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187 Pages·2011·5.6 MB·English

by  Noer Fauzi Rachman

UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia
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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/87s5s84g
Author
Rachman, Noer Fauzi
Publication Date
2011

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia
By
Noer Fauzi Rachman
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Environmental Science, Policy and Management
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in charge:
Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair
Professor Katherine O’Neill
Professor Louise Fortmann
Professor Gillian Hart
Professor Michael J. Watts
Fall 2011
© 2011
Noer Fauzi Rachman
All Rights Reserved
Abstract
The Resurgence of Land Reform Policy and Agrarian Movements in Indonesia
By
Noer Fauzi Rachman
Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair
On January 31, 2007, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced a
new land redistribution program that was part of the implementation of a land reform
policy called Reforma Agraria. The program was to be launched in conjunction with a
land registration program as part of a government strategy to eradicate poverty. The
launch of the program was a watershed event that had been engineered by the head of the
National Land Agency (NLA) in collaboration with agrarian movement activists who had
struggled for years for agrarian social justice.
The resurgence of land reform policy was fostered through a unique partnership of
activists, scholars, and reformist government officials. This new political space for
manuever was made possible in 1998 by the end of Suharto’s “New Order” which had
previously harnessed the bureaucracy, police, and military to control the rural masses
through various mechanisms of coercion and consent, while constructing the apparatus
for centralizing management and reaping profits from the nation’s land and forest
resources.
The new land redistribution program called the National Agrarian Reform Program
(NARP) focused on the redistribution of state lands for the rural poor claiming 8.15
million hectares of state forest land under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Forestry and
another 1.1 million hectares from other state lands under National Land Agency (NLA)
authority, and 7.3 million hectares of other “idle lands” under their jurisdiction to be
redistributed. When the ambitious program met with considerable political challenge, the
NLA quickly reframed the reform as a government sponsored land title legalization, a
program that not only better fit with the interests of the existing neoliberal economic
growth model, but also allowed the NLA to tout its land title legalization programs as a
major contribution to the success of President Yudhoyono’s government. This reframing
ruptured the NLA’s working relationship with agrarian activists, unveiling the processes
by which land reform policy in Indonesia is made and unmade.
This dissertation examines how land policy processes and agrarian movements in Java,
Indonesia, have been mutually constituted through continuous (and ongoing) processes of
1
movement success and movement setback. My research traces how the actors and forces
are produced, and how the trajectories and conjunctures at which they meet, enable or
constrain them to becoming influential. I explore state-society interactions pertaining to
land reform, articulating the multiple and interconnected sites of struggle, and showing
how they contribute to the empowering or disempowering of the existing politics
governing land access. The purpose is to understand, as Stuart Hall formulates it, “how
they work, what their limits and possibilities are, what they can and cannot accomplish.”
(Hall 2007:280).
Focusing on the conflict over land occupation events in West Java, this dissertation
shows how the movements’ objectives over time have both conflicted, competed, and
come together with the politics and practices of the National Land Agency (NLA) of the
Indonesian government, and the State Forestry Corporation (SFC), at multiple sites of
land policy making processes. This dissertation concludes that the tension, interaction,
and convergence of these objectives have rendered unfinished the projects of both reform
and anti-reform.
2
This dissertation is dedicated to my father,
Abdurachman Shaleh (1935-2011),
and my mother, Siti Mundjiatul Munawwarah (1940-...),
who taught me how to bravely and patiently
keep struggling for my goals, family, and humanity
i
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ ii
List of Figures ................................................................................................................iv
List of Tables ...................................................................................................................v
Abbreviations and and Pseudonyms ...............................................................................vi
Acknowledgments ...........................................................................................................ix
Map of Indonesia ...........................................................................................................xix
Chapter 1: Introduction ...................................................................................................1
1.1. Introduction ...............................................................................................................1
1.2. Background ...............................................................................................................6
1.3. Characterizing the Java Agrarian Movement and Its Counterforces ........................8
1.4. Toward a Gramscian Approach to Understanding the Struggle for Land Reform .11
1.5. A Note on Methods .................................................................................................12
1.6. The Dissertation Chapters in Brief...........................................................................15
Chapter 2: Trajectory of Indonesian Land Policy since Independence to Sukarno’s
Guided Democracy (1945-1965) ...................................................................................17
2.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................17
2.2. An Overview from Decolonization through Sukarno’s Guided Democracy ..........18
2.3. A Formal Abolishment of the State Domain Principle ...........................................22
2.4. Initial Policies to Redress Agrarian Injustices.........................................................25
2.5. How did Plantation Land become Excluded from the Land Redistribution
Program? .................................................................................................................27
2.6. How did Forestry Become Separated from the Agrarian, and How did Forestland
become Excluded from the Land Redistribution Program? ...................................30
2.7. The Rise and Fall of Land Reform Policy .............................................................37
2.8. Encapsulating the Trajectory of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law...............................40
Chapter 3: Trajectory of Indonesian Land Policy: From Suharto’s New Order to
Reformasi (1966-2005) ..................................................................................................43
3.1. Introduction .............................................................................................................43
3.2. The Rise of a Counter-Revolutionary Authoritarian Development State................43
3.3. The Rise of Land-for-Development Policy .............................................................45
3.4. The Rise of Market-Oriented Land Administration and Management Policy ........50
3.5. The Return of Land Reform after the Fall of Suharto .............................................53
3.6. High Hopes for Change lead to Ersatz Land Reform ..............................................64
Chapter 4: From Reforma Agraria to Land Title Legalization (2005-2009) ..................66
4.1. Introduction ..............................................................................................................66
4.2. Background for Joyo Winoto’s Appointment as the Head of National Land Agency
(NLA) ......................................................................................................................68
ii
4.3. Negotiation with National Legislature ...................................................................69
4.4. Overhauling NLA Organization and Its Personnel, Governance and Function .....71
4.5. Negotiating Reforma Agraria to the President and other Ministries .....................76
4.6. Targeting Abandoned-lands to be Objects of Land Redistribution .......................87
4.7. Accelerating Land Title Legalization ....................................................................88
4.8. Concluding Remarks..............................................................................................95
Chapter 5: Shifting Relations between National Land Agency and Agrarian Activists
(2005-2009) ...................................................................................................................97
5.1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 97
5.2. Mobilizing Protests Against the 2005 Government Regulation on Land Acquisition
..................................................................................................................................98
5.3. Seizing the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Developmet
(ICARRD) .............................................................................................................102
5.4. Synergies and Tensions between KPA Activists and National Land Agency ......108
5.5. Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................ 117
Chapter 6: En-countering Land Reform through Dismantling Land Occupations ......119
6.1. Introduction ...........................................................................................................119
6.2. Mutual relation between SPP and NLA in Advancing Reforma Agraria .............120
6.3. Reformasi’s impact on the State Forestry Corporation .........................................122
6.4. Prefiguring the Forest Security Operation through Deploying “Illegal Logger,”
“Illegal Occupier,” and “Anti-State” Labels ..........................................................125
6.5. The Operation in Action ........................................................................................127
6.6. Escalating the Conflict: Bringing Allies in ...........................................................130
6.7. The Outcome of the Operation: Demobilizing Local SPP ....................................133
6.8. After the Operation: The Confrontation Continues ...............................................136
6.9. Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................137
Chapter 7: Conclusion ..................................................................................................139
Bibliography .................................................................................................................143
iii
List of Figures
Figure 0.1. Map of Indonesia ………………………………………………………...…xiii
Figure 4.1. A simplified basic framework of National Agrarian Reform Program (NARP)
………………………………………………………………………………..76
Figure 4.2. An advertisement “Land for the People. Not Just Empty Words” (Pertanahan
untuk Rakyat. Bukan Omong Kosong) published by Yudhoyono’s campaign
team in the newspaper Media Indonesia of June 24, 2009 ………………….94
Figure 6.1. Map of Ciamis district with Forest Zone controlled by State Forestry
Corporation, villages with SPP-occupied land, and working are of the 2008
forest security operation ……………………………………………………128
iv
List of Tables
Table 2.1. Forest Zone controlled by the State Forestry Corporation.....................................36
Table 2.2. The maximum limits of the land ownership according to Law No. 56/1960..37
Table 2.3. Land Redistribution in Java (1962-1968) .......................................................40
Table 3.1. Major types of land right given for development projects in Indonesia 1969-
1982 .................................................................................................................48
Table 3.2. Number and amount of location permits released by the National Land Agency
(until January 1998) for five provinces in Java ...............................................50
Table 3.3. Numbers of land certificate issued by Indonesian Land Administration Project
(ILAP) 1995-2001 in five provinces in Java ...................................................52
Table 3.4. Comparing policy directions for agrarian reform and natural resource
management as contained in the People’s Consultative Assembly Decree No.
IX/2001 ............................................................................................................62
Table 4.1. Proposed land redistribution pilot projects in 2007 as reported by the NLA to
the President .....................................................................................................81
Table 4.2. Identification of abandoned-lands in all provinces as identified by the NLA in
2008 .................................................................................................................87
Tabel 4.3. Total number of land certificates according to land title legalization schemes
(2005-2008) .....................................................................................................90
Table 4.4. List of NLA ceremonies to give land title in 2008 .........................................92
Table 5.1. Total redistributed lands and beneficiaries (covering all land categories) 1961-
2005 ...............................................................................................................106
Table. 5.2. A list of land conflicts related to private- and state owned plantations in Blitar
district 2005....................................................................................................112
Table 6.1. Quotations from minutes of village meetings held by the SFC in areas targeted
by the 2008 Forest Security Operation ...........................................…...........138
v