Noer Fauzi Rachman
Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management (ESPM),
University of California, Berkeley
This proposal won Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Mellon Foundation. One year. $25,000 plus $5,000 academic fees, plus 3,000 for field activities. https://www.acls.org/fellow-grantees/noer-fauzi-rachman/
Land reform has returned to Indonesian agrarian politics after a forty-year hiatus fraught with violence and tragedy, a return that resonates with global resurgences of land reform and rural social movements (Ghimire 2001, Rosset et al 2006, Akram-Lodhi et al 2007). For more than three decades after smashing a nascent land reform agenda, Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, used the “New Order” bureaucracy, police, and military to control the rural masses through various mechanisms of coercion and consent. Meanwhile, his regime constructed the apparatus for centralizing management and reaping profits from the nation’s rich resources (Robison 1986, White and Husken 1989, Fauzi 1999).
The extent of the change that has taken place since Suharto’s fall in 1998 was made visible on January 31, 2007, when President Susilo Bambang Yodoyono launched a new land reform policy in conjunction with a World Bank-funded land registration program as a part of the government strategy to eradicate poverty. The head of the National Land Agency (NLA) was the author of this policy. The policy declared that 8.15 million hectares of state forest lands under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry (MoF) would be provided to the land reform program, in addition to 1.1 million hectares from other state lands under NLA authority. The NLA also identified 7.3 million hectares of other “idle lands” under their jurisdiction to be redistributed, including state lands that had been unused, misused, or used by private companies in ways contrary to government regulations (Winoto 2008).
My dissertation research examines the ways the new land reform policy and rural movements in Java, Indonesia, have challenged the structures and processes of state land control, land acquisition, and development policy and practice. No systematic research has been done on this topic in Java. This study exemplifies how rural movements and land reform policy processes have been mutually constituted through continuous (and ongoing) processes of movement success and movement setback, adding an important dimension to studies of rural social movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Edelman 1999, Missingham 2003, Wright and Wolford 2003, Moyo and Yeros 2005, Yashar 2005, Postero 2007, Borras 2007, Turner and Caouette 2009). In particular, my work demonstrates how the land politics, management ideologies, and practices of different agencies of a single national state —in this case the National Land Agency (NLA) and the Ministry of Forestry (MoF)— conflict, compete, and come together with the objectives of rural social movements at different historical moments, rendering projects of both reform and anti-reform incomplete.
With more than 50% of its population still employed in agriculture (some 50% of whom are landless) and more than 25% of its land base classified as state lands zoned for forestry or plantation production (Kasryno 2007), Java is an important site for studying resurgent rural movements (Afiff et al 2005). Through examining the trajectory of one of the largest rural movement organization in Java, the Sundanese Peasant Union (SPP), since its formation in 2000, my research has traced the contestation and negotiation that has taken place mainly between the SPP and the State Forestry Corporation (SFC) and state/private plantations, and between the two major Indonesian land management institutions (the NLA and the MoF) and the SPP and its allies.
Research Arguments, Approach and Method
My dissertation poses two arguments: First, land reform policy processes are not straightforward, but rather are sites of power struggle, contestation, and negotiation (Watts and Peet 1996:266). They are affected by the ways in which rural movement organizations and their allies are excluded or included within the policy process, and the extent to which their participation is or is not recognized as legitimate by land management institutions. It is impossible to understand how the new land reform policy in Indonesia has been produced without taking into account the efforts of rural movement organizations, NGOs, and scholars to criticize state land control, land acquisition and development policies and practices, and to promote alternative or complementary visions of agrarian reform policy.
Second, the actual forms that land reform policy took, and the differential ways of legitimizing or delegitimizing the SPP and its respective claims, transformed the subsequent working strategies of the SPP in relation to their allies, opponents and villagers. The NLA legitimizes the SPP through their new official frame Reforma Agraria, and invites and welcomes the SPP and its NGO allies’ participation in land reform programming, including by legalizing and redistributing occupied lands that previously were controlled by private plantation owners. In contrast to the NLA’s recognition, the Ministry of Forestry and the SFC refuse to recognize the SPP and their claims as legitimate. Instead, they define the SPP as a “provocative organization”, pushing “illegal occupation” which is complicit in “illegal logging” practices, and excludes them from their policy making processes to rearrange villagers’ access to forest lands.
My research continues my previous work on the history of agrarian politics in Indonesia since colonial times (Fauzi 1999), on local demands and global trends toward agrarian reform (Fauzi 2003), on contemporary rural social movements in Third World countries (Fauzi 2005), on the resurgence of rural social movements in West Java (Afiff et al 2005), and on the changing relations between agrarian movements and environmental movements in contemporary Indonesia (Peluso, Afiff and Rachman 2008). I have been inspired in large part by an indication 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, see also Herring and Robert 2006:15). Through bringing together concepts from social practice theory (Holland and Lave 2001, 2009) and approaches from political ecology (Moore 2003, Peet and Watts 2004, Springate-Baginski and Blaikie 2007), my research assumes that a struggle over resources is also a struggle over meaning. Thus, the social practices of movements and counter-movements, and of pro-reform and counter-reform policies, need to be analyzed at the same time as are their meanings, taking account of “multiple historical/geographical determinations, connections, and articulations” (Hart 2006:11).
By using critical ethnography (Willis and Trondman 2002, Hart 2004, 2006) my research examines the ways the SPP actually changes the political space within which they are working, and will provide a detailed account of the differential mechanisms and moments by which the SPP became a product as well as a producer of the shifting political opportunities and constraints that they faced in local and national levels. My broad network of contacts, which includes NLA and MoF officials, rural social movement leaders and NGO activists, and agrarian and forestry scholars, enabled me to access my research subjects through participant observations, semi-structured and structured interviews, and focused group discussion, as well as to collect various published and unpublished official reports relevant to my research arguments.
Field Research
The first phase of my field research (November 2007 - August 2008) traced the ways the National Land Agency (NLA) shifted its land policies. The NLA is the most critical site for understanding tensions and synergies between rural movement groups and land reform policy. In reconstructing the key institutional policy processes in the NLA, I focused on the shifting constraints, limits, and possibilities of the NLA leaders to: (a) manage the demands for land reform, (b) develop collaboration with movement leaders, NGO activists and critical scholars, (c) produce institutional policy change in response to demands and collaborations, and (d) negotiate their land reform agenda with other government institutions. I collected important official and informal documents related to key institutional policy changes and conducted interviews on the means and methods by which the policies have been contested by state and civil society actors operating at multiple arenas and scales. I followed the on-going land reform policy processes through participant observation and interviewed participating actors in the NLA and the MoF, and of NGOs and the rural movement organizations’ related activities.
I also traced the ways in which the SPP has developed from being a dissident group to a recognized rural movement organization with regularized forms of participation in local level politics and in the NLA’s land reform policy process. To do this, I collected accounts of the SPP’s local and district-level obstacles, definitive events, turning points, and connections with district, national, and local-level state actors, NGOs, and academics. To get multiple versions of these accounts for comparison, I conducted interviews and focused discussion groups with farmer leaders, affiliated NGO activists, and critical scholars who operate at local, district, and national levels.
During my field work, a state-sponsored repression in five villages in Cigugur, Ciamis district caused the local SPP chapters in three of the five villages to go underground. The police evicted poor farmers from their occupied lands that were previously controlled by the State Forestry Corporation (SFC). Through deploying an “illegal land occupation” and “illegal logging” frame, the police criminalized SPP leaders and members. The SFC forced SPP members to denounce the SPP and leave the organization in order to let them access the forest lands. In the wake of these evictions, I traced differential responses from various state institutions (police, local government, local parliament, the NLA, the MoF) and civil society groups (villagers, NGO activists, journalists, environmental groups, scholars). I observed and interviewed participating actors including the SPP local leaders, NGO activists, the police commanders, and the director of the SFC. Following this case allowed me to understand the ways in which state-sponsored repression and counter-movement forces come together through discursive and material practices at that particular moment and place, and change the SPP working strategies.
I returned to University of California, Berkeley in August 2008 to analyze the data that I had collected. Working with my academic advisors, I crafted a detailed outline for my dissertation. I also used this opportunity to write a book chapter on the SPP and political ecology of land struggle in West Java upland, which was published in Indonesian (Fauzi 2008), a short article on NGO activists’ critiques toward NLA’s land registration program (Fauzi 2009), and a joint article critiquing the World Bank’s World Development Report 2008 (Rachman, Savitri, and Shohibuddin. 2009).
The second phase of my field research ran from May 2009 until September 2009. I updated my work on land reform policy processes at the NLA at the national, provincial, and district levels, and on dynamics within the SPP and its NGO and academic allies. During this time I also followed two land reform pilot projects in Ciamis district of West Java, which is also a working area of the SPP. I collected official project documents, including maps and a detailed list of beneficiaries, and carried out interviews with NLA officials, village government, and SPP local leaders. I also conducted a household survey to examine the characteristics of land reform beneficiaries and their livelihood. Through focused group discussions I examined the trajectory of their local land struggle, including their relations with the SPP. I followed up with in-depth interviews with a selection of the beneficiaries.
Schedule for Dissertation Writing
Since I returned from the field in fall 2009, I have been working on two chapters, which I plan to complete by December 2009. I plan to finish two more chapters by May 2010. Between the fall of 2010 and April of 2011, I plan to finish three more chapters and finalize my dissertation.
Bibliography
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