Political Ecology of REDD+ in Indonesia

Agrarian Conflicts and Forest Carbon

Jonas I. Hein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351066006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Écologie

Indonesia's commitment to reducing land-based greenhouse gas emissions significantly includes the expansion of conservation areas, but these developments are not free of conflicts. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of agrarian conflicts in the context of the implementation of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and forest carbon offsetting in Indonesia, a country where deforestation is a major issue.

The author analyzes new kinds of transnational agrarian conflicts which have strong implications for global environmental justice in the REDD+ pilot province of Jambi on the island of Sumatra. The chapters cover: the rescaling of the governance of forests; privatization of conservation; and the transnational dimensions of agrarian conflicts and peasants' resistance in the context of REDD+. The book builds on an innovative conceptual approach linking political ecology, politics of scale and theories of power. It fills an important knowledge and research gap by focusing on the socially differentiated impacts of REDD+ and new forest carbon offsetting initiatives in Southeast Asia, providing a multi-scalar perspective.

It is aimed at scholars in the areas of political ecology, human geography, climate change mitigation, forest and natural resource management, as well as environmental justice and agrarian studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781351066020, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

When traveling through the dense oil palm plantations around the village of Bungku to the “forest of hope” (Harapan Rainforest, Indonesian: Hutan Harapan)¹ in southeastern Jambi on the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 2012, the people I met were troubled and rebellious. For almost 30 years, they have been fighting against the violent appropriation of community land by a transnational oil palm company. More recently, a new conflict has emerged to affect their lives – after the conservation company PT Restorasi Ekosistem Indonesia (REKI), founded by a transnational NGO (nongovernmental organization) consortium and financed by the German and Danish governments, had received a conservation concession from the Ministry of Forestry.² The new concession further reduces the land available for the peasants and indigenous communities of Bungku and neighboring villages. The village of Bungku, which the inhabitants, after years of conflict, describe as the “village of 1001 problems”, is now effectively a village without land, stuck between the dark green of corporate oil palm plantations and PT REKI’s new Harapan Rainforest conservancy.

Yet, there are signs of resistance along the road. Signs and boundary stones placed by villagers demarcate land claims. Banners and wooden portals welcome visitors to the territory of the indigenous Batin Sembilan group and to officially inexistent peasant settlements in the “forest of hope”. When talking to peasants, you rapidly realize that it is not their “forest of hope” but a forest charged with stories of conflict and resistance. Some villagers allege that the Prince of Wales, who visited the area in 2008, now owns the forest. Others explain that they cannot use their rice swiddens anymore since the government declared the forest “as the lung of the earth”. Some of those living in the Harapan Rainforest tell you that “the rich countries bought the oxygen in the forest”, while others complain that their “home is not the carbon toilet for the rich countries”, asking why Germany and Denmark are not reducing their greenhouse gas emissions at home instead of protecting forests in Indonesia.

Many peasants explained that their presence within the conservation concession was not accepted by the conservation company. They told me about clashes with the army, “black” private security agents and the riot police, about houses that had been burned supposedly by private security and forest police, and about brave women organizing sit-ins in front of bulldozers and heavily armed policemen. When entering the Harapan Rainforest, the tensions were visible. Visitors had to pass security checkpoints, the main camp was fortified, and the riot police, “BRIMOB”, had established a temporary base close to an ancient airfield within the conservation concession. PT REKI’s staff found themselves in an emergency situation after staff had been kidnapped by peasant activists to use as bargaining chips in negotiations for the release of peasants who were arrested by private security and the police. Both parties accused each other of being responsible for the violent escalation of the conflict and the anarchic conditions.

Protest and resistance in and against the Harapan Rainforest conservancy took many different forms and involved various actors. Some peasants received support from peasant organizations and organized, for instance, a march to the Ministry of Forestry in Jakarta. Village governments ignored the borders of the concession and issued land titles for plots located within it, while others rather engaged in hidden activities, such as logging. However, not all peasants were engaged in protest against PT REKI. Some members of the indigenous Batin Sembilan consider the conservation company to be an important ally against the expansion of agro-industrial oil palm estates. They explained that their forest gardens and swiddens had been destroyed by oil palm companies. They hope that the conservation project will help them to reestablish their traditional livelihoods.

This book focuses on these new stories from the Harapan Rainforest and many others from other places on Sumatra, such as the Berbak Carbon Initiative. The stories center on the socio-spatial consequences of a recent invention by economists and conservationists in the context of international climate policy: the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanism. They stand for a new kind of conservation conflict linking different places and actors, such as developed countries and corporate actors interested in carbon offsetting, conservationists interested in financing protected areas by selling carbon credits, and peasant farmers and indigenous groups in the Global South interested in maintaining or expanding access to agricultural land. The conflicts over Sumatra’s remaining forests are symptomatic for the contradictions and ambiguities caused by attempts to maintain the current fossil-fuel based accumulation regime and by attempts to export climate change mitigation to supposedly low-cost locations in the Global South.

In Indonesia, a large highly biodiverse archipelago with the third largest extent of tropical forest cover, the situation is notably conflictive. On the one hand, Indonesia claims to be a global leader in REDD+; on the other hand, local realities such as land tenure conflicts and the rampant forest fires of 2015 stand in sharp contrast to Indonesia’s announcements concerning forest governance reforms (Finlayson, 2014; Hein et al., 2016: 380; Toumbourou, 2015). In particular, Indonesia’s last remaining frontier areas are heavily contested spaces that are still witnessing violent conflicts about access and control of forest land (Hein et al., 2016; Tsing, 2005). Caused by historically contingent structural inequality, land conflicts “became chronic” (Rachman, 2013: 3) in Indonesia. Colonial and post-colonial governments appropriated vast forest areas for resource exploitation and conservation. Today, indigenous communities and peasant organizations consider the occupation of corporate and state-owned plantation estates and conservation areas as a legitimate response to the dispossessions of the colonial and post-colonial state (Hein et al., 2016; Lukas, 2014; Peluso et al., 2008).

Indonesia has 252 million inhabitants and the fourth-largest population in the world, the third-largest extent of tropical forest cover and one of the highest rates of land-based greenhouse gas emissions, mainly caused by forest fires and deforestation. In this context, the Indonesian government, supported by Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI), selected a number of Indonesian provinces for piloting REDD+ policies. The province of Jambi, located on the island of Sumatra, became one of these provinces in 2013.

This book shows that REDD+ policies are seldom conflict free, especially when local communities have to cope with the simultaneous expansion of agro-industrial estates. The book focuses on two different but interrelated forms of peasant resistance and agrarian conflict. The first refers to land occupations that occurred before REDD+ implementation and that were organized by village governments, indigenous leaders and peasants, and facilitated by sub-national branches of the state. The second refers to resistance and attempts to defend land rights during the implementation of REDD+. Taking a political ecology perspective, the aim is to unravel the causes and the scalar dimension of land conflicts and peasant resistance by asking questions, such as: Which actors are involved in land tenure conflicts in REDD+ target areas? What are the historical root causes of conflictive property rights? Which role does power play? What are the explanations for conflict? What are the climate justice implications of transnational forest conservation initiatives such as REDD+?

Introducing the politics of REDD+ and peasant resistance

When the idea of reducing emissions from deforestation entered the UN climate negotiations in 2005, this was also the result of lobbying by an interesting transnational actor coalition. This transnational coalition consisted of a number of tropical forest countries represented by the Coalition of Rainforest Nations, large environmental NGOs and a number of large transnational companies interested in the cost-efficient offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. Hein and Garrelts, 2014; Jodoin and Mason-Case, 2016; Stephan et al., 2014). Influential reports such as the Stern Review on the “Economics of Climate Change” (Stern, 2007) and Johan Eliasch’s (2008) review “Climate Change: Financing Global Forests” identified forest conservation as the most cost-efficient way to mitigate climate change. In addition, the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published in 2007 pointed out that 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by deforestation and forest degradation. These key publications supported the growing momentum for the inclusion of forest conservation in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agenda (Jodoin and Mason-Case, 2016).

The basic idea behind REDD+ was taken from dominant market-oriented conservation concepts, such as payments for ecosystem services and carbon trade. Payments to forest owners or tropical forest countries channeled through carbon markets, global funds or national payment for ecosystem services schemes would halt deforestation almost automatically. Supporting forest conservation in the Global South was framed as a “win-win” solution that would contribute to biodiversity conservation, rural development and climate change mitigation (Angelsen et al., 2012; Pagiola, 2011; Virgilio et al., 2010; Visseren-Hamakers et al., 2012). Thus, the idea rapidly gained political traction and also received support from previously skeptical actors, such as the European Union.

In 2007, REDD+ became part of the Bali Roadmap towards a post-2012 binding climate agreement. In contrast to previous market mechanisms and climate finance mechanisms, such as the Clean Development Mechanisms and the Adaptation Fund of the Kyoto Protocol, REDD+ is not governed by a central management or financing body. No final agreement has yet been made on how REDD+ will be financed, and whether emission reductions from REDD+ activities should be considered as voluntary contributions from developing countries supported by the developed countries, or whether REDD+ should be eligible for offsetting (Angelsen et al., 2014; Horstmann and Hein, 2017; Jodoin and Mason-Case, 2016). In fact, today’s REDD+ governance is highly fragmented (Zelli et al., 2014). This fragmentation is also reflected at the national and local scales (ibid.). The UNFCCC is only one of many institutions governing REDD+. Most REDD+ country programs and local projects are funded by bilateral donors, such as Norway, the United Kingdom and Germany, by multilateral donor agencies such as the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) administered by the World Bank, and through voluntary carbon markets. All these actors have developed their own specific ideas on the recognition of community rights, on how to reduce deforestation, on rules for financing forest conservation, and on achieving supposed win-win outcomes. Some projects aim to produce emission reduction certificates for voluntary carbon markets (as the Berbak Carbon Initiative discussed in this book). Indonesia, Colombia, Guyana and Brazil, for instance, have negotiated result-based payment agreements with donors, meaning that they receive payments if they successfully reduce deforestation. Other donor-financed REDD+ projects aim to “improve” national forest governance or to make countries “ready” for carbon markets. In some cases, conservation NGOs and national conservation authorities strategically link their existing conservation efforts to REDD+ to gain access to donor finance.

Consequently, REDD+ can be many different things at different scales and for different actor coalitions and their respective storylines and discourses. In particular, because of its fuzziness, REDD+ still is and was very popular as an idea. For some actors, REDD+ is a cost-efficient offsetting mechanism, for others rather a development aid mechanism to support transformation towards rural low carbon economies, for environmental NGOs and often underfunded national conservation authorities it is rather a mechanism to finance protected areas. Indigenous communities across the globe use REDD+ to access development aid and to argue for land rights, while peasant associations consider REDD+ as enabling land grabs for the purpose of forest carbon offsetting (La Via Campesina, 2015). For those that Hiraldo and Tanner (2011) describe as “institutionalists”, REDD+ is an attempt to establish a global scale of “good” forest and land tenure governance to support climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, sustainable development, and the rights of local and indigenous communities (Gupta, 2012: 622; Hiraldo and Tanner, 2011: 46).

From a global environmental and climate justice perspective, REDD+ raises a number of additional concerns. REDD+ focuses on developing countries and especially on the peripheral forest margins. Forest conservation and the transfer of financial resources could help to promote more sustainable land use, but it also transfers responsibility for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to those who have emitted much less than citizens in the Global North. Furthermore, as a recent study of Irfany and Klasen (2015) shows, Indonesian citizens living in urban areas emit twice as much as those living in rural areas. From the perspective of an urban citizen either from Indonesia or from the Global North, REDD+ is attractive because it transfers obligations either to the global periphery or to the national periphery, avoiding hard emission cuts that would affect their own lifestyles. The expansion of protected areas and reforestation efforts rather affect the rural population. Consequently, the factual or putative lower-opportunity costs of forest conservation are not politically neutral.

Indigenous groups and peasants in many parts of the world criticize the “global gaze” (Fogel, 2004) of the REDD+ mechanism and the framing of forests as empty carbon stocks, highlighting that many indigenous groups and peasants live within and close to forests and have maintained the carbon storage capacity of forests for generations. REDD+ and green enclosures affect actors differently, reflecting power imbalances at the forest margins but also between the North and South, and between urban centers and rural areas in the South (Eilenberg, 2015; Hein et al., 2018a; Kosoy and Corbera, 2010; Lohmann, 2008; McAfee, 2012b). Following this argument, REDD+ can be considered as a mechanism that stabilizes the current fossil fuel-based accumulation regime (Hein et al., 2018a) and the “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen, 2012, 2017) characterized by high-emission lifestyles and consumerism in global centers. The imperial mode of living is based on a disproportionate claim to global sinks, including to the world’s tropical forests, to offset the externalities of high emission lifestyles (ibid.).

In this context, where land and nature are becoming increasingly valuable as carbon sinks, as ecosystem service providers and as fertile grounds for the expanding agro-industry, “[…] the basic questions of the agrarian political economy are as relevant as ever: Who owns what? Who does what? Who gets what?” (Fairhead et al., 2012: 241). Land is at the heart of the agrarian question. It is one of the most important means of production in the agrarian political economy. Providing and legitimizing access to land is an important source of political authority (Lund, 2016). In many target countries of REDD+, it is exactly this political and economic resource that is highly contested (Eilenberg, 2015; Hein et al., 2016, Kunz et al., 2016; Larson et al., 2013; To et al., 2017). Two important reasons for this contestation are as follows. First, especially in Indonesia but also in South American countries like Colombia, the central state has appropriated large parts of the countries’ forests, often ignoring the presence of indigenous and customary communities. The formation of the state forest estate (kawasan hutan) in Indonesia and the forest reserve (reserva forestal) in Colombia were state territorialization projects aimed at claiming land and stabilizing the national territory by allocating land in frontier areas to citizens and companies, challenging pre-existing authority and property relations (Hein et al., 2016; Ortiz, 1984: 210). In both countries, this process was notably violent and was characterized by multiple periods of primitive accumulation (Del Cairo et al., 2014; Escobar, 2003; Gómez et al., 2015; Hein et al., 2016; Peluso, 1995; Peluso et al., 2008). In Indonesia, after the fall of former Indonesian president Suharto at the end of the 1990s, power constellations changed the scalar structure of the state, and this state territorialization project came under serious pressure driven by protests from customary communities, peasant movements and local governments (Barr et al., 2006; Hein et al., 2016; Peluso et al., 2008). Rescaling widened the agency of local political authorities, creating the momentum to exercise de facto control over parts of the state forest territory. Second, land is often very unequally distributed. In the Indonesian village of Bungku, for instance, located at the margins of the Harapan Rainforest, two-thirds of the village land has been allocated to oil palm, timber and conservation companies, leaving only a few hectares available for peasant farming (Polsek Sungai Bahar, 2011; Zainuddin, 2013).

Protest and resistance from peasants and indigenous communities against REDD+ and other conservation initiatives on the island of Sumatra and beyond revolve mainly around the basic questions of the agrarian political economy, as raised by Fairhead and colleagues (2012), and in particular around access to land, land rights and land-use restrictions. However, a particularity of peasant resistance against REDD+ on Sumatra is the explicit reference to global climate justice issues, as illustrated by the slogan introduced above: “Our forest is not the carbon toilet of the rich countries”. The basic idea of offsetting emissions at low-cost locations not only links emitters in the North with project implementers and land users in the South, but offsetting also links local struggles on access and control of forest and land resources to transnational activists’ networks that provide peasants with the opportunity to resist the land claims of private or public conservation agencies (Chatterton et al., 2013; Hein and Faust, 2014; Hein et al., 2016).

Peasant resistance and indigenous struggle for recognition and rights have been widely discussed by scholars, in particular by James C. Scott (1985). Scott analyzed hidden peasant resistance strategies, arguing that hidden and everyday forms of peasant resistance do not openly challenge hegemony. Rather, they occur silently as the hidden encroachment strategies of peasants entering the forest of hope. But when the political context permits, for example after the fall of Suharto, hidden resistance can turn into open forms of resistance, such as the public invasion of property (Peluso, Afif and Rachman, 2008; Scott, 1989: 5; Turner and Caouette, 2009: 11). The cases discussed in this book fall between the two categories. They include open and organized forms of land occupation, the formation of counter territories and open protest at climate summits, but also hidden encroachment and sabotage. Furthermore, they include resistance against historically rooted and contingent structural inequality and unequal land distribution prior to conservation interventions, and resistance and conflict in the context of ongoing REDD+ and conservation interventions. Whereas peasant resistance can be considered as class struggle (e.g., Scott, 1989), indigenous groups’ struggle mainly strives for the acknowledgement of full citizenship rights (especially in Indonesia) and the obtaining of specific minority rights in compensation for being historically disadvantaged, exploited and marginalized by European colonizers and post-colonial governments.

Recently, the social struggles of peasants and of indigenous groups have become more and more transnational. Transnational peasant organizations such as La Via Campesina and the Asian Peasant Coalition emerged out of protest against market liberalism in the 1990s (Borras, 2008). Transnational peasant protest has become a common feature of international trade conferences and, more recently, of climate change conferences. La Via Campesina, as the largest peasant organization, and large indigenous rights organizations, such as AMAN (Alliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara) from Indonesia and COICA (Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica) from the Amazon basin countries, have become key actors of the global climate justice movement (Claeys and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of figures and tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptual, theoretical and methodological underpinning for a political ecology of transnational agrarian conflicts
• 3 Rescaling of the governance of forests and land in Indonesia
• 4 REDD+, privatization and transnationalization of conservation in Indonesia
• 5 Transnationalized agrarian conflicts in the REDD+
• 6 Conclusion: towards a political ecology of transnational agrarian conflicts
• References
• Index