Noer Fauzi Rachman
24 September 2007
Project Summary
This study will examine the dynamic relationships between national agrarian policies and agrarian movements in post-Suharto Indonesia. Starting from the fall of the authoritarian regime in 1998, researcher will document the ways peasant organizations and its allies within the state and among civil society have changed agrarian policies, and will trace each policy, their background, and the ways the policies had been produced. Researcher will focus to reconstruct the institutional policy history of the National Land Agency (NLA), and then locate its new land reform policy as emerging arenas of contestation and negotiation that shape the working strategies of agrarian movements.
Using the tools of critical ethnography, researcher will follow the multiple and interconnected sites struggles in various scales, within and outside of land reform policy-making processes, including a pilot project of the land reform policy implementation. Supplemental descriptive quantitative data will be collected to profile the targeted lands, characteristics of land reform beneficiaries, and their livelihood condition. Combined with qualitative data on geographical history of their access to the targeted land, the research will be able to demonstrate whether or not the policy implementation have improved landless and poor peasant’s access to land.
The intellectual merit of this proposed research lies in its relevance to (a) deepen the literature on how social movement works to influence government policy, and how the shifts in government policy provide a space for social movement group and shape their working strategies; and (b) the ways in which peasantry have been politically redefined through the struggle over land. The resurgence of land reform in post-Suharto Indonesia provide an excellent case to understand the ways in which the relations between agrarian policies and agrarian movements have been shifted over time in relation one to another.
The broader impacts of this research lie in his position as critical scholar, activist, and educator mainly within the Indonesia agrarian movements and non-governmental organizations for more than fifteen years of experience in local and national levels. The research will enable him to have a better understanding about the ways in which the movements have seized opportunities to challenge the unequal agrarian structures, framed the agrarian problems, mobilized rural people, conducted collective actions, enlarged and maintained networks within the state and among civil society groups, and effectively intervened government agrarian policies and practices in order to improve landless and poor peasant’s access to land.
I. Project Description
Land reform has returned to Indonesian agrarian politics after a forty-year hiatus fraught with violence, tragedy, and unfinished business. In 1965 a massive state-led land redistribution program was cut short by a military coup and the installment of an authoritarian regime, the “New Order.” President Suharto, who came to power as a result of the coup, froze the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law and decried land reform as part of a communist-driven agenda. Subsequently, Western-oriented technocrats helped construct a national political economy built on large-scale development programs and state control of Indonesia’s many resources — at the core of this agenda was the zoning of more than seventy percent of the country’s land as a National Forest with limited access for villagers. For more than three decades, the bureaucracy and military kept the rural masses under strict political control while centralizing, extracting, and reaping profits from the nation’s rich resource base. State land control and development policies and practices further marginalized the rural poor and increased their numbers, mainly through land dispossession.
Susilo Bambang Yudoyono, the fourth president since the fall of Suharto in 1998, launched a new land reform policy on 31 January 2007. The government planned to redistribute:
- 8.15 million hectares of state land under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry (MoF), and
- 1.1 million hectares of the state land under the jurisdiction of the National Land Agency (NLA) over the next ten years until 2017. The policy has become a hotly debated issue among civil society groups and within the state.
Local peasant organizations that were already active in protesting land dispossession and demanding land rights perceive this as an opportunity to legalize their de facto control of occupied lands, and are urging the government to include them in the land reform processes. In contrast, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are split between those who are for andagainst the new policy. Those who criticize it have initiated a campaign about the dangers of “pseudo land reform” because of what they describe as its “elitist policy-making processes” and its “impossibility to radically change unequal land distribution.” Supporters say that even though this policy cannot be used to enact a radical change in highly unequal agrarian structures, thenew land reform policy is an acceptable official attempt that should be welcomed and seized by peoples’ movement groups.
In further contrast still, the two groups of parastatal corporations with the greatest control over state lands and resources on Java until now, the State Forest Corporation (SFC) and the (various) State Plantation Corporations (SPC), are worried about the effects of legalizing land occupations and exacerbating tensions between villagers and corporations. They have offered some alternative collaborative schemes such as improved revenue-sharing between the corporations and village cultivators.
Adding another dimension to these tensions, the Minister of Forestry has publicly supported the new policy, while high-level bureaucrats under him have questioned it. Two of these are the head of the Forestry Planning Agency, who is debating the criteria for selecting the forest lands to be converted and targeted under this policy, and the general secretary of the Ministry of Forestry, who prefers implementing social forestry without land redistribution for ameliorating the 1.5 million hectares of critical forest lands under the SFC in Java.
Some parliament members from the biggest political party, including the chairperson of the national parliament, have criticized the policy and anticipated that the implementation will create more tension in rural areas rather than eradicating poverty. They have stated that they will invite the head of the National Land Agency (NLA) to discuss the legal dimensions of the policy and the implementation plan to ensure that no existing laws and regulations are in contradiction. On the other hand, some parliament members from other parties back the NLA initiative.
Policies will be implemented at the district level. Some district governments have welcomed the new policy enthusiastically, seeing it as a means of solving chronic land disputes and raising district revenues. They have been overwhelmed by demands for land but have lacked legal authority to change property relations on disputed state lands. Since the decentralization policy took effect in 2001, the authority to regulate land issues, including the management of state lands, is one of the unresolved tensions between district and central governments. The NLA therefore both creates and represents challenges in the resolution of central-district governance of land-based resources. It also creates challenges and opportunities for nascent peasant organizations in such governance.
The World Bank initiated market-oriented land registration projects in 1995 and has started to explore the potential interfaces between the land reform policy and their land registration scheme (World Bank 1994, 2004, 2005). In 2004, they hesitated to support land reform, arguing that land reform was ”too political” at that moment, and that there was no national consensus on land reform (World Bank 2004: 12). The World Bank’s strategies to delink land reform and political struggle, and to frame land reform within broader market mechanism constrain their involvement to the new land reform initiative.
Since 2006, the new leadership in the NLA has reformed the NLA organizational structure and strategy in order to lead the new land reform policy. In order to make the policy be mandatory for other national government institutions, and provincial and district level governments, the NLA has drafted a Government Regulation on Agrarian Reform (Peraturan Pemerintah tentang Pembaruan Agraria) to be signed by the Indonesian President. The NLA also will set up pilot projects in selected districts, one of which is Blitar, East Java – a place where the Indonesian President possibly will declare the national program of agrarian reform.
The above account shows that there are pro and anti-reform forces within state, civil society, and international institutions. The tensions among these will affect the land reform policy development and implementation. My overarching questions are: Why did the land reform policy originally emerge, and at the moment what are the conditions and factors which continue to shape the policy processes? These questions can be examined more closely through the following specific research question: How do the agrarian movements affect the new land reform policy processes, and vice versa?
II. Research Hypotheses
My research hypothesis is: The agrarian movements and the land reform policy processes are mutually constituted. The land reform policy processes have been shaped by the ways in which peasant organizations forge alliances and resonate their actions with pro-reform forces among the non-governmental organizations, and the state actors; on the other hand, the actual forms that the land reform policy processes take have expanded working strategies of peasant organizations and their allies, depending on the ways the National Land Agency and other government bodies include or exclude them within in theprocesses.
The resurgence of agrarian movements in Indonesia since the democratic breakthrough in 1998 enables some scholars to show the centrality of the persistent demand for land reform from local peasant organizations, the creative role of non-governmental and scholar activists to promote the necessity of land reform policy, and the ways in which they worked in multiple sites of struggle (Affif et al 2004, Aspinal 2004, Lucas and Warren 2000, 2003, Rosser, Roesad and Edwin 2005). My research will be different with those, because of the different moment that enables me to examine the details oftensions and synergies between the land reform policy process and the agrarian movements, and the condition under which that interaction has been produced.
The ways Indonesian government bodies produce and implement the new land reform policy is not straightforward, but rather a site of contestation and negotiation. They have no prior experience dealing with redistributive land reform. The division of authority between central, provincial and district government bodies in the land reform implementation will provide political opportunities for peasant organizations and their allies to intervene the policy processes, and in turn they change and also was changed by the political spaces where they are working. As clearly laid out by Borras who applied Fox’s sandwich strategy to analyze the Philippines’s land reform case (Fox 1993,42001, 2004, Borras 2001, 2005), in order to achieve a such successful redistributive reform, at least three other pillars beside that of the persistent peasants’ demands are needed: a broad pro-reform political coalition from national through local levels, substantial public investments and technical assistances, and pro-poor development strategy (Borras and McKinley 2006, see also: Barraclough 1991).
Since the authoritarian regime fell in 1998, the National Land Agency has shifted its national land policies over time. My research will trace the shifted policies, the background and implication of each policy, and the ways in which the policies have been contested by various forces within the state and among civil society actors. The hypothesis covers the newest national policy in relation to the peasants’ persistent demands for land rights which I see them as a part of what Harvey recently conceptualized as struggle over accumulation by dispossession, organized collective (re)actions to the on-going process of capital accumulation through dispossession (Harvey 2003, 2005). When they actualized the demands through land occupations, explicit agrarian conflicts were created and in turn became the potential driver of agrarian reform. Agrarian reform is “the offspring of agrarian conflict” (Christodolou 2000:119).
During the high tide of the state led land reform around the world, the 1960s through the late of 1970s, land reform scholars theorized the relationships between types of agrarian structures and land reform policies (cg. Dorner 1972, Griffin 1974, Paige 1975, de Janvry 1981, Kuhnen 1982, Ghose 1983). These programs were aimed primarily at private landlords targeted by official land reform policies and/or rural movement groups. They excluded public/state lands from their concerns. My research, following that of Borras (2006), will help fill the lacuna in which Borras analyzed the ways that land reform policy in the Philippines targeted public/state lands controlled by private landlords. The Indonesian case is different from that inthe Philippines because of the nature of what I call state landlords, which are state owned companies that were founded by thestate for specific mandates to control and manage huge tracts of land, and directly arranged by specific government regulations. I will examine the conditions under which and why the policies took the forms that targeted various types of state land, and whether or not they were produced in order to respond to peasants’ demands.
III. Theoretical Relevance
My research that examines tensions and synergies between the land reform policy processes and agrarian movements in Java, Indonesia, hinges on current theoretical debates of the status and prospects of peasantry in the contemporary forms of agrarian questions. I am aware that the terms ‘peasant’, ‘peasantry’, and ‘peasant agriculture’ are highly contested terms in the academic literature (Cf. Kearney 1996, Djurfeldt 1999; for classic text cf. Wolf 1966, Landsberger 1974). In this research, the term ‘peasant’ is taken as a loose definition to mean the majority inhabitants of rural areas who live through cultivating rural lands: landless, near- landless farmers, farm workers, and other rural wage laborers and rural semi-proletariat. I am aware that some scholars argue that – as Elson wrote (1997:238) – “the peasantry is in the process of passing away” (Hobsbawm 1995, Bryceson, Kay and Mooij 2000, Bernstein 2003), but I insist to keep using this term for political and academic reasons. In Indonesian vocabulary the term ‘petani’ can be translated into ‘peasant’ or ‘farmer’, but the former has political connotations beyond its descriptive meaning, related to the rural movements during the revolution/independence period during 1945-1965, particularly with the way Soekarno, the First President of the Republic of Indonesia, used the term in order to gain mass support for the Indonesian revolution (His famous motto at the time and still popular right now within Indonesia agrarian movement circles is “petani adalah soko guru Revolusi Indonesia”, meaning “peasants are the prime movers of the Indonesian Revolution)”. Agrarian movement groups in Indonesia tend to use the term “peasant” as a translation of “petani” rather than “farmer” because of that reason.
The status and prospects for the peasantry is one of the crucial topics within the debates on agrarian questions, which can be understood as “the forms in which capitalist relations transform the agrarian sector and the political alliances, struggles and compromises which emerge around differing trajectories of change” (Watts 2000:7). Kautsky (1889), Lenin (1899) and Chayanov (1925) provided foundational concepts and frameworks to understanding many crucial issues in agrarian questions, such as the destructive effect of capital to the agricultural sector, role of agriculture in capitalist industrialization, ruraldifferentiation, the persistence of the peasantry, etc. (See for review: McMichael 1977, Djurfeldt 1982, Lehman 1982, Shanin1982).
Byers and Berstein interpreted that the classic meaning of the agrarian questions may be defined as the continuing existence and role of peasants and peasant agriculture in the context of political struggle, their contribution to accumulation for industrialization, and the incomplete transitions to capitalist mode of production (Byres 1986, 1995, 1996, Bernstein 1996).
The current academic debates evaluate these classic agrarian meanings and re-theorize the new agrarian questions created through the contemporary international capitalist division/restructuring of labor, the resurgence of land reform policies in international development agencies, and last but not least, the proliferation of new rural social movements (Cf. McMichael1997, Amin 2000, Harrison 2001, Grifith, Khan and Ickowitz 2002, Bernstein 2003, Byers 2005, Watts and Goodman 1997).
Related with the status and prospects of the peasantry, the main opposing camps of the debate can be simplified between (a) the disappearances thesis, which argued for the necessary dissolution of the peasantry as a logical consequence of the advancing processes of capitalist development, and (b) the persistence thesis that argued that peasant societies persist because they operate according to a particular logic that enables them to resist the expansionary and destructive forces of capitalist development (Arighi 1995, Johnson 2004).
Berstein, who has been representing the first camp for a long time, insists on the idea of “farewell to the peasantry” and argues that the agrarian questions in their original formulations is not relevant given the dominance of capitalism as a world phenomenon. Based on Byers’ idea that agrarian questions are something that can be ‘resolved’, Bernstein (2002, 2004) recently argued that the transition to capitalism has occurred on a global scale; as a result, there is no longer an agrarian question of capital today. Where these transitions have not fully taken place, as in many so-called Third World countries, he strongly promoted not using peasantry as an analytical category. Instead, he developed “the theorization of an economic form -- agricultural petty commodity production -- constituted by the class relations (and contradictions) of capital and labour, andlocated in the shifting places of agriculture in the international divisions of labour of imperialism.” (Bernstein 2003:14). Then, he concluded that today’s agrarian question exists in the contemporary era of neo-liberal capitalism, and can at best be characterized as an `agrarian question of labor’: where contemporary capitalism has failed to absorb the labor force by providing adequate and secure employment particularly for those in the rural South, and therefore land redistribution may acquire a new significance.
Critiques to Berstein’s view are from the permanence theses (Johnson 2004, Owen 2005), use a Chayanovian perspective to insist that global capitalism “has resulted not in the disappearance of the peasantry, but in its redefinition.” (Johnson 2004: 64). McMichael reinforces this view and adds further critique to Bersntein saying that the peasant prospects cannot be concluded solely through the lens of the general rule of the capital accumulation, but “the current agrarian question and its resolution depends on the peasantry itself, in a politicised movement on a world scale to confront the international power, and socio-ecological impact, of capital” (McMichael 2006a:407). Brass also criticizes Bernstein’s argument because of the false de-linking between the agrarian question of labor and the agrarian question of capital, and of the announcement of closure on the resolution of the agrarian question (Brass 2007).
I actually resonate with McMichael’s sympathetic invitation to what he described as the ways “to understand the historically (and geographically, NFR) specific relations of capitalism against which peasants struggle” (2006:412-413). So I argue that the new Indonesian land reform policy processes provide political space that has opened up a new site of struggle where agrarian movement groups will be able to formalize their demands to land rights. But, different from McMichael’s observation about Via Campesina-connected agrarian movement groups in Latin America that “represent the possibility of a peasant modernism, dedicated to an ‘agrarian citizenship’, via a politics of ecology and food sovereignty”, agrarian movements in Java, Indonesia, are localized movements that resist the ongoing enclosure processes in order to guarantee their means of reproduction as peasants through their farming activities. The movements open up a possibility to what Otero (1999, 2003, 2004, Otero and Jugeitz 2003) calls “political class formation”, that I see as a process to develop peasantry as a political class through (a) their politicized collective actions to create their positionality and identity over their class location; (b) their demands and struggles in relation to other classes; and (c) various types of organizational relations, for instance compromised submission, collaboration/making alliances or confrontations with other political classes within multiple and interconnected sites.
My research also hinges on political ecology perspective especially on its pertinent claim that struggles over meaning are as crucial as struggles over resources, and consequently they are exist at multiple and interconnected sites of struggle (Carney and Watts 1990, Hart 1991, Peluso and Ribot 2003). Herring (2002) recently provided an interesting account on the clash of meaning over property rights in colonial and post-colonial countries through critically examining the ways the market had been expanded into colonized countries. Using India as an example, he argued, “(T)he privatization of property went hand in hand with the creation of state property” (Herring 2002:266). This conclusion is also valid for the Indonesian history (Fauzi 1999, Tsing 2002).
So, I see the Indonesian new land reform policy and peasants’ collective actions in relation to a particular collective (re)action of dispossessed groups to on-going enclosure processes which is a main mechanism of uneven geographical development (Smith 1990, Harvey 1982, 2006). The recent debate on Marx’s notion of “primitive” or “original accumulation” has reinvigorated theories of uneven development and stimulated new research agendas (Glassman 2006). Traditional interpretations of “primitive accumulation” conceive of it as a one-time historical phenomenon of dispossession, creating a “free” labor force. In contrast, my research will utilize the newer interpretations arguing that capitalist accumulation depends on the ongoing,
often violent, exclusion of competitors from resources (Perelman 2000, 2007, Bonefeld 2001, 2002, De Angelis 1999, 2001). Based on that and reading on Luxemberg’s Accumulation of Capital, Harvey has made major contributions to this interpretation, using the notion he calls “accumulation by dispossession” to explain uneven patterns of global capitalist expansion (Harvey 2003, 2005a and 2005b). Under neoliberalism, he claims, privatization and commodification take myriad forms, through which capitalists ”actively manufacture” these new forms and realms of proletarization. Following Polanyi’s notion on double movement (1944), Harvey (2003) argues that accumulation by dispossession also generates social movements to confront its depredations. Moreover, when social movements erect barriers to capital accumulation, capitalist institutions move to dismantle these barriers and also push the state to use its coercive powers to create conditions conducive to furtherenclosure and exclusion (Harvey 2005a, 2005b).
Harvey’s insightful macro-level analysis overlooks some key concrete processes, as pointed out by Hart (2006). She argues that movements cannot be predicted automatically from dispossession, as Harvey implies. Moreover, the material “facts” of dispossession and its counter movements need to be analyzed at the same time as their meanings, taking account of “multiple historical/geographical determinations, connections, and articulations” (Hart 2006:11). I will examine the conditions under which the three processes – dispossession, collective action of dispossessed groups, and state policy – are intimately connected, and dramatically shifted over time since the fall of the Indonesian authoritarian regime in 1998. My research question and hypotheses concerned with the latest expression of these shifted connections.
Contemporary agrarian movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America differ from those addressed in classic peasant studies by Wolf (1969), Landsberger (1974), Migdal (1974), Paige (1975), Scott (1976), Popkin (1978), and Adas (1979) whichfocused on the devastating effects of state and capitalist market interventions in agriculture, and peasant resistance to aspects of colonial and post-colonial rule. The contemporary movements differ not only in the moment and context, but also in their collective actions, rallying issues, scales of actions, types of alliances, leadership-membership characteristics, and last but not least in how their objectives are new (Petras 1997, Webster 2004, Moyo and Yeros 2005). The specificity of the agrarian questions in the twenty-first century, which is experiencing global restructuring of capitalist production under neoliberal globalization also provides new conditions for new types of collective action (McKeon, Wolford and Watts 2004, McMichael 2005, 2006a, 2006b). The current scholarship also focuses on the roles of rural social movements and other civil society actors in leveraging land reform agendas in local, national and international arenas (Ghimire and Moore 1999, Ghimire 2001, Moyo and Yeros 2005, Rosset, Patel, and Courville 2006, Akram-Lodhi, Borras and Kay 2007). Many of them celebrate the new roleof the NGOs in creating new possibilities to change government policies and governance at various levels in order to improve access to land for the rural poor. Other authors criticize the ambiguity of NGO’s role in relation to rural social movements, especially when the NGOs are located under the uneven geographical development, and the contested nature of neoliberalstrategy to govern societies (Petras 1999, Baraclough 2001, Bebbington 2004).
My approach is differs from the political opportunity thesis that basically starts from the argument that contractions in political opportunity structure within the state will shape social protests among civil society groups (Tilly 1978, Mc Adam 1982, Kitschelt 1986, Tarrow 1998). Tarrow defines the political opportunity structure as “consistent – but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national – signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form a social movement” (Tarrow 1994:54). He breaks it down into four salient kinds of phenomena: the opening up of access to power, shifting
alignments, the availability of influential allies, and cleavage within and among elites within the state. Meyer (2005) reviewed the ways various authors use this perspective in analyzing the relation between protest and its policy outcome, and he concluded that “the interaction of both substantive and symbolic changes in policy with the development of a challenging movement is undertheorized and understudied.” (Meyer 2005:2). Herring and Robert (2006:15) reinforce it that “(w)hatremains uncharted are the reciprocal relationships between the diffusion of particular policy innovations and the waves of social movement activity”.
Thus, through considering critiques from the relational perspective to the linearity of political opportunity theory (Crossley 2002, 2003, Goldstone 2004, Meyer 2004, Ray 2000), my research will examine how social movement groups forge alliances with the state and among civil society groups, the reciprocity between movements and their counter-forces as they change over time through their struggles over access to resources, power, and meaning, and then subsequently will show the ways they actually change the political space within which they are working.
So, in order to understand more adequately how the peasant movements are constituted, I follow a more geographically and historically specific framework that will help to clarify the particular power-laden practices (Hart 2006) at the multiple and interconnected sites of contestation. I will employ what critical geography literature calls the “space-time'' dimension in which we theorize social phenomena, a notion that encourages sensitivity to spatiality, formed through social relations and interactions at all scales (e.g. Harvey 1990, 2005, Pred and Watts 1992, Massey 1994). Considering what Otero (1999, 2002) calls “political class formation” of peasantry, I will examine the double processes (a) of the ways in which the political struggle in various scales have provided political space to peasant organizations and their allies to work outside and within the land reform policy development arenas in different government institutions; and (b) of the extent to which their various types of collective actions define their collectivities as a class that clearly have been politically differentiated with other classes. This hypothesis opens up a possibility to theorize the emergence, dynamics and consequences of contemporary Indonesian agrarian movements. I intend to examine the new types of collective actions, and how they produce new political spaces locally and nationally in relation to the new land reform policy.
IV. Research Design and Methods
This study will examine the power struggle to define the meaning and practice of land reform in Java, which involves national land management agencies, agrarian movements, civil society groups, private and state landlords, and district governments in Java, the most populous island in Indonesia (and in the world), with more than 107 million people, 62% of the country's population. With more than fifty percent of its population still employed in agriculture, some fifty percent of whom are landless, and more than twenty-five percent of its land base classified as state lands zoned for forestry or plantation production, Java is an important site for studying the new peasant movements occupying large tracts of those lands and persistently demanding land reform. The case of Java speaks not to the “disappearance” or the “persistence” of peasantry but rather its re-creation and redefinition as a political class in multiple and interconnected sites of struggle.
My research will firstly trace the ways in which the state institutions have responded to the demands for land reform,and then document the ways in which agrarian movement groups forge alliances within the state and among civil societyactors in order to make the land reform policy implementation able to constitute redistributive land reform. The latter is defined as a redistribution of property rights in cultivable land through taking land from those with large operational holdings and transferring it either to those with no land at all (landless peasant and wage laborer) or those with tiny holdings (poor peasants), and usually is contrasted with tenurial reform, which are changes in the contractual arrangements between the land owner and those who cultivate the land (Griffin, Khan and Ickowitz 2002, Byres 2004).
Here I will employ critical ethnography (Hart 2002, 2004, 2006) to guide my specific choices of methods. The method pulls together lesson from Marx’s philosophy of internal relations (Ollman 1976), Lefebvre’s notion on space (Levebvre 1991), Massey’s conception on place (Massey 1994), and Hall’s idea on articulation (Hall 1980). Rather than seeing 'cases' as examples of or deviations from a particular ideal type or an acclaimed universal phenomenon, critical ethnography explores how my research objects are differentially formed in relation to one another and to a larger whole. "In this conception, particularities or specificities arise through interrelations between objects, events, places, and identities; and it is through clarifying how these relations are produced and changed in practice that close study of a particular part can generate broader claims and understandings," (Hart 2006:996). By conducting a detailed examination y at various different scales, I hope to be able to arrive at a complex understanding of the ways in which contestations and negotiations over land access and control have informally preceded and then been officially opened by the new land reform policy.
I will conduct twelve months of fieldwork in Indonesia (January – December 2008) and utilize my networks of contacts with government officials, parliament members, National Human Rights Commissioners, party leaders, activists, NGOs, and academics as main sources for this research, as well as document archival research available in Indonesia.
To examine the mutual constitution between the land reform policy processes and agrarian movements, I will:
1) track changes in the ways peasant movement leaders, NGO activists and critical scholars participate in national land policy-making processes.
I will construct a “social history” of the ways peasant organization leaders, NGO activists and critical scholars had forged alliances and worked within and outside the state institutions to leverage land reform agendas since the fall of post-authoritarian regime in 1998. Three aspects that I will focus on are (i) the ways they perceived and then seized spaces of interventions opened up by power shifts and struggles within the state institutions; (ii) competing ideas and working strategies to work within or outside the state institutions in order to leverage land reform, (iii) the policy outcomes of their interventions, and its consequences, especially for the peasant movements.
In order to acquire these data, I will:
a) lead focus group discussions (FGDs) with different groups to develop multiple versions of their histories of eachorganization and their changing roles and activities within various state institutions. I will follow up the FGDs with interviews with the group leaders in order to obtain more nuance stories concerning their activities and other participating actors.
b) document key events (workshops, seminar and conferences, mass mobilization, protest actions, government officialmeetings, etc.) and their background related with six land related policies, i.e., the constitutional changes in 1999-2001, the 1999 Forestry Law, the 2001 National Parliament’s Decree on Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management (including debates on revision of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law), the 2003 Plantation Law, abortive drafting in 2002-2004 on land dispute settlement by the National Human Rights Commissions, and the 2007 new land reform policy. For each policy-making process, I will analyze official reports and interview participating government officials, parliament members, human right commissioners, peasant organization leaders, NGO activists, and critical scholars.
2) Reconstruct the institutional policy history of the National Land Agency in relation to agrarian movements in 1998 -2007.
The National Land Agency is the most critical site to understand tensions and synergies between agrarian movements and the land reform policies. Since 1998, Indonesia has had four government administrations with each of them made different mandates to the NLA. In reconstructing the key institutional policy changes in the NLA I will focus on the shifted constraints, limits and possibilities of the NLA leaders to (i) manage the demands for land reform, (ii) develop collaboration with peasant organization’s leaders, NGO activists and critical scholars, and (iii) produce institutional policy change in respond to the demand and the collaboration. In order to acquire the data, I will:
a) collect and analyze the official documents related with the key institutional policy changes, and interview the past and present NLA leaders, legal scholars and professional consultants who worked temporarily within the NLA projects.
b) pay special attention to the World Bank land projects, which have been implemented since 1995, because of their great influence to introducing pro-market land policies, management, and administration within the NLA and itsoffices at the provincial and district levels. I will examine the ways they helped to frame the land reform demands and the new land reform policy. I will interview long-standing contacts in the World Bank, pro-market officials inthe NLA, and their professional consultants, and collect documents and internal reports of the projects through them. Their open disclosure policy will help me to easily access their official document and interview their officials in the Resident Staff Indonesia office.
c) interview some national parliament members working in Commission II, which have had regular meeting with the head of NLA, and high-level officials in other government bodies closely working with the NLA, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Forestry, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National DevelopmentPlanning Agency, and the Coordinating Ministry of Economics. These interviews will focus on the key institutional policy changes in the NLA.
3) Conduct an ethnography of the new land reform policy-making processes and the ways peasant organizations and their allies responded to the processes.
The new land reform policy processes are in the making as well as the agrarian movements in Java. I will examine the condition under which the new policy and its implementation designs have been produced, especially in what ways the policy has been produced in respond to the agrarian movements’ demands. On the other hand, I will also examine the ways peasant organizations and their allies in NGOs and critical scholars have responded to the policy processes. Because of the controversial nature of the land reform policy and the agrarian movements, I will also examine the ways various state and civil society actors perceive and act against them.
In order to acquire the evidence, I will:
a) follow the on-going processes through conducting participant observation of both the policy-making processes inthe NLA and the peasant organization related activities. I will utilize my long-standing contacts within the NLA, and peasant organization leaders, NGO activists and critical scholars who have worked within and outside of theNLA in leveraging land reform agendas. I will officially request my participation to their activities, but when that is not possible, I will interview participating actors after the events.
b) document the variety of pro and contra views and responses regarding the new land reform policy, the agrarian movements, and their potential effects. I will interview various actors within the state, for instance parliament members, legal scholars in universities, consultants in land related professional association, and officials in the Ministry of Forestry, the Ministry of Agriculture, the National Development Planning Agency, and the Coordinating Ministry of Economics.
c) follow the step-by-step a pilot project implementation at the particular district, which will be selected later after theNLA determine the location of the pilot projects. From my longstanding contact in the NLA I got the information that the pilot project will be started on January 2008. I will officially request my participation to any possible internal and public events related to the implementation within the government bodies, peasant organization and their NGO allies. But if that is not possible I will request to interview the participating actors, and read the minute of the events if available.
d) examine general history of the ways land reform beneficiaries have accessed the targeted lands through FGD with the beneficiaries. I will follow up the FGD with deep interviews with some of them to deepen their stories. Then, I plan to conduct randomly sampled household surveys to examine the targeted land, the characteristic of land reform beneficiaries, and their livelihood condition, and then visit interview subjects’ plots with them. To get pluralperspectives, I plan to interview villagers who are not included as the beneficiaries, village head, village council members, and informal leaders of the village.
Then, I will analyze complex relations between the agrarian movements and the agrarian policies, and the ways in which they have been shaped in respond to each other.
