Nancy Lee Peluso, Suraya Afiff and Noer Fauzi Rachman (2008) “Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movement in Indonesia,” Co-authored with Journal of Agrarian Change 8: 2/3: 377-407. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2008.00174.x.
Abstract
This essay examines the convergences, tensions and mutual influences of agrarian and environmental movements in Indonesia and their connections to transnational movements under state-led development and neoliberal governance regimes. The authors argue that environmental movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century affected the strategies, struggles, mutual relations with, and public discourses of resurgent agrarian movements in diverse ways. Environmental movements had significant influences on national policy, law and practice within a decade of their emergence under the state-led development regime of President Suharto. Environmental activists used the appearance of technical ‘apolitical’ concerns to their advantage. They mobilized at multiple scales, targeting laws and other institutions of state power at the same time as organizing the grassroots. The repression of the Suharto regime forced agrarian reform activists underground, while environmental issues were mainstreamed. Agrarian movements in Indonesia today, under a decentralized regime dominated by neoliberal policies, have faced new opportunities and constraints due to national and transnational influences of environmental and agrarian reform discourses and networks. We show how these influences have changed the political fields within which Indonesian agrarian movement groups operate: forming, shifting and struggling over critical alliances.
Keywords: agrarian movements, environmental movements, agrarian politics, environmental politics, Indonesian movements
Introduction
This essay argues that the trajectories and strategies of ‘new’ agrarian movements need to be understood in relation to those of environmental movements and the positioning and power relations of both sets of movements within shifting political economic conjunctures. We focus on the alliances and divergences between movements in Indonesia and how these have changed under transformed and transformative political economic circumstances since the 1970s when the modern ‘environmental movement’ began. Indonesia is an interesting case to reflect on broader trends, as it helps demonstrate that these shifting alliances and conflicts do not derive from transnational forces alone. Rather, we suggest that they depend as well on the temporal and political economic origins and histories of the respective movements, on the types of land contested, on the politics of access to those lands and on the emergence of what Hajer (1993, 1995) has called ‘discourse coalitions’, that dominate discursive spaces. Going beyond this view of discourse as discursive space and into the realm of practice and institutions, we also examine the articulations of discursive and institutional practices of government and non-government, transnational, national and grassroots organizations involved in Indonesian agrarian and environmental struggles and movements.
These shifting coalitions across environmental and agrarian movements, and indigenous peoples’ organizations with interests that might articulate with either or both, help us further understand Christodolou’s (1990, 112) thesis that ‘agrarian reform is the offspring of agrarian conflict’. Specifically, we argue that the forms coalitions take in the contexts of particular agrarian conflicts have lingering effects, even when movement groups move on and follow new, more separate trajectories. The diverse effects of different conflicts are particularly evident in Indonesia, where a number of key agrarian conflicts generated very different kinds of coalitions and helped produce new political opportunities in subsequent periods. Agrarian conflict in the 1960s, for example, did not lead directly to agrarian reform (Husken and White 1989; Farid 2005).
An important issue here is how the realm of the agrarian is defined. This is particularly important in understanding resurgent agrarian movements in Indonesia today, as the primary landlord targeted is a state ‘environmental management’ institution – the Ministry of Forestry. The state’s expropriation of millions of hectares of land with the creation of a national forest puts forestry right at the heart of most agrarian struggles in Indonesia, though these have taken different forms in different parts of the country (see e.g. Bachriadi and Lucas 2001; Li 2007). In this essay, we include apparently environmental conflicts over access to and control over forests and certain anti-dam campaigns in our use of the term agrarian conflicts, because these have engaged issues of rights to and use of agrarian land. Contestations take place within more broadly defined ‘agrarian environments’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003), a term which recognizes that such sites were not always separated into discrete discourses and domains of ‘forestry’ and ‘agriculture’. Indonesian agrarian movements and their transnational connections are of significance because of the particular historical and political moments from which they have emerged and the forms they have taken. The massive drive to repeasantization1 through land occupations and the formation of new rural organizations have taken place after over 30 years of depoliticization and structural violence since the largely rural massacres of 1965–66 (Cribb 1990) and subsequent, systematic land expropriation by Indonesian state agencies and their cronies in the private sector (Fauzi 1999; Farid 2005). The new agrarian movements have been concurrent with the efforts to make decentralization work and the ‘thickening’ of civil society (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Hadiz 2004a, 2004b). Those particularities make Indonesian agrarian movements unique and yet important to understand as they were constrained in their ability to connect with transnational networks until the late 1990s. Under the repressive ‘New Order’ regime, the name by which the Suharto regime was known for 32 years (1966– 98), Indonesian environmental and agrarian movement actors often expressed a compulsion to retain a face of solidarity, despite some critical ideological differences.
The Indonesian case also demonstrates that state power has remained important, though in new institutional forms and ways, in the transition from stateled (including but not only authoritarian) development to a political economy dominated by neoliberal policy (see also, Borras 2004). Indeed, it is the involvement of state actors and institutions within the various coalitions formed across and within environmental and agrarian movements that often has determined their relative ability to literally gain ground – spatial zones of influence recognized by local, national and international actors and institutions.
That state power has remained important under changing global regimes was most evident in the gains of the environmental movement, occurring slowly but surely under Suharto. The intersections of state power and the history of discourse coalitions are also reflected in many environmental justice groups’ willingness to work within the confines of forest law in CBNRM (CommunityBased Natural Resource Management) and social forestry projects. Here, ‘access to’ forest land rather than ‘private or communal rights’ to forests are seen as justice accomplishments, even though these were not enough for more radical agrarian reformers who have demanded full land rights, including excision of lands currently under the formal jurisdiction of state forestry institutions.2 In ways reminiscent of earlier environmentalist strategies, since Reformasi some agrarian movement groups have started working with government, trying to form coalitions with sympathetic district and national parliament members and government land managers. This had been impossible earlier, as farmer/peasant organizations were criminalized and repressed in the wake of the anti-left campaign and the agrarian violence that brought Suharto to power in 1966.
Also affecting the histories of Indonesian agrarian and environmental movements and their mutual constitution were the ways each formed relations with a nascent Indigenous Peoples’ movement. Like the environmental movement, a major motivating factor for this movement came from international activity and grabbed Indonesian activists’ imaginations in the mid-1990s after the UN declared 1993 ‘The Year of the World’s Indigenous People’.3 However, this movement has to be understood as not only an artefact of transnational movement politics but as a historically grounded set of institutions whose participants, practices and policies found ways of expressing their political positions through articulations with transnational and national discourses (Li 2000, 2001; Moniaga 2007). It has been alternately claimed by and allied with environmental and agrarian justice advocates.
Resurgent agrarian movements today show the effects of these historical tensions and the emergence of new ones. As centralized state power declines, and with it some of the gains of conservation, decentralization, democratization and the increasing hegemony of neoliberal policy and practice have generated new splits in the environmental movement. This is reflected in new alliances between Big Conservation and capital and changes in the alliances between environmental justice organizations and agrarian reformers. While these are changing the coalitions on the ground, a new state-led agrarian reform initiative launched by the National Land Agency (NLA), the Ministry of Forestry (MoF) and Indonesia’s president has once again made the state a critical site of contestation over agrarian reform.
Contemporary agrarian movements aim to change state policies and their implementation (Webster 2004, 2; Moyo and Yeros 2005). Peasant associations and movements are shaped by state policy and practice and various forms of class formation and accumulation, as well as by other movements and the political fields they help to create (Buechler 2000, 78; McKeon et al. 2004; McMichael 2005). The transnational dimensions of campaigns and advocacy, of knowledge exchange and communication, and new types and goals of collective action have produced new political and cultural spaces nationally and transnationally (Routledge 2004; Edelman 2005; see also Keck and Sikkink 1998). Environmental movements, because many of them operate in the realm once thought of as ‘agrarian’, are particularly important to understand. While some work has begun on these relations, a great deal remains to be unpacked (Edelman 1999; Franco and Borras 2005, 2006; Kowalchuk 2005).
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Link for free and full access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2008.00174.x
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Footnotes
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