Sanders, AnnaPrasti Harianson, Rut DiniPascoe, SophieMulyani, Lilis2026-07-232026-07-232514-8486WOS:001746015200001ORCID:/0000-0001-5981-5640/work/221319465https://hdl.handle.net/1885/733813572Drawing boundaries around land and forest involves diverse actors, technologies, and claims. Legal tools and territorial strategies function to control access, regulate movement, enable land investment, assert ownership, maintain customary relationships, and manage conflicts. In three ethnographic stories from Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, involving state forestry officials, plantation companies, and local communities, we conceptualise boundary making as an active and relational process mediating what type of land and resource use is sanctioned, whose knowledge and claims are recognised, and who benefits and bears the consequences of multiple and interacting forms of intervention. The concepts of friction and palimpsest provide a nuanced framework for examining land disputes and relational injustices in processes of frontier transformation. We argue that boundary making is an entry point for attending to forms of authority, exclusion, resistance and continuing negotiation of relationships, and relational injustices that are latent and less visible on the surface of interactions.We are grateful and indebted to the people of Kapuas for sharing their stories and lives with us and give thanks and honour the memory of Pak Dehen. The first and second authors were responsible for all fieldwork in Indonesia. The first author thanks her doctoral research supervisors for their guidance and support. The Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) provided funding under several grants: the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) [grant numbers QZA-10/0468, QZA-12/0882, QZA-16/0110], European Commission (EC) [grant number DCI-ENV/2011/269-520], United Kingdom Department for International Development (UKAID) [grant number TF069018], the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID, currently DFAT) [grant numbers 46167, 63560], and the CGIAR Research Programme on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP-FTA) [grant number TF No. 069018], with financial support from the donors contributing to the CGIAR Fund.24enPublisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).Boundariesenvironmental governanceIndonesialand claimsrelational justiceresource frontierstropical peatlands2026-04-2210.1177/25148486261442727105036504026