, I will concentrate my talk on one kind of Indonesian timber estate in which the utopian ideas are most clearly expressed, namely the so-called HTITrans (integrated timber estates). There are roughly 200 timber plantations in Indonesia today, by far most which are located in the Outer Islands. When they are built to their full extension, they will cover well over 7 million hectares (70,000 square kilometres, almost twice the size of Denmark). The process of converting forest into plantations continues at a rate of about 400,000 hectares a year. To date about 2 million hectares have already been established, not a mean feat considering that the plantation effort in the form of HTIs only began in earnest in 1990. In that same year (1990), the total area of plantations in the world was estimated at 135 million hectares, 90 % of which are timber plantations for industrial use. Like those in Indonesia, the timber estates of the rest of the world supply the wood industry, predominantly the paper and pulp industry as well as plywood factories and the sawn wood industry. Indonesian plantations may account for only a small proportion of the global plantation area, but the pace of plantation build-up in Indonesia is one of the highest in the world.en_AU
dc.format.extent101823 bytesen_AU
dc.format.extent354 bytesen_AU
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen_AU
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1885/41849
dc.language.isoen_AUen_AU
dc.publisherCanberra, ACT: Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (RMAP), Division of Pacific and Asian History, Research School for Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National Universityen_AU
dc.relation.ispartofseriesResource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (RMAP) Working Paper: No. 15en_AU
dc.rightsAuthor/s retain copyrighten_AU
dc.source.urihttp://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/68341en_AU
dc.subjecttimber plantationsen_AU
dc.subjectIndonesiaen_AU
dc.subjectgovernmenten_AU
dc.subjectmodern utopiaen_AU
dc.subjectHTI-Transen_AU
dc.subjectintegrated timber estatesen_AU
dc.subjecttotal institutionen_AU
dc.subjectheterotopiaen_AU
dc.subjectwork schedulesen_AU
dc.subjecttransmigrationen_AU
dc.subjectorganisational structuresen_AU
dc.subjectsocial inertiaen_AU
dc.subjectestate managementen_AU
dc.titleTimber plantations in Indonesia: approaching the predicaments of a modern utopiaen_AU
dc.typeWorking/Technical Paperen_AU
dcterms.accessRightsOpen Accessen_AU
local.contributor.affiliationResource Management in Asia-Pacific, (RMAP) Program, RSPASen_US
local.contributor.affiliationANUen_US
local.contributor.authoremailrepository.admin@anu.edu.auen_AU
local.description.refereednoen_US
local.identifier.citationmonthmaren_US
local.identifier.citationyear1998en_US
local.identifier.eprintid2262en_US
local.rights.ispublishednoen_US
local.type.statusPublished Versionen_AU

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