Environmental justice and the political economy of land conflict resolution in Indonesian forestry and palm oil

Abstract

In Indonesia, the boom in the oil palm and timber plantation sectors has generated substantial land conflict. Despite recent reforms to resource governance, mechanisms to resolve land conflicts comprehensively, decisively and fairly remain ineffective. Environmental justice and political ecology studies have largely focused on understanding the nature and political economic causes of these conflicts, while giving less attention to how conflicts might be resolved. Few studies have systematically assessed the extent to which land conflict resolution initiatives deliver just outcomes to affected communities and the role of cross-scale political, institutional and power dynamics in shaping the processes and outcomes.

This thesis examines to what degree conflict resolution initiatives ameliorate problems of distributional justice, procedural justice and recognition experienced by communities. Further, it investigates how community actors frame and pursue their claims for achieving justice, and to what effect. Last, the study explores how politics, institutions and power relations working across scale shape land conflict and environmental justice outcomes.

Based on extensive ethnographic, multi-sited, integrated and comparative investigations of three cases of 'successful' conflict resolution in West Kalimantan, Jambi and Riau, the thesis advances three arguments. First, although land conflict resolution initiatives remain productive in specific ways, 'successful' land conflict resolution has only conditionally provided distributional justice and recognition for local landowners. Conflict resolution and environmental justice objectives were not necessarily mutually reinforcing. Second, although conflict mediation improved procedural justice for the affected communities, the multiple embeddedness of land issues in different layers of social organisations and institutions, the tendency of mediation to render complex political economic problems 'technical', and significant power imbalances between corporate and community actors limit the achievement of recognition and distributional justice outcomes. In these Indonesian cases, formal processes of land dispute resolution tended to reinforce, rather than to ameliorate, pre-existing problems of misrecognition and inequality.

The thesis concludes that unless effective mobilisation and legal reform can provide legal and political empowerment, political, institutional and structural barriers will continue to generate truncated agreements in conflict negotiations, potentially cementing the exclusion of local smallholders from effective access and land control. This reveals a paradox: while land conflict resolution ostensibly aims to address the conflicts identified and raised by aggrieved landowners, these initiatives more often produce technical 'fixes' that avoid full engagement with complex political economic problems. As a result, the roots of conflicts remain only partially addressed, raising the danger that such resource conflicts will recur. Show more