“Institutional Activism: Seeking Customary Forest Rights Recognition from within the Indonesian State

Suraya Afiff and Noer Fauzi Rachman (2019) “Institutional Activism: Seeking Customary Forest Rights Recognition from within the Indonesian State”, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 20(5):453-470. https://doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2019.1670245

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Abstract

This article aims to explain why the adat movement activists in Indonesia could expand their campaigns for state recognition of adat community rights to activities from within the state apparatus. We argue that three combined processes have contributed to the conjuncture that made institutional activism possible: the preparation of the 2014 national election offered activists opportunities to influence the government agenda; the emergence of a conscious strategy for conducting institutional activism; and the coalitions between some key state officials and the movement’s actors. This article also analyses the problems that institutional activists faced, in particular resistance from influential actors at various government units who were not sympathetic to the adat movement’s agenda. Therefore, the impact of this activism on policy changes so far remains limited. The authors’ personal involvement in this case of institutional activism to promote customary forest provided access to the information for this article.

Keywords: Customary Forest; Masyarakat Adat; Institutional Activists; State–Movements Interaction; Indigenous Land Rights

Introduction

        On 30 December 2016, a special ceremony was held at the national palace, where President Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi) honoured nine indigenous com-munities with a ministerial decree legalising their claims over customary forests, or hutan adat (Table 1).1 We were among about one hundred people from different organisations who also attended the ceremony that day. The total area of the custom-ary forests that received government recognition was actually quite small, about 13,000 hectares for approximately 5,700 individuals.2 However, despite this fact, the indigen-ous peoples’ activists and their allies who attended the ceremony felt overwhelmingly enthusiastic and with high expectations that from now on, more indigenous commu-nities would be granted customary land rights. From these activists’ points of view, the ceremony symbolised a campaign success by obtaining government recognition of indigenous peoples’ customary claims.

        Since 1998, the year that marked the end of over three decades of Soeharto’s so-called ‘New Order’ era, social movement activists have urged the government to recog-nise the rights of indigenous communities (officially termed masyarakat hukum adat, or ‘customary law communities’)3 to control their lands within the areas designated as ‘state forests’. The legal basis for the implementation of the customary forest scheme has existed since the time of the previous government. The scheme was stipulated in Article 5 of the National Forest Law no 41/1999. In 2013, the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of the Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of Indonesia’s Archipelago (AMAN) and their demand for the state’s recognition of the indigenous communities’ land rights within the state forest zone. However, the scheme had never materialised until the ceremony held in 2016. Why did the implementation of the customary forest scheme (hutan adat) in Indonesia suddenly become possible during Joko Widodo’s administration?

        We argue that three combined processes led to a political conjuncture in which the implementation of the scheme became possible. First was the process leading up to the 2014 presidential election. Government transition provided an opportunity for social movement actors to form a new coalition with politicians who were willing to incor-porate movement agendas into their political platform. Second, since the presidential candidate that the social movement supported won the election, there was an emer-gence of ‘institutional activists’, that is, ‘social movement participants who occupy formal status within government and who pursue movement goals through conven-tional bureaucratic channels’ (Santoro and McGuire 1997, 504). These individuals are members of social movements who make the best use of political access, knowledge and other resources available to them as insiders. Social movement insiders worked hard to ensure the newly elected government implemented the movement’s agenda as promised during the election. The third process was the gradual formation of a con-structive partnership between some state actors and the social movement through institutional activists (Stearns and Almeida 2004). Institutional activists often face many bureaucratic obstacles when trying to promote movement agendas from inside. An activist working inside the state does not guarantee there will be greater opportunities to promote successful policy change (Abers and Tatagiba 2015; Lewis 2013). To obtain a positive outcome, institutional activists and outside movement actors need to work with key state actors who are willing to collaborate and overcome the legalistic, technical and political obstacles that block the agenda, in this case formal recognition of customary land rights.

        We position our study in debates in social movement studies that have problema-tised the insider/outsider dichotomy in the context of interactions between move-ments and state institutions. For a long time, scholars in social movement studies worked with the underlying assumption that movements were collective groups that operated outside the state. Therefore, social movements and the state have always been perceived as separate entities (Tilly 1978). There has also been a tendency to view movements that were too close to state institutions in a negative light due to the belief that such movements could then be co-opted by elite politicians who are only interested in maintaining the status quo. The outcome of such close engagement with the state can lead a movement to decline (Tarrow 1998).

        Scholars who use the concept of institutional activists begin with a different assump-tion about boundaries between the state and social movements. They argue that the state consists of actors, and these actors do not have homogeneous interests and motivations. Therefore, the state should not be regarded as a homogeneous entity. Likewise, social movements consist of a variety of actors who are not homogeneous. They use different tactics and strategies to pursue their goals to change state policy. Viewed this way, scholars using this framework have hypothesised that the state and social movement actors have many potential roles and ways to interact.

        Collaboration would be one of these interactions. Moreover, these interactions or coalitions between the state and movement actors are not fixed, but change and evolve over time. They also do not assume that close interactions between the state and social movements would always lead to a movement’s decline. On the contrary, institutional activists sometimes require movements to apply external pressure to the state in order to achieve their goal.

        Some scholarly studies of social movements have challenged this insider/outside dichotomy (Banaszak 2005; Goldstone 2004; Pettinicchio 2012; Santoro and McGuire 1997). Rather, they have argued that porous boundaries exist; movement actors could be members of political parties, members of parliament, or state bureau-crats. Hence, they have proposed to ‘blur the distinction between insider and outsider; between activist and institutional activist’ (Pettinicchio 2012, 501). A number of scho-lars have shown that institutional activists and coalitions of state and movement actors are not a unique phenomenon. Feminist movements have frequently produced insti-tutional activists (Banaszak 2010; Pettinicchio 2012; Suh 2011). Other examples include civil rights movements (Santoro and McGuire 1997), environmental policy pressure groups (Olsson 2009), health campaigns (Abers and Tatagiba 2015) and agrarian reform such as post-Marcos Philippines (Lewis 2013). Scholars have used the institutional activist concept to refer to varied roles: it could mean state actors who adopt the social movement’s agenda or ideology in their work, it could refer to state actors who join social movements or it could refer to activists who take a job working for the state. Therefore, we need to clarify how we have defined this term for use in the analytical framework for this article.

        This study focuses on a certain type of institutional activist, that is, social movement activists who have strategically accepted work inside the state to push a movement’s agenda. Not all activists who become state bureaucrats can be defined by our con-ception of institutional activists, however. We are only interested in those activists who work for the state but maintain connections with external movements and con-tinue advocating their agenda. Therefore, the individuals that can be defined as insti-tutional activists in this article are actors with multiple identities that allow them to move easily from one social group (movement) to another (the state) as suits their purpose. We should not just view these insiders as part of the state, but as part of the movement as well (Banaszak 2005, 153). This type of actor has received less atten-tion in social movement studies in Indonesia, as well as in policy change analysis in the Indonesian forest sector.

        Our focus on actors’ agency and their networks for influencing government policy does not mean we assume that these actors are autonomous when making their decisions. Actors’ strategies depend on and are shaped by power relations in the complex social networks embedded in the institution. Since the state is not monolithic, but consists of individuals and is divided into government units that often conflict with each another, movement actors inside the state have to overcome many challenges. They must perform work that conforms to the logic of bureaucracy. When promoting change, activists inside the state require the knowledge and skill to politically mobilise support and manoeuvre their actions in the delicate terrain of complex social relations that shape state power. Our case study demonstrates that promoting change from inside is not as easy as one might think.

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